Minto Songs Project Narrative-for-report-100210

Minto Songs ProjectNarrative Long-term goals The long term goal of the Minto Songs Repatriation Project is to develop a system for repatriation of Alaskan Athabascan musical recordings,

Minto Songs Project

Narrative

Long-term goals

The long term goal of the Minto Songs Repatriation Project is to develop a system for repatriation of Alaskan Athabascan musical recordings, by doing the following:

• Transcribing and translating song lyrics from a particular village

• Annotating the songs for function and history

• Processing existing recordings into usable digital products

• Placing these products under community control Our products will ensure that all songs can be learned and performed with

understanding, and our project structure will make it possible for community members and family members to directly control their dissemination

Because the Minto collection represents the musical tradition of a single village, we hope that if we develop a successful approach to Minto music, a similar approach could be applied to language groups represented by multiple villages, such as Koyukon and Ahtna

Among the cultural objects gathered in the last century from indigenous groups in the Americas is a large amount of recorded song Among Alaskan Athabascans, song serves as

a community- activity that supports native language use and cultural revitalization, and also

as a marker of village identity in the larger communities (those that share a language and those that speak Athabascan languages.) The Minto Athabascan community is the last village that has speakers of the Lower Tanana Athabascan language (there are 15, all over the age of 60), but the community has a very strong song tradition (see Olson 1968, Pearce

1985, Lundstrom 1985)

Alaskan Athabascan songs may be grouped generally into those intended for

dancing, memorial “sorry” songs written by grieving relatives of a deceased person, and potlatch songs (Johnston 1994) These song types differ in their purpose, their distribution, and the traditional rules governing their performance

Recordings of Alaskan Athabascan song have been made by many people for many different reasons As art, songs have inherent interest, and Athabascan singing can be dramatic and exciting As part of traditional culture, Athabascan singing may reveal

important aspects of community organization and clan and family obligation For this reason, anthropologists an d folklorists and those interested in preserving culture have made recordings As a record of community life, Athabascan singing happens on occasions of community and family importance, and for this reason, it has [also been extensively

documented by community members themselves Thus for Minto there exist an unknown number of recordings of Minto songs, by multiple performers, songs and singers both famous and obscure, on reel-to-reel tape, cassette tape, videotape, CD and DVD A given song may have been recorded by a number of singers, in good and bad conditions, with or without explanation of its history and function Many of these recordings are not accessible

to community members at the present time: they don’t know what they are or where they are, or how to get copies of them For most in the younger generations, there is also a language barrier, since the Minto language is spoken only by the older generation They cannot understand the song lyrics they hear, and would very much like to have this aspect of the song processed so that it is accessible to them

This project relates to two larger issues: appropriate handling of sound collected in native communities, and appropriate repatriation of recordings with different privacy levels

There is a lot of sound that has been randomly collected because of its intrinsic interest Unlike word lists or texts, which usually are recorded by linguists, song is recorded by people with many different interests However, since it contains lyrics in a language that few people speak any more, reproducing it and using it can be a challenge that needs some technical support Based on the success of the (Dena’ina) Qenaga language website

created by ANLC researcher Gary Holton as part of a larger NSF-funded project, we feel that a web-based organization using sound clips connected to written text is the easiest presentation However, for this project we do not envision the creation of a University-controlled website Rather, we propose to create materials that can be immediately uploaded

to existing community-controlled websites

Start-up activities

Our start-up activities will involve the basic organization of Minto recordings most accessible to us: at the Alaska Native Language Center, in Rasmuson Library, and in the Rooth collection in Lund, Sweden We will also be checking with other researchers who work with Minto materials Because Minto people sing so much, we know that there are many recordings of songs included in interviews that could have been on any topic We will include as much of this material as can be made available We will reach out in this stage to Alaskans and others who may have made audio and video recordings of Minto songs and dancing, including public performances of the Minto Dancers, a popular group that has performed statewide for many years When these materials have not been digitized,

we will digitize them Songs will be identified as well as possible based on information connected to the recordings, and organized for field consultation with elders who know or can translate their lyrics and know their history

