Tribesourcing Southwest Film April 7

Tribesourcing Southwest Film, a groundbreaking NEH-funded project seeks to "tribesource" dozens of educational films about the Native peoples of the Southwestern U.S. and (new!) Southern California.

These works derive from the American Indian Film Gallery,  a collection awarded to the University of Arizona in 2011. Most of the films were made in the mid-20th century and reflect mainstream cultural attitudes of the day. Often the narration pronounces meaning that is inaccurate or disrespectful, but the visual narratives are for the most part quite remarkable.

At this historical distance, many of these films have come to be understood by both cultural insiders and outside scholars as documentation of cultural practices and lifeways—and, indeed, languages—that are receding as practitioners and speakers pass on.

This project seeks to rebalance the historical record, intentionally shifting emphasis from external perceptions of Native peoples to the voices, knowledge, and languages of the peoples represented in the films by participatory recording of new narrations for the films.

Each film in this project will be streamed with at least one alternate narration from within the culture. This aspect of the project allows for identification of people, places, practices, vocabulary and stories that might otherwise be lost, as well as providing a significantly richer, community-based narration for each film, thereby taking a small step toward cultural repatriation of content.

To the best  of the team's knowledge, the films are believed to be the public domain.The Mukurtu platform allows for local tribal control of access to cultural information contained in the films. This is an entirely nonprofit project and we do not license or sell footage herein. For more about Mukurtu, please see: http://mukurtu.org/about/

Melissa Dollman is the Digital Projects Manager/Archivist for Tribesourcing Southwest Film.  Melissa (Yankton descent) earned her PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in American Studies in 2021.

She has worked professionally as an audiovisual archivist, adjunct faculty, fellow, exhibit developer, and researcher for cultural heritage institutions including Women In Film Foundation, UCLA Film and Television Archive, Academy Film Archive, Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, State Archives of North Carolina, North Carolina State University, and the Southern Oral History Program.

She has published on home movies and ethics in Amateur Movie Making: Aesthetics of the Everyday in New England,  1915-1960 (2017), as well as videographic essays on public access television, and found home movies and privacy. Her mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, great-great-grandmother, and other ancestors are/were enrolled members of the Yankton Sioux/Ihanktonwan tribe.