In consultation with Oklahoma Native American communities and cultural leaders, the project will develop a series of protocols for best practices in ethically facilitating the preservation and digitization of music recordings. Many of these come from historically-private, sacred repertoires whose circulation has been strictly controlled based on Indigenous conceptions of cultural property. Given music’s connection with so many important facets of American Indian culture—including heritage language retention, religious practices, social cohesion, and education, this project is urgent. This is particularly so as elders pass on, taking their knowledge with them, and as many existing recordings made in outmoded formats steadily deteriorate.

Over the course of 2017 and 2018, the Sam Noble Museum hosted a series of workshops that brought representatives of Native American tribes in dialogue with other experts, including legal scholars, cultural activists, and archivists. NEH funding helped support travel costs for representatives of Oklahoma’s 38 tribal nations, many of whom travel significant distances to participate in the workshops. For the project affiliates at OU, these conversations were an opportunity to learn how to design culturally appropriate protocols and create a pathway for digitization initiatives. The results of the project were then disseminated to cultural institutions in Oklahoma more widely, in accordance with tribal communities’ input. As Joshua Nelson, who works on the program, noted “we don’t have to reinvent the wheel on some of these processes. We’ve discovered people who have worked on these matters for a long time.”