Moving Songs

Repatriation has become almost ubiquitous in ethnomusicological research on Australian Indigenous song. This article provides insights into processes of a repatriation-centered song revitalization project in the Kimberley, northwest Australia. Authored by an ethnomusicologist and two members of the Ngarinyin cultural heritage community, the article provides firsthand accounts of the early phases of a long-term repatriation-centered project referred to locally as the Junba Project. The authors provide a sample of narratives and dialogues that deliver insight into experiences of the work of identifying recordings “in the archive” and cultural negotiation and use of recordings “on Country.” The entanglement of local epistemological frameworks with past and present collection, archival research, repatriation, and dissemination for intergenerational knowledge transmission between spirits, Country, and the living, is explored, showing how recordings move song knowledge from community to archive to community and from generation to generation, and move people in present-day communities. The chapter considers how these “moving songs” allow an interrogation of the fraught endeavor of intercultural collaboration in the pursuit of revitalizing Indigenous song traditions. It positions repatriation as a method that can support intergenerational knowledge transmission and as a method to consider past and present intercultural relationships within research projects and between cultural heritage communities and collecting institutions.

Memory, Trauma, and the Politics of Repatriating Bikindi’s Music in the Aftermath of the Rwandan Genocide

The ethics of musical repatriation become especially murky when representative members of the originating culture disagree over whether certain musical artifacts should be repatriated at all. This may be due to linkages between the artifacts and violent histories, such that the artifacts carry the risk of inducing traumatic memories and contributing to ongoing political conflict. Centering on postgenocide Rwanda, this chapter employs a series of ethnographic vignettes to illustrate these ethical tensions. In 2007, the author came into possession of songs by Simon Bikindi, which were used by government-affiliated propagandists to incite the 1994 genocide. The songs are presently de facto censored by the current regime. In carefully reintroducing the songs to genocide survivors and witnesses, the author found that many did indeed support measures to suppress them, while others expressed an earnest desire to own and listen to them again, primarily as a facilitator for therapeutically remembering and narrativizing their own experiences of terror, loss, and recovery. In conclusion, this chapter does not aim to resolve this conflict, but to present it for the purposes of reflection and dialogue.

“Each in Our Own Village”

This article explains the importance of creating sustainable interactions between custodian communities and archives, arguing that an archive is truly sustainable if it promotes and supports forms of sustainable and unmediated interactions and dialogue between its own organization and custodian communities. It first provides an overview of some of the contemporary concerns of cultural custodians as well as the contemporary concerns of archives before discussing interactions related to stakeholder communities and archived collections of musical recordings. It then describes the author’s experiences from her own research within Kam minority communities in southwestern China over the past thirteen years, and more specifically her involvement in archiving recordings of Kam music, to demonstrate how insights from the perspective of the fieldworker/archivist might be used in the process of developing new initiatives that assist in establishing sustainable custodian-archive dialogue and thus archival sustainability. The author’s work involved collaboration with Kam custodians to create and establish a sustainably archived digital collection of recorded materials with the Pacific and Regional Archive of Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC). Drawing on this experience, she proposes several new initiatives aimed at enhancing custodian–archive communication founded on two features integral to sustainable digital archives: using the very audiovisual means that form the basis of the archive, and using the archive’s online streaming capabilities (or digital recordable media such as VCDs and DVDs as substitutes where online streaming is not available).

After the Archive

The afterlife of an archive determines what that archive was in the first place. In other words, the way an archive preserves, processes, analyzes, and circulates its holdings—or fails to do so—plays a central role in constituting not just the what of the archive (its ontology) but also its when (the temporalities it contains and allows). In the 1930s, Milman Parry, a scholar of Homeric epic, traveled to the former Yugoslavia to collect oral poetry from the area, hoping to use this contemporary tradition to think about the feasibility of epic song—and specifically the Iliad and Odyssey—as an oral tradition more broadly. Parry’s student, Albert Lord, published their findings on the topic, creating a massive rethinking of poetry and literature more generally. But the archive they created through their audio recordings in Yugoslavia, recorded on aluminum discs, wire spools, and reel-to-reel tape, served for decades as a kind of necessary proof of their findings, but not an archive that allowed for significant new research. In the past decade, however, a number of family members of the singers who had recorded for Parry have begun to contact the archive seeking information about recordings in the archive. This contact has led not only to meaningful encounters between these families and the archive but also to small but significant expansions in the archive’s holdings through a kind of genealogical ethnography of the archive itself and its multiple, simultaneous (and often divergent) histories.

