Presented at the Upper Midwest Digital Collections Conference, November 5, 2020.
Native Nations are charged with collecting, preserving, and sharing language and culture. Tribal cultural institutions not only preserve the belongings, stories, and words of their communities, they also protect tribal identity, knowledge, and sovereignty. Whereas most digital archives initiatives champion open access to content in the public domain, many Indigenous communities have cultural protocols and community preferences that necessitate more granular, deliberate control over the online circulation of cultural patrimony. Since 2017, the Mukurtu Midwest Hub has provided support and training in Mukurtu CMS for communities and institutions in the midwest, as well as future information professionals in the UW-Madison iSchool course Tribal Libraries, Archives, and Museums (TLAM).
Each year, the Hub has collaborated closely with TLAM students and tribal community members to coordinate service-learning opportunities to assist tribal institutions in describing and managing digital content. One tribal community partner is the Hoocąk Waaziija Haci Language Division (HLD). The HLD ensures that the Hoocąk Language continues to be a living language. TLAM and WiLS have spent the last 3 years assisting HLD staff with organizing, cataloging, and digitizing language resources, with the goal of building a digital library for language learners and educators.
This presentation focused on why Mukurtu is unique, how it fulfills the needs of Indigenous communities in building and managing digital cultural heritage collections, how organizations with Indigenous collections can work with Indigenous communities to care for and present their collections in culturally appropriate ways, how the Hub promotes a community-driven approach to preserving and sharing Indigenous heritage, and how the HLD project has implemented Mukurtu principles and methods to create a respectful online space for Indigenous communities.
MukurtuPresentation-KMW-UMDCC-2020
