In this episode of Sound Files, hosts Jesse Johnston and Evan Haywood discuss the Federal Cylinder Project, a major audio preservation and community engagement project by the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, with Judith Gray. They interview Judith, who discusses the project’s history, its mission to reconnect Native American communities with historic wax cylinder recordings, and the ethical considerations involved in making these materials accessible to their source communities.
Episode Title: Native American Recordings, Community Connections, and the Federal Cylinder Project ft Judith Gray
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In this episode, hosts Jesse Johnston and Evan Haywood discuss the Federal Cylinder Project at the American Folklife Center, focusing on its goal to reconnect Native American communities with archival audio recordings, largely recorded onto wax cylinders by various settler ethnographers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century throughout North America. Jesse interviews Judith Gray, coordinator of reference services at the American Folklife Center, about the project's history, its mission, and the ethical considerations in making these culturally significant sound recordings accessible to source communities.
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Jesse Johnston Welcome to Sound Files, a podcast about the preservation of recorded sounds and the people and organizations who preserve them. I’m Jesse Johnston, Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information. I’m also executive director of the National Recording Preservation Foundation and a former grant maker in cultural heritage preservation.
Evan Haywood And I’m Evan Haywood, an audio archivist, engineer, and music producer based in Ann Harbor, Michigan, where I run the Black Ram Treehouse Recording Studio.
Jesse Sound Files is presented by the NRPF, a nonprofit charitable organization that works in alignment with the Library of Congress to promote and preserve historical audio.
Evan We’re focused on giving our listeners a deep insight into archival methodologies, why these preservation projects are so important, and the people who make it their mission to preserve audio resources for future generations.
Jesse In each episode, we will talk with an archivist, invite them to introduce the audio collections they work with, and talk about why preserving recorded sound is important. We will also include audio clips from the collections and interludes featuring original music by Evan Haywood.
In this episode, I talk with Judith Gray, reference librarian and archivist at the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress. She told us about the work of the Federal Cylinder Project, one of the largest and longest running projects to reconnect sound recordings in institutions with their source communities. We talked in depth about the long-standing work of the American Folklife Center to promote the return of many recordings to Native American communities. Although the American Folklife Center was established in 1976, it continued the work of various other units within the Library of Congress that were devoted to folk and traditional music.
As part of these long-term efforts, the Library has acquired over 10,000 recordings on wax cylinders. These were acquired from various private individuals and other agencies of the U.S. government, including an especially notable portion from the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology. Of those 10,000 cylinders, roughly 80% document the sung and spoken traditions of American Indian communities recorded from the 1890s to the early 20th century. Since the 1970s, American Folklife Center staff members have contacted or visited over 100 Indian communities and have been contacted by many others in search of relevant materials that might be in the Library’s collections. The work to return and ethically make available these recordings has been at the center of many of the Library’s ongoing efforts to establish and maintain relationships with source communities.
Let’s get to the conversation.
Jesse Hi Judith, thank you so much for talking with me today. Can you tell us what you do here at the Library of Congress and how you’ve been involved with the American Folklife Center?
Judith Gray I have now been at the Folklife Center for 40 years and am coordinator of reference services at this point.
I came to the Library in 1983 having first heard of the Federal Cylinder Project at a Society for Ethnomusicology conference in Indiana in 1980. The people who were then involved in the project were talking about it in a way that made me think that finally, finally, finally there was a project in which there was a collaboration between tribal communities and an archival entity. I was excited by it and kept an ear out for it and in 1983 suddenly there was a posting for a one-year position with the Federal Cylinder Project. I applied and came on board. That one year became the first of a series of contracts and positions until it finally became a permanent posting.
Jesse What was the work of the Cylinder Project like in those early phases?
Judith I came on right at the time when there was sort of a transition between the initial stage of figuring out what the library had as well as also at that point acquiring cylinder related collections from other museums and in some cases private collections. So the beginning of the documentation work was happening but there was also an understanding that the ultimate goal was to be returning copies of the recordings and the information back to the communities of origin.
Very shortly after I arrived there was a gathering of people, of native people who had particular experience dealing with larger institutions and especially federal ones. So it was people who were museum people, there were archivists, there were people involved in tribal language programs and they came together to sort of advise the participants of the Cylinder Project in how to go about approaching tribal communities in a respectful way and in a pragmatic way. So among the things that they advised us was that okay we were coming from a federal agency. That meant we could not go around the designated tribal government. We had to go through the front door. We had to go to the tribal authorities and then even if we knew that the recordings were perhaps more family specific or perhaps ritual specific, only then could we make inquiries past that to see if we could find people for whom those recordings were really the intellectual property.
Jesse It’s an impressive amount of planning and care that was put into this effort. Getting back to your work, what was your role in the project as things were getting started?
Judith I helped to catalog things and then later on became one of the people to actually return copies to communities. But the first step, the cataloging, was trying to round up any information that we had on the collections given that for so many of them the materials were not entirely here at the library that a collector’s papers might be in another repository, another museum. Some other copies of recordings might be in other archives. And so we needed to try to gather up whatever information that was there to bring it together in order to understand what we had here but also to make it easier ultimately for the communities to put together all the parts of the puzzle.
And definitely there were puzzles. Things had been mislabeled, [some] things didn’t have any labels. And so it was a matter of using everything that we could put together to try to track down what we had, to whom it might be important, and to get confirmation of that where we could from people we knew.
And then ultimately to make the copies available back in the communities for their use if they wanted them. And that was another part. We couldn’t presume that the community wanted the materials just then. We had to follow their lead to see what they preferred. And in some cases that was a project that took a long time. It depended upon building relationships and determining who would want to speak on behalf of the community and how that should all happen. It was not for us to make those decisions.
Jesse What was the impetus for the Federal Cylinder Project?
Judith The impetus for the Federal Cylinder Project was one particular ethnomusicologist, Tom Vennum, who at the time was working for the Smithsonian, but who had written his dissertation on Frances Densmore’s Ojibwe Anishinabe recordings. So he knew about them and he also knew that they were not generally accessible within the communities. So he proposed that there be some sort of project to work with the early recordings and that’s pretty much where it started.
After that, well, it grew. And as the word got out that we had the capability of preserving the recordings. I mean, I think some of my predecessors in the project were sending out letters inquiring whether or not various institutions had cylinders, but the fact that we could handle them brought a great many in.
[MUSIC excerpt – Evan Haywood]
Jesse When were most of the cylinders originally recorded and how did they end up at the Library of Congress?
Judith Well, to do that I have to actually go back to the 1940s.
One of the principal collectors, Frances Densmore, had been working for the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) as a recordist all over the place. She was also ultimately given the task of doing some of the initial cataloging of those cylinder recordings. Right around the start of World War II, all of the original cylinders were moved to the National Archives. Densmore knew about that, but she also knew that the National Archives at that point did not, as far as I know, have a recording studio, whereas the Library did. The Library was set up to do cylinder transfers and other such things.
So Densmore managed to, it sounded like she got some funding from wealthy people she knew in Minnesota, she herself was Minnesotan, that she managed to get them to contribute monies that helped to facilitate the transfer of the BAE, the bulk of the BAE cylinders, to the Library of Congress.
Jesse How many cylinders were there?
Judith Roughly, at that point, I would guess, 2,000 to 2,500, something like that. They were transferred to the Library, first to be transferred onto aluminum discs. That occurred for the most part around 1947.
Evan Let’s listen now to a short excerpt from a related archival recording. This is a recording made by Frances Densmore in 1925, of a song with the English description “Manabus Tells the Ducks to Shut their Eyes.” This re-engineered excerpt is from a digitized wax cylinder recording held by the Library of Congress. Please check the show notes for a link to the full recording. Now, we will hear Louis Pigeon of the Menominee singing:
[~13:00: MUSIC excerpt, Louis Pigeon (Menominee), singing “Manabus Tells the Ducks to Shut Their Eyes,” recorded by Frances Densmore in 1925. Digitized from the wax cylinder recording by the Library of Congress, information at https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200196307/.]
Jesse So, it seems like Densmore’s recordings were the main collection initially at Library of Congress, but there were other recordings too?
Judith Yes, there were some other cylinder collections here by that time, including those, the non-tribal cylinders by the person who created the Archive of Folk Song, Robert Winslow Gordon. He collected cylinders for the Library starting around 1928, so those were the first ethnographic cylinder recordings that came to the Library at that point. But other organizations that were depositing collections were giving materials to the Library, and then the big Bureau of American Ethnology trove in the 1940s. And after that, again, other organizations knew that we could handle those formats. So it was, for example, that the Passamaquoddy cylinders came to us from the Peabody Museum at Harvard, again, precisely because we had the capability to do the transferring and the preserving work.
