0.21 Negotiating the cultural turn as universities adopt a corporate  (Page 4/5)

We are currently in the planning phase of writing a grant that would allow us to migrate the Gibagadinamaagoom site onto the APS’s servers and to explore the possibility of replicating this project with other Native communities. This spring, the Mellon grant will pay for a conference at the APS that will be attended by Ojibwe wisdom-keepers and administrators associated with the Gibagadinamaagoom project as well as representatives from the Eastern Band of the Cherokee, Penobscot, Abenaki, Passamaquoddy, the Anishinaabe in Manitoba, Pueblo of Isleta, Grand Ronde, Shawnee, the National Museum of the American Indian, the National Anthropological Archives, Minnesota Historical Society, the Newberry Library, and the Library of Congress, and the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. While we are still in the preliminary phases of discussion, it is worth considering the potential that this historical moment presents. Unlike Penn, where Native American culture is perceived to be on the periphery, if not outside the pale, these cultural institutions have vast holdings of Native American materials, which they are all in the process of digitizing. As the material is digitized, it becomes extraordinarily inexpensive to copy and to repatriate to indigenous communities (a single digital scan costs $20 at the APS, but once material has been digitized an entire CD costs only $4).

The Mellon grant to digitize endangered American Indian languages at the American Philosophical Society provides a historic opportunity to explore how digital technology can imagine anew the relations between archives and Native communities. To provide a sense of scale and historical importance, the APS recently sent more than one hundred hours of language material to the Mandan tribe, where there are only a small number of elders who still speak the language fluently. A contingent of four Ojibwe First Nations in northern central Canada, in partnership with the Canadian government and the provincial governments of Manitoba and Ontario, contacted the APS to digitize more than three hundred photographs from the A. Irving Hallowell collection. These digital objects, inspirited by the land and people in the photographs, will be used in a UNESCO World Heritage Site grant application to preserve more than forty thousand square kilometers of boreal forest and the cultural landscape of the Anishinaabe or Ojibwe people. When I traveled to Ontario to speak with elders from the four First Nations and scholars involved with the Pimachiowin aki project, the Ojibwe enthusiastically offered to record oral histories about the photographs from the Hallowell collection. Stories like these abound, demonstrating how digital repatriation can work in a mutually beneficial ways to strengthen language preservation programs, to support grant applications written through the tribes, and to enhance the American Philosophical Society's Native American collections.

And yet while the future comes bearing gifts of great promise, it asks riddles worthy of the sphinx. One question that remains difficult to answer is: how will these digital materials, once repatriated, be preserved and sustained by the tribes? In most of the cases that I have worked on, the lack of digital infrastructure in these communities has necessitated sending material in the form of CDs, which often end up in elementary school libraries or even private homes. Obviously this is not a viable long-term solution, since the digital material inevitably becomes scratched and therefore unusable. We dream of and work towards the day when young people in these tribal communities will become empowered with the technical expertise to maintain their own servers and will be able to curate their own digital collections.