Nakota communities reclaim audio recordings housed at Indiana University
CBC
Indiana University in Bloomington, Ind., is working with Nakota communities to return valuable cultural archives of recordings of their elders.
Kenneth Helgeson, a Nakota language teacher at the Hays Lodgepole School in Fort Belknap, Mont., said when he first became a teacher in 2003, elders at the school were working on translating stories and an online dictionary database from recordings at the university.
He would tag along.
“As a young man, at 19 years old, I can remember being full of piss and vinegar and I'm like, why do these white guys have all this stuff? This doesn't make any sense. It needs to be with these kids,” said Helgeson.
He said his grandmother took him aside and told him they wouldn’t have these recordings now if the university's researchers didn't do what they did, starting in the 1970s when no one else was thinking about it.
He remembers a researcher coming to her house when he was 10 and his dad came into the house and he threw the recorder on the ground, thinking she was there to steal his mom’s language.
“To see how smart my grandmother was to know that she had to do this at that time so we could come around all these years later to actually hear her voice and what her story was,” said Helgeson.
Helgeson said he wants to create a curriculum from pre-K to Grade 12 and get enough materials to make it a full day teaching in the language at school.
Helgeson said after listening to some of the ceremony recordings the university has he is amazed that a song he heard from 1914, recorded on a wax cylinder, is still sung today at sundances.
“We have all of these archives and everything, but our people are still living the way we were intended to,” said Helgeson.
Richard Henne-Ochoa, director of Indiana University’s Institute for Indigenous Knowledge, said they are assisting in developing online archives where Nakota communities can host the collections and exercise data sovereignty.
The goal, said Henne-Ochoa, is "to rematriate these materials back to the Nakota communities from which it was taken or otherwise extracted."
Henne-Ochoa said in the years past, western academia was going into these communities, offering compensation like cigarettes or groceries in exchange for stories.
“We're coming out of a paradigm that inadvertently caused a lot of damage, not just at IU, but throughout academia,” said Henne-Ochoa.
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Indiana University in Bloomington, Ind., is working with Nakota communities to return valuable cultural archives of recordings of their elders.
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