In one's own voice: Tribesourcing project updates Native documentaries for posterity

More than 450 digitized films documenting Native lifeways across the Americas (with a large concentration of films about Southwestern tribes) comprise the University of Arizona’s American Indian Film Gallery. The collection ranges from silent-era newsreel footage to more recent video documentation of powwows and political meetings, with the bulk of the films dating to the mid-20th century. It was a time when documenting Native customs was the domain of outsiders and not the tribes themselves. Consequently, the narrations contain inaccuracies such as mispronounced words, and some of them reflect disrespectful attitudes about Native peoples. A new initiative — the Tribesourcing Southwest Film Project — seeks to clarify and correct these narrations, turning to the tribes themselves to offer inroads to the recent Native past, and to present their stories from the inside out, rather than the outside in.

Currently, 60 films about Southwest tribes are the focus of the initiative. It seeks to remedy the imbalances by re-recording the mid-century films and providing new narrations by tribal community members.

At 2 p.m. on Sunday, March 1, Jennifer Jenkins, associate professor of English at the University of Arizona and the tribesourcing project’s lead investigator, discusses the project and demonstrates the merging of old film footage and new audio with the open source digital platform Mukurtu. The platform, built in collaboration with Australia’s Warumungu community, is a resource for indigenous communities to share their digitally preserved cultural heritage.

The Tribesourcing Southwest Film Project is sponsored by the University of Arizona and supported by funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The project acknowledges the invaluable insight that Southwest tribes can provide into their own cultural practices and seeks to restore the Native voice as a voice of authority. The films will stream on a Mukurtu-based website with alternate narrations in English and Native languages.