Jesse So later, when Tom Vennum started some of the work that became the Federal Cylinder Project, was the emphasis always on repatriation, or was it mostly about the preservation of the recordings?
Judith From the very beginning, and as I said when I first heard about it, that was what attracted me, that it was already talking in terms of, it was preservation, but also, well, documentation, and ultimately dissemination.
We didn’t refer to it as repatriation because we weren’t giving back the original recordings, which communities had no means of playing back. So we were returning copies, and we knew that, and so we referred to that as the dissemination phase. But that was built into the project from the very beginning.
Jesse And it seems like we’re now still talking about repatriation, how to make community access available in ethical ways and in ways that return materials respectfully. It was such a unique initiative.
Judith I think it was at the time. I was aware when I first came to DC that there were some returns of photographic collections that were occurring around the same time. And in one sense, that was also when the Smithsonian was returning some, or was sharing photographic collections with communities that, yes, there was this round-trip process of gathering more information to help inform the collections and such.
But as far as sound recordings, yeah, I think this was among the first notions of trying to do that, I think.
Evan Let’s hear an excerpt now from a recording by Carl Fleischhauer of the Library of Congress. This recording was made in Macy, Nebraska at a powwow on August 13, 1983. You will hear the Omaha host drum playing and singing, and the announcer describes this as a revived Hethushka warrior song. Later, we will hear the archival recording from the Federal Cylinder Project.
[~15:25: MUSIC excerpt from “Hethu’shka Song (‘Get Up and Dance’)” sung and drummed by the Host Drum at the Omaha powwow in Macy, Nebraska on August 13, 1983. Recorded by Carl Fleischhauer for the Library of Congress, information at https://www.loc.gov/item/omhbib000001/. ]
Jesse I’ve always been impressed with the Federal Cylinder Project. Judith suggests: It really strikes me as one of the largest audio return projects, though I know that both the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University and the Lowie Museum at the University of Berkeley had outreach activities.
Judith Each of the institutions had its own form of outreach, but I think what we were doing was formalized and was sponsored through, yes, we got several grants to enable us to do that, and just had a very specific project that went on for a long time and gradually morphed into something that was not so much a project, but part of the regular functioning of the archive.
In part because, yes, if we visited a community to return copies of cylinder recordings, the natural question was, well, do you have anything else from our community? And so if we had wire recordings, if we had disc recordings, if we had tape recordings, all of those things were important to the communities, and it natural then that we tried to facilitate connecting people with everything that we had that was related to their specific heritage.
[17:10 – MUSIC – Evan Haywood]
Jesse How did you begin to establish relationships with communities? I imagine that as the Library of Congress, it had to be quite formal as an official state-to-state relationship. So were you making initial outreach or engaging in a lot of formal written contact?
Judith Precisely that. We would first write a letter to the tribal chair. We also, again, as a federal agency, we also had to let the congressional delegations know that we were approaching communities within their states or their regions or whatever. And so sometimes, in some cases, Congresspeople or Senators got directly involved and wished to be part of the whole process.
But yes, it started out on that formal level. And then we would see, as I said, if we could find people who were directly involved. If there was an elders council, if there was a tribal language program, as well as the schools within communities, where we would find people who would be interested in the kinds of material that might be on the recordings.
Jesse What members of the community or organizations did you work with?
Judith When we would visit communities, yes, we might engage with any number of groups within the communities, be it tribal council, just groups of elders. Sometimes we were sent to schools, and sometimes, as you can imagine, 100-year-old cylinder recordings might not be the thing most engaging to a young audience, but then again, sometimes it was! When they could hear voices that were their very own heritage. That became important in some places. One of the longest relationships we had was with the Omaha tribe of Macy, Nebraska. Their elders group ultimately requested copies of what became published as an LP sampler set of recordings. The elders were giving those LPs to recent graduates, high school graduates from their community, as a marker of, you know, “This is your heritage, this is part of what we know to be Omaha.”
Evan As we’re hearing about the ways that the Federal Cylinder Project engaged communities, here is one of the transferred cylinder recordings of a Hethushka song, as it was played here during the 1983 powwow we heard earlier, in Macy, Nebraska.
[~20:34 RECORDING excerpt of a cylinder recording being played back at the Omaha powwow in Macy, Nebraska, in 1983. “Wax Cylinder Hethu’shka Song - 1983 Pow-Wow,” recorded by Carl Fleischhauer for the Library of Congress, information at https://www.loc.gov/item/omhbib000097/.]
Unnamed speaker introducing the recording at the powwow The first song is the Halushka Society song, and it’s sung by Josiah Fields, Richard White, Arthur Mitchell, and Klein. This was recorded September 9, 1897, right here on the Omaha reservation by one of your own tribesmen, Francis La Flesche.
[EXCERPT concludes at ~ 21:20]
Judith So the recordings, however old and however scratchy, carried a lot of meaning in many contexts.
But in other places, yes, people were not, it was not the right time, not the right place, and that’s their, obviously, that’s their decision, and we abide by that.
Jesse Can you tell us how those events played out? How did you engage the community with audio, specifically? And how did the communities interact with the recordings? Did you play things back? Were they listening in groups, one-on-one?
Judith I mean, I’ve seen a variety of things. I’ve seen people coming here to the library as well; I’ve made community visits; listening to the recordings and starting to sing along. And the expressions on their faces seem to me to be one of pride that despite all of the attempts that have been made to take away the culture or to minimize it or something, people recognize things that are on the recordings. They know them to be theirs.
It looks to me like there’s pride on people’s faces when they hear that.
At the same time, however, I mean, there’s the other side. I can recall in one instance the recordings that had been made were by the direct ancestor of a group of people there. And for them, it was problematic. Was it their ancestor who inadvertently gave away materials that should perhaps have stayed within the community? There was a sense there that there was some embarrassment.
But that truly was the exception to what I have seen, where people are so interested in revitalizing what was their practice and here is documentation that, yes, this is theirs.
[23:24 – MUSIC – Evan Haywood]
Jesse How have these community relationships that began with the sound recordings developed over time? It sounds like these recordings have really built relationships between the library and the source communities.
Judith Very much so, yes. The recordings have been, well, the cause for the outreach on our part. And in some cases, those relationships have been long lasting. Some of the relationships have been ongoing for 20 to 30 years now. We’re dealing with the same people that we started dealing with or just immediately thereafter. So that’s definitely a part of it.
Jesse That’s incredible and a serious investment in the collections and the relationships. Do you plan out those activities in advance? And how long do these sorts of projects take?
Judith I keep finding myself saying it’s going to take as long as it takes.
And with no preconception at the opening as how long that might be, again, that’s not our call. But we try to operate in good faith and to be there as people ask us to be there. Sometimes that works better than others, but we’re trying to be responsible and responsive and try to help out as best we can.
So that also means not just working with the old recordings, but also providing people as best we can with skills so that they can do their own documentation. So whenever we would return copies, we would also be passing along information both on how you take care of old recordings, but also how you do your own documentation projects so that that work can be carried on into the future if communities desire to do that.
Jesse I know one of the most well-known projects recently was with the Passamaquoddy cylinders recorded in Calais, Maine, which are among the oldest sound recordings created in the field. Has that been an ongoing relationship for the Library?
Judith That actually started in 1983. It was the first time when a tribal linguist named David Francis came down to the library and listened to those recordings, which had come to the library, I think late, no, actually sort of mid-60s, early 70s, I think.
So yes, the Passamaquoddy community has worked with those recordings in different ways and at different times ever since the 1980s. And different tribal linguists have been involved. And now there’s this very, very wonderful program that’s being coordinated in large part by the Donald Soctomah, the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer, who has repeatedly been able to gather community members to listen to the early recordings made in March 1890.
People have been listening to those recordings and where we would have one line from the recordist as to what this was, they find paragraphs of meaning and have been able to contribute that information back to the Library so that we could add that information with their permission to a website having those particular recordings. [See https://www.loc.gov/collections/ancestral-voices/about-this-collection/]
There are some recordings which they do not wish us to have online. And so you can see the title of them, but you will not see all of the gathering of information that is part of that collection.