Repatriating the Alan Lomax Haitian Recordings in Post-Quake Haiti

Alan Lomax’s Haitian recordings, 1936–1937, rediscovered in the Library of Congress Archives of Folk Culture in 1999, were edited to produce a boxed set in 2009, with the intention of repatriating the set and eventually the entire corpus of 1,500 recordings and six films to Haiti. This chapter charts the process and the problematics of curating the box set as well as repatriating the archives in the face of the massive 2010 earthquake in Haiti. It discusses the challenges inherent in the large repatriation team assembled by the project’s funders. It also looks at the impact of such recordings on the personal, familial, and religious levels, as the “voices of ancestors” return to their homeland.

“The Songs Are Alive”

“The Songs are Alive” recounts the digital repatriation of Frances Densmore’s audio recordings of Ojibwe/Anishinaabe songs that were originally made on wax cylinders in the first decade of the twentieth century and are held by the Library of Congress. Powell, a digital humanities scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, discusses the process of creating a database that converted a huge digital file of undifferentiated songs into individual recordings given cultural context by Densmore’s remarkably detailed ethnographic descriptions. Jaakola, the director of the Ojibwemowining Center at Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College, writes about bringing the songs back to life by carefully circulating them through the community, identifying culturally sensitive songs, and making new recordings of the songs deemed suitable for the public by working with elders and youth. The songs are now being used by Ojibwe communities in the Great Lakes region for cultural and language revitalization as well as in Minnesota public schools.

Cinematic Journeys to the Source

“Cinematic Journeys to the Source: Music Repatriation to Africa in Film” critically explores four documentary films that feature the repatriation of a musician or group of musicians to Africa. More specifically, it asserts that for these artists, their music has created the opportunity for both them and their audience to collectively remember an African past and either consciously or subconsciously is the metaphorical site of repatriation before the physical travel takes place. The author argues that music communities emotionally repatriate through their participation in music making and that in turn makes physical repatriation possible. The chapter makes these points by exploring the concepts of memory, identity, and performance of ethnicity. The films, They Are We, by Emma Christopher; Throw Down Your Heart, starring Béla Fleck, by Sascha Paladino; Feel Like Going Home, which stars Corey Harris, by Martin Scorsese; and Search for the Everlasting Coconut Tree, starring and directed by Adimu Madyun are reviewed based on their contribution to the ongoing dialogue about the negotiation of relationships between Africans and African Americans, perceived healing of the trauma of the trans-Atlantic trade of enslaved people and the lasting effects of it, and the role that music has played in pursuit of achievement of these goals.

“Where Dead People Walk”

The Quechua community of Q’eros, Peru, is known internationally for their lifestyle steeped in an “Inca” past. While many documentaries, exhibitions, theses, and articles have been published about them, their direct complaint is that they never see these works. In 2010, the ethnomusicologist Holly Wissler digitized and handed over fifty years of audiovisual archives about the Q’eros directly to their communities. This chapter discusses the collection and presentation of the archives via an “ambulatory movie theater”; the triggering of memory and discussion about past customs and deceased community members; one woman’s multiple viewings of footage of her long-deceased mother as integral process in healing; the impact of archive return directly to the community of origin, versus deposit in a public institution; and a stimulation of consciousness about the place of Q’eros in Andean history, and the uniqueness of their customs that is connected to both Inca and current identity.

Claiming Ka Mate

This chapter unpacks the sociocultural and legal issues surrounding the Māori haka (chant/dance) “Ka Mate” authored by Ngāti Toa chief Te Rauparaha in the 1820s. In Aotearoa New Zealand, this beloved haka has become a symbolic display of biculturalism and is integral to the national imaginary. Historical associations and usages in wartime and sport, particularly rugby, have exacerbated associations with aggression and masculinity with essential meanings becoming diluted and erased with each further layer of appropriation. Important dialogues emerge from Ka Mate’s complex location at the intersection of Indigenous cultural property, the public imagination, the nation-state, and global appropriation. Ka Mate’s contentious legal history, including its recent repatriation to Ngāti Toa as an “intangible” taonga (treasure), highlights the problematics that the circulation of music and dance have for Indigenous custodial guardians, underscoring that repatriation must include an acknowledgment of history, context, and mana (integrity/power).

Bali 1928 Music Recordings and 1930s Films

Bali 1928 is a restoration and repatriation project involving the first published recordings of music in Bali and related film footage and photographs from the 1930s, and a collaboration with Indonesians in all facets of vision, planning, and implementation. Dialogic research among centenarian and younger performers, composers and indigenous scholars has repatriated their knowledge and memories, rekindled by long-lost aural and visual resources. The project has published a series of five CD and DVD volumes in Indonesia by STIKOM Bali and CDs in the United States by Arbiter Records, with dissemination through emerging media and the Internet, and grass-roots repatriation to the genealogical and cultural descendants of the 1928 and 1930s artists and organizations. Extensive research has overcome anonymity, so common with archival materials, which deprives descendants of their unique identities, local epistemologies, and techniques, marginalizing and homogenizing a diverse heritage so that entrenched hegemonies prevail and dominate discourse, authority, and power.