This episode features a conversation with Leslie McCartney, curator of oral history at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who tells us about oral history work, a rare collection of audio documenting Native Alaskan languages and history recorded in the 1970s, and how oral history captures a unique perspective on the past.
Show hosts Jesse Johnston and Evan Haywood talk with Leslie McCartney about the work of preserving oral histories at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. During the conversation, Leslie shared about the history of the tapes for the "Cuttlefish Project," undertaken in the 1970s by a class of high school students in Unalaska and their teacher Ray Hudson. We also discuss the significance of some of these recordings as documents of various Native Alaskan languages, the history of Native and Russian settlement in the remote Aleutian Islands, and the significance of recorded sound as a unique carrier of historical information.
Sound clips were digitized with support from the National Recording Preservation Foundation and are used courtesy of the Elmer E. Rasmuson Library at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
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, a 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 grantmaker in cultural heritage preservation.
Evan Haywood: And I'm Evan Haywood, an audio archivist, engineer, and music producer based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I run the Black Ram Treehouse Recording Studio.
Jesse Johnston: Sound Files is presented by the NRPF, a non-profit charitable organization that works in alignment with the Library of Congress to promote and preserve historical audio.
Evan Haywood: 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 Johnston
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.
Evan Haywood
In this episode, Jesse will talk with Leslie McCartney, associate professor and curator of oral history at the Elmer E. Rasmuson Library at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Leslie received a grant in 2020 from the NRPF to fund the digitization and rehousing of a collection of audio recordings made in the 1970s by teacher Ray Hudson and his students at a high school in Unalaska.
Jesse Johnston: As Leslie explains, this is a remote community, even now, located in the middle of the Alaskan Aleutian Islands, and when the recordings were made, it would have been primarily connected by boat or plane.
This made me think about how rare these recordings are, especially considering that recorders and tapes would have likely been carried by hand to the community.
We also talked about the importance of these recordings for preservation of native Alaskan languages, cultures, and potentially even language revitalization efforts. Throughout the conversation, we've dropped in a few clips of archival audio from the Unalaska community, including speakers of English and Unangax.
Evan Haywood: Throughout this episode, we've dropped in a few clips of audio that were digitized with support from the NRPF grant. This includes recordings by Ray Hudson and his students in Unalaska, which are now preserved at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.
Jesse Johnston: Let's get to the conversation!
Hi, Leslie. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today, and particularly to share about your audio preservation work that was supported by the National Recording Preservation Foundation. To start off, can you please introduce yourself?
Leslie McCartney: So my name is Leslie McCartney. I'm a cultural anthropologist. I am a professor, and I am the curator of the oral history collection at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.
Jesse: So can you tell us more about the audio collections at the University of Alaska and what's in them?
Leslie: Our collection has over 15,000 recordings in every kind of audio media you could possibly think of, from glass records to wire recordings to magnetic media to born digital.
And our collection encompasses the whole of Alaska. It's not just Fairbanks. Any recordings that are of importance to the history or cultures of Alaska or people who have helped create that history and culture are fair game for our collection. And we're collecting all the time. A lot of our collections are by donations, such as the cuttlefish collection, for example, which was donated to us by the Unalaska School District. So we have a very broad remit for our recordings.
Jesse: Now, NRPF supported preservation work with that specific collection you mentioned, the cuttlefish tapes, right?
Leslie: Well, this particular collection is really important. It was made by a school teacher at the time named Ray Hudson. He has retired, and it was one of his high school classes.
And he would have elders and community people come into the classroom to teach the children about their language and culture.
And he was insightful enough to record these on a reel-to-reel recorder. Now, you've got to remember, you're out in the Aleutian Islands. This is the 1970s. I don't think having a recorder would have been that popular.
And just the struggle probably trying to get audio tape would have been a challenge. So he was very insightful in that he recorded these sessions.
Jesse: And when were those recordings made?
Leslie: The recordings were made between the 1970s up to 1982. And he lived on Unalaska Island from 1964 to 1991. So he has a real in-depth knowledge of the area.
Yeah.
Jesse: You know, I have a general sense of what it might have been like to live in the Aleutian Islands at this time, but I've never been there. Can you say a bit more about what it would have been like to live in Unalaska then?
Leslie: So Unalaska is an island in the Aleutian chain. So the only way to get there would be to fly in or by boat. Back in the day, I would imagine that for Ray, it would have been very difficult to get on and off the island with any regularity.
The Aleutians are well known for tumultuous weather. Storms coming up. The Bering Sea and the Atlantic Ocean sort of coming together. So the weather can be pretty dodgy at the best of times.
Jesse: And how did the tapes end up in Fairbanks at the University of Alaska?
Leslie: The school district found the recordings and sent them all to us. And so they have sat in our magnetic media vault, you know, to slow down degradation for a number of years.
And when this grant came along and I asked my staff which small collection would we have that would fit this grant, this was one of ones that was identified as as important to be done.
So the elders came in, a lot of times they spoke in English or they had a translator and they spoke in their own language. So there's all kinds of things about making different kayaks, making different implements,
foods, traditional, just a menagerie of things. And Ray is still alive. And so I contacted him and he was very, very helpful in the background work that I needed to do for this grant in order to say who the people were that were on the recordings and why they were important.
Jesse: That's wonderful. It sounds like such unique content. I know that part of the work on the collection was to create metadata, but how are you doing that? Is Ray still involved with the project?
Leslie: Ray is also still working with us. He's actually going through and listening to them and trying to make more detailed summaries so we can catalog them better in the catalog so that the communities will know just who's on what recording and what they're talking about.
And hopefully reuse in the communities. So there has been a lot of interest in the communities and the local library about making these recordings available to people. So it's been a huge, a huge cultural injection for the community.
Jesse: And what's your role with the collections now?
Leslie: So I am the curator of the oral history collection. So the oral history collection is my responsibility. And to find grants to have many things digitized at a high level, especially I feel that we can do some digitization in-house, but we're not professional.
And when you have recordings like this that are so precious in a language that's almost not even spoken anymore, I don't want us doing them. I want them done at a high professional level because that expertise and care needs to be done in the digitizing.
And I just wouldn't want anything to happen to them in-house to be damaged because then that is lost forever for, you know, world cultural history, basically.
So this is why I really, when we select recordings to go out, that's usually what we're looking for. To go out is something that is really, really important and cannot be replaced very easily. Not that any of the recordings can be replaced, but this is even at a higher level.
And we want high quality and we, you know, want them cleaned up as much as possible. Sometimes in a classroom, you know, there's a bit of ambient noise or whatever, and sending it out to a professional company to digitize and really gives you a lot better quality back.
[8:45 music]
[9:40]
Jesse: With a collection like this, there isn't any other copy, right? So that's your one chance to preserve it.
Leslie: Yes, and a lot of the, I would say probably most if not all the people on the recordings have all passed away. So there is no second chance. This is why it's so important to get it right the first time and why it's so important to have these digitized so that they can be used today.
Jesse: And it sounds like you have some special storage options for these collections like cold vaults and other things. What was the condition of these recordings?
Leslie: They were really quite in good shape. We dealt with Mass Productions, Paul Adams at Mass Productions. So what he wanted us to do was actually take some photographs of some of the reels before he would give us a quote because, you know, there might need to be clean up, there might need to be mold.
I think it was 59 boxes, 59 reels that I went through, and I opened every one of them and I could not visibly see anything. And the photographs I took I sent to him and he thought they all looked really good. And there wasn't any problems. They were actually still in pretty good shape. This particular collection was.
Jesse: These were all open reel audio tapes?
Leslie: I believe they were all seven or nine inch open reel. Yes, they were the smaller ones. Boxes are about that big. You know, obviously what he got in the Aleutians when he was when he was teaching there, that was the media of the day.
Jesse: It's so important but unique that you're still in contact with Ray as one of the original creators of the collection. So he's logging information and is able to provide information about where they came from and what the background was.
Leslie: He is and he speaks a little bit of the language himself, which is very, very helpful. And so he has emailed me a couple of times to say it's like visiting old friends again, you know, to hear the people's voices. I think it's been quite emotional for him.
He is retired. So, you know, it's this isn't going at the speed of light. