All across the United States, hundreds of wax cylinder recordings containing the voices of Native elders are decaying to the point of no return.
Ethnographer Frances Demsmore recording Mountain Chief, elder of the Blackfeet Nation.
Fortunately, recent innovations at Berkeley’s Lawrence Laboratories have made it possible to retrieve recordings that archivists feared were lost forever to mold and degradation. Using optical scanning technology, researchers have “read” the physical markings left on the old wax tubes (grooves similar to those on a phonograph record) and have translated them into digital reproductions of the sound they once encoded in analog ridges along the surface of the cylinders.
The results have been amazing. Berkeley linguist Andrew Garrett, who is working on a collection of Yurok stories, has found the recovered voices invaluable for reconstructing the verbal arts of the Yurok community. For Garrett, the new technology is a form of repatriation: “I see what we are doing as creating the possibility of digital repatriation of cultural heritage to the people and communities where the knowledge was created in the first place.”
A similar recovery effort is underway at Philadelphia’s American Philosophical society, which has been collecting and working to preserve Native American languages since the time of its founders, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.
“I see what we are doing as creating the possibility of digital repatriation of cultural heritage to the people and communities where the knowledge was created in the first place.”
The APS is currently in the process of digitizing and extensively cataloging over 3000 hours of endangered Native American languages. These recordings include music, origin stories, historical accounts, linguistic material, and conversations with elders in both English and indigenous languages. Many of these recordings were originally made on obsolete technology such as wax cylinders, wire, or aluminum discs.
Lela Rhodes (Achumawi), “Mouse Brothers.” California Language Archive.
These efforts represent a form of repatriation. By plucking these stories out of danger, scientists are making them available to a new generation of Native storytellers, linguists, and artists. In 2010, for example, the Unkechaug community of Long Island contacted the American Philosophical Society and requested a copy of the vocabulary list the Society had constructed from a recovered recording of the Unkechaug language in order to begin the process of its revitalization.
At Berkeley, young Native people like Rumsen Ohlone tribal member Louis Trevino can now access their traditional languages, many of which have not been spoken for several generations. As he explains in the National Science Foundation’s online magazine, Science Nation, “because we don’t have old timers who can sing the songs . . . for us, this is one of our sole resources. For that reason, it is especially precious to us.”
In this way, such efforts at recovering the indigenous sounds trapped on old wax cylinders exemplify how the work is repatriation is never just about the past. Digital versions of the recordings are clear, and now may speak again—to a present and future audience. They are reproducible and available to all those who are doing the hard work of language revitalization in their communities. The voices of past elders, whose knowledge once passed face-to-face to the next generation, although in a new form, still carry their messages of cultural continuity and continue to demonstrate the incredible resilience of indigenous ways of knowing.
Miguelito (Diné) making phonograph record. Copyright by Geoffrey O’Hara, New York, N.Y.. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