Level of funding

We request Level II funding for this project because other projects with a different focus, such as the NSF-funded Dena’ina Archiving, Training and Access Project under Dr Holton, have provided a technological base that works very well for making sound and text available A project just concluded by Dr Tuttle, involving the compilation of a pocket dictionary for the Minto language (NSF 05047), included many interviews during which the need for song repatriation became glaringly obvious Dr Tuttle is also working with Ahtna texts (NSF 6510804) using the same technology We would like to apply the aligned text technology to this song material The challenge in this humanities project is to properly handle the different privacy levels of the material so that the community is back in charge of its cultural heritage, and ANLC can step back to preserving organized backup recordings in its archive

Enhancing the humanities through the use of emerging technologies

This project would provide an opportunity to develop a structure for handling

musical media that involves language and also involves differentiation of materials based on their cultural value Minto is a good place to start because it still has an extremely vital song tradition, but within a few years the speakers who can annotate and translate the songs will all have passed on Other Athabascan communities in Alaska, and possibly outside Alaska, can be served following the protocols we develop

In the Ahtna communities in the Copper Basin, the Matanuska Valley and the area of Denali (Mentasta, Chistochina, Gakona, Gulkana, Tazlina, Copper Center, Chitina,

Chickaloon, Cantwell), private and community media collections have bloomed Each community calls for organization, archiving and dissemination of their artistic property, and

fewer and fewer fluent elders are available to help with translation and annotation In addition, competing village level organizations exist that must be treated fairly If we have a sensible protocol for their organization, dissemination and archiving ANLC will be able to help many communities with these language- and music related objects, We believe that the smaller Minto project can give us a chance to get such a protocol organized Ahtna, of course, is only an example; there are other Athabaskan-speaking groups with similar

collections and nearly as endangered status for their dialects

We believe that if we can solve this problem, we will be making a contribution to the understanding of repatriation of verbal art throughout North America

History and duration of the project

The Minto songs work will be a new project, but it does grow out of several ANLC projects undertaken in the last few years As noted above, during the dictionary project begun in 2005, Minto elders made it clear that song lyrics and annotations were a very high priority for them In contacts with the Ahtna communities in our present work on Ahtna texts, members of these communities have expressed the same opinion, and strongly urged

us to work with the existing recordings of Athabascan song with the elders while they can still help us with the translations The focus of this project is community directed

Earlier publication of Athabascan song material has included print media, with or without musical notation of tunes and annotation Among such publications are Pulu (1978), which was written as educational material and includes simple annotation and notation by Tom Johnston, and Lundstrom (1980), a more scholarly work which includes notation and annotation This year, Craig Coray (Coray 2007) has released a book of Dena’ina (southern

Alaskan Athabascan) lyrics, some with musical notation, through the Kijik Corporation in Nondalton, Alaska This is a native community corporation, and the distribution is at the discretion of the corporation; the book is not for sale In this list must also be included the Qenaga website mentioned earlier, which essentially presents text and sound together without musical notation Our product can follow the guidelines of all these works, in presenting sound and text together, adding annotation and some musical notation where appropriate In particular, Holton’s and Coray’s work provide guidance in dissemination of possibly sensitive materials

Staff

Methods

Tasks to be undertaken

We will handle existing data in the following ways: in consultation with elders, lyrics will be transcribed and translated; annotations for songs will be recorded with Minto elders who can identify the composers and the occasions for which songs were composed; song recordings will be digitized, catalogued, categorized and backed up to hard drives and CDs and the product will be organized into html format so that the community can make available what they wish to share, and keep what they would like to keep We hope to hand over a processed digital product that can be released under community control

Connection to an already developed Lower Tanana-controlled website may be possible, once the village of Minto takes over the materials The village of Nenana shares Lower Tanana heritage with Minto, and has only recently lost its last speaker of the

language Nenana and Minto are the last two villages left of a Lower Tanana Athabascan chain of communities that once extended as far upriver as Tanacross (Chena did not survive the gold rush, as the modern city of Fairbanks grew up on its site; most residents of Salcha and Goodpaster fell to the 1918 flu, and these areas became populated by whites as well.) This means that Minto and Nenana share close cultural ties and a sense of the urgency of preserving their language and art Mitch Demientieff of Nenana has worked with the

University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Center for Distance Education to develop a website to handle Nenana song material In the first stage, it contains 12 songs recorded in June of

1986 (although the songs were composed years ago by late Nenana elders.) The songs were translated some years ago by Paul George of Nenana with the assistance of Jim Kari, emeritus professor of linguistics at the Alaska Native Language Center Nenana has digitally remastered a huge collection of the songs that were recorded via cassette tape to be available although not in the completed form The first 12 songs on this website will have historical captioned images and be subtitled in Lower Tanana with English translations The Alaska Native Language Center will continue to be involved in the preparation of the next level of songs for this website As in Minto, Nenana has identified music as motivator and teaching tool for use in language revitalization

The Nenana website is a good example of a well-designed and

community-controlled dissemination program While we do not propose at this point to recommend or

to mediate choices for the dissemination of the Minto materials, the existence of this site makes a simple and viable choice possible for the Minto Council Obviously, other choices will be available as well, both in design and control of materials

Computer technology to be employed

Following successful experience in our research unit with aligned text technology,

we propose to employ this method of handling sound and text for the Songs project The projected multimedia product in this project is a very simple one, an HTML file with lines of narrative text linked to a cleaned-up version of the original sound for that particular

sequence of text On a linked page, a morpheme-by-morpheme gloss can also be accessed The product of this project is specifically NOT a website, but material that can be instantly uploaded to a website by community members who control the dissemination of each category of song according to their choices

We will therefore be working with sound editing software (Soundforge for PC) and a program for creating aligned text (ELAN)

Technical and staff resources required

Translation and annotation are appropriate tasks for linguists and will be undertaken

by the PI, with assistance from consultants Kari and Lundstrom

Cataloguing and organization of digital materials require considerable knowledge of community and family structure in Minto The PI will work in this capacity with help from the consultants and the technical assistant

Processing text and sound into aligned text is a technical skill that requires some instruction This task will be carried out by the technical assistant with help from the PI and others

Staff’s experience with technology and application to the humanities

PI Tuttle has worked with the Lower Tanana Athabascan language since 1990 (Tuttle

1998, 2003) and has been working on a dictionary project in the Minto community for the past two years Her present project on Ahtna texts involves the creation of aligned text in this related language

Consultant James Kari has been working with the Athabascan languages of Alaska since the 1970s He has done extensive fieldwork in Minto and collected a large lexical base which he has made available for research purposes He has translated song lyrics in

Dena’ina, Ahtna, Lower Tanana and Koyukon

Consultant Håkan Lundstrom, an ethnomusicologist at the University of Lund in Sweden, has worked with Alaskan music since the 1970s, when he studied under Anna Birgitta Rooth He has recently been processing recordings from the Rooth collection and sharing his results with the Alaskan colleagues

Plans for evaluation of the results

Summative with respect to the start-up grant

We will evaluate the protocol based on its success with the Minto people who have been asking for the project Should the transmission of processed materials not lead to dissemination or accessibility, we will have to rethink the structure of our work

Accordingly, we will be keeping touch with the Minto community after the project is over,

to see whether they do in fact have the songs they want and the information about them that they asked for

In terms of product usability and accessibility: we will demonstrate the use of our

products towards the end of the project, in a one-day workshop in Minto Note will be taken

of the user-friendliness of the aligned-text format with songs, and adjustments will be made accordingly

Formative with respect to the long term project goals

Should the transmission of processed materials appear to be successful in the Minto case, we will try to build on this small-scale experiment and apply it to the two larger groups

of communities in the Interior that have large song collections, namely Koyukon (to the west) and Ahtna (east and south) The next step would be the planning of larger projects in interior Alaska to work with the music of multi-village groups such as Ahtna and Koyukon

Final product and dissemination

Our final product is to be digitally organized sound-and-text materials containing Minto language, Minto song, translations of lyrics and annotations These digital files will

be transmitted to representatives of the community of Minto so that they may make

appropriate choices as to their local and web-based dissemination Backup copies and metadata (annotation interviews, notes and observations) will be archived at the Alaska Native Language Center, where they will be available for consultation by visitors

Work plan

Spring 08 (start

April)

Digitize/Catalogue ANLC collection

Tuttle, Kari

Spring 08 Catalogue Swedish

collection

Lundstrom