Tribesourcing Southwest Film: Digital Repatriation
FAIN: HAA-284912-22
Arizona Board of Regents (Tucson, AZ 85721-0073)
Jennifer Lei Jenkins (Project Director: June 2021 to present)
A series of workshops in Arizona, New Mexico, and California and the development of a digital curriculum on the creation of culturally-appropriate descriptive metadata and narration for Native American films based on the Tribesourcing Southwest Film website.
Tribesourcing Southwest Film digitally repurposes a collection of midcentury educational and sponsored films about Native peoples of the Southwestern U.S., reclaiming visual content through recording culturally-informed alternate audio tracks voiced by Native narrators from within the cultures represented. This process, which we have termed “tribesourcing,” has the double benefit of repatriating historic images and decolonizing these archival films, visible at Tribesourcingfilm.com. In this proposal, we seek to extend the project by: recording additional narrations in Southern California, Arizona and New Mexico; developing a digital curriculum for workshops; and to begin decentralizing the project through a series of workshops to help communities who wish to do their own tribesourcing with their own archived audio-visual materials.
Media Coverage
Tribesourcing Project Receives New NEH Grant (Media Coverage)
Publication: University of Arizona College of Social & Behavioral Science
Date: 2/24/2022
Abstract: University announcement of new award.
URL: https://sbs.arizona.edu/news/tribesourcing-project-receives-new-neh-grant
Associated Products
Tribesourcing Southwest Film (Database/Archive/Digital Edition)Title: Tribesourcing Southwest Film
Author: Melissa S. Dollman
Author: Jennifer L. Jenkins
Author: Rhiannon Sorrell
Abstract: Based on the collection of nearly 500 films in the American Indian Film Gallery housed at the University of Arizona, this project tribesources mid-20th century educational and sponsored films about Native peoples of the U.S. Southwest and (coming soon!) Southern California by recording Native narrations and contextual information for film content from the Native communities they represent. The films contain valuable historical visual imagery, but the original narrations are often inaccurate and culturally uninformed. Tribesourcing places historical materials with the peoples they represent in order to tell the untold or suppressed story. As we have conceived it, tribesourcing is guided by the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials (2006).
Year: 2019
Primary URL:
http://tribseourcingfilm.orgAccess Model: Open
Prizes
Innovation Award
Date: 11/12/2020
Organization: National Digital Stewardship Alliance/Digital Library Federation
Tribesourcing Southwest Film, Polyphonic Communities Exhibition, Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (Exhibition)Title: Tribesourcing Southwest Film, Polyphonic Communities Exhibition, Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival
Curator: Patricia Zimmerman
Abstract: Each of these projects mobilizes the idea of polyphony by featuring a multiplicity of voices, topics, and practices with vastly different methods and approaches. The featured collaborative and participatory projects from India, Canada, and Indigenous nations in the US show ways of how to think beyond the auteur towards new kinds of media organizations and practices to bring new knowledges to the forefront.
Tribesourcing Southwest Film offers a resource adding contemporary narrations to mid-twentieth century educational and sponsored films produced by Indigenous communities and now archived in the University of Arizona library. These new narratives are designed to counter inaccuracies and cultural biases in the original narrations. The project is supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Arizona, and “wisdom from our tribal partners.”
Tribesourcing Southwest Film works to locate community-vetted narrators for films. To date, 16 films have been re-narrated, including works by Navajo/Diné, by Apache/Inde (Ndee), and Akimel O’odham/Pima.
Other communities whose films are part of the collection include Cahuilla, Havasupai/Supai, Hopi, Navajo/Diné, Pueblo/Puebloan, Tohono O’odham/Papago, Yokut, as well as those that are Intertribal/Pan-Indian. Work is done according to the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials (2006).
Year: 2023
Primary URL:
https://www.ithaca.edu/finger-lakes-environmental-film-festival/polyphonic-communities-exhibition/tribesourcing-southwest-film