In Kotzebue, An aging trove of Inupiat photographs, books and recordings at risk of deteriorating are being assessed in the hope they can be digitized for future use. Aqqaluk Memorial Trust, a cultural arm of NANA regional corporation received a small grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to bring in a preservation specialist this week, to examine the materials.
More than 4000 items including 500 recordings made from 1965 into the 1980s are in the collection. Arctic Sounder reporter Shady Grove Oliver said the nearly 50 year old recordings include conversations with elders, highlighting the importance of understanding what it means to be Inupiaq. She spoke with Alaska Public Media’s Lori Townsend.
OLIVER: And this happened at the same time as a lot of the Land Claims discussions were happening, the times when the Native corporations were coming into being. So with this, it was this ton of rejuvenation in interest in one’s own history. So some of these recordings have interviews with people like Willie Hensley and John Schaeffer, who later went on to be huge figures in self-governance movements in the area. They also, in some cases, document things like the meetings that took place throughout the Northwest Arctic that discuss what people wanted their Inupiaq values to be, as in, if you go to that area now, there’s a lot of pride in one’s Inupiaq values. And it’s this agreed upon set of values that were actually determined at that time. So they have recordings of the original conversations discussing things as personal as what it means to be an Inupiaq person.
TOWNSEND: And Shady, what else is within this vast collection? What else have you discovered or you’ve been told about what’s contained within these archives?
OLIVER: The tapes are really the central focus to some degree. There’s more than 4,000 items all together in this collection, and there’s about 700 cassette tapes. So as a group, they’re one of the most important parts of it. And I’d like to point out some of the other things that are actually in these tapes that I’ve had described to me. There’s conversations with elders that are actually in Inupiaq, and that’s really important because there are a lot of people nowadays who are trying to learn the language as second language learners, as in they didn’t grow up speaking their native language. And these tapes are a really important original document of the language as spoken by fluent native speakers. So I know there are language learners who are looking forward to being able to hear how the language is spoken by people who knew it fluently. In addition, there’s recordings of elders talking about migration patterns, hunting and fishing traditions, traditional medicine, weather patterns. So a lot of things that would actually help communities nowadays understand where they are and how they got here, even if they weren’t able to speak to those elders that had that information themselves.
TOWNSEND: It’s sounds as if some of that information could be valuable for baseline information for climate change research and other scientific initiatives.
OLIVER: For sure. And it’s something that I know people are interested in seeing what’s actually on these tapes, and I say that because there so fragile at ts point. We know that tapes can last for 25-30 years fairly comfortably, but some of these tapes are pushing 50+ years at this point. So because they’re so fragile, many of these haven’t actually been heard in a long time, but people are hoping to be able to listen and see what’s on some of them. So in terms of climate change, if we could hear, firsthand, what conditions were like in the 1960s and 70s, that would help back up what some of the elders are saying today. That would help lay the baseline so we could understand how have the caribou migration patterns changed, did the migration routes originally go through some villages and not others, how far out does the sea ice extend? And by having that data, we can better understand the rate and way things have changed over the last 50 years.
Lori Townsend is the chief editor, senior vice president of journalism and senior host for Alaska Public Media. You can send her news tips and program ideas for Talk of Alaska and Alaska Insight at ltownsend@alaskapublic.org or call 907-550-8452. Read more about Lori here.