But yes, the whole Ancestral Voices project is, I hope, a good model for ways in which we can collaborate directly with communities and in turn have them share with us that which they want to share with us and thereby with other people who come after us.
Evan The Ancestral Voices Project explained and preserved the oldest audio recordings ever made outside of a recording studio. Let’s hear a short excerpt of Noel Josephs, of the Passamaquoddy tribe in Calais, Maine, recorded by Jesse Walter Fewkes in 1890. The original cylinder was digitized by the Library of Congress and can be heard in full at the link in the show notes.
[~28:18 EXCERPT of Passamaquoddy cylinder recorded in Calais, Maine, in 1890. “Passamaquoddy description of the Snake song and dance : Snake song,” digitized by the Library of Congress from an original wax cylinder, available online at https://www.loc.gov/item/2015655553/.]
Jesse How do you negotiate that conversation with a source community around what to provide access to? I know that libraries often have a very open approach to making materials available, which doesn’t always align with community interests. So how do you approach that issue of access?
Judith Basically, you listen.
That’s our responsibility, is to listen to what people are telling us about what is appropriate, what needs to be done, what needs to be respected.
So that’s our role, I really believe, is to listen.
[29:29 – MUSIC – Evan Haywood]
Jesse Would you say the project is still ongoing?
Judith Yes, absolutely. Things have changed over the years. For one thing, instead of us doing the outreach in the intervening years, there have been the creation of so, so many tribal archives and so many projects. And it’s at this point, people reach out to us regularly. So there’s not a week when I’m not receiving some inquiry from people interested in some of the recordings that are here that belong to their particular community, their particular family.
And it’s all about building relationships and, as I say, trying to be both responsible and responsive to their needs and to what is being asked.
Jesse Are there things that people ask when they’re interested in the collection that still surprise you?
Judith Oh, all the time. All the time we’re constantly learning about both the people who are involved. I mean, that’s one of the lovely things about being able to contact family members, especially that chances are there might be a photograph there. And so a voice that has been just a voice on a recording suddenly becomes a full-fledged human being with a photo and with stories that the family knows of, oh, when the person came and collected recordings or whatever.
Very often it’s more the sense of, yeah, way back then somebody came from Washington to make recordings or whatever. And is there any way we could figure out who that might be? Chances are pretty good that we can.
One thing that happens here a lot, not exclusively with tribal communities, but with all of the different peoples whose recordings are here, we get a lot of people coming in sort of on pilgrimage. Even if they have copies of the recordings at home, it’s so important to them to hear it here in the National Library. So we sometimes get three and four generations sitting here listening to the, you know, an ancestor. And that’s it’s really a magical moment.
Jesse Are there any particularly interesting or memorable examples from the recordings?
Judith I mean, there are some funny ones, mostly, you know, the collectors acting out.
One particular linguist was getting totally exasperated with the machine. And he says very loudly, “If this thing doesn’t work better, I’m going to send it back to Washington COD!”
Jesse I guess it did come back eventually!
Judith It did.
And I mean, you do get the people who are like Frances Densmore, who perceived her task as preserving things. Her way of putting it was that the young people don’t have time for this right now, but someday this will be meaningful to them. So, a statement of her time and her place as to what this was about. But on some levels, you have to understand what she thought and then see it in light of what has become of those recordings and how important they are to people today.
Jesse Why do you think it’s important to save historic audio collections? Why are these archives important?
Judith I think we are custodians of the past for the future, that our task is to keep those things for uses that we can’t even imagine. And that the people whose materials they are, they will know. And whether or not those are kept or not, that’s again, that’s not our call.
We need to listen. We need to hear what the communities are saying about what’s important to them and abide by that.
Jesse Thank you so much, Judith, for talking with me today.
[~34:18 Music fade in]
Evan Sound Files is produced for the National Recording Preservation Foundation by Jesse Johnston and Evan Haywood with support from the University of Michigan School of Information, the Black Ram Treehouse, the NRPF, and the generous contributions of our donors.
Jesse This podcast was recorded and mixed at the Black Ram Treehouse in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with original music and sound design by Evan Haywood.
You can follow NRPF on Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms, or just visit our website at www.recordingpreservation.org, where you can learn more about the NRPF’s programs and how to support them.
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Jesse Thank you for listening to this episode of Sound Files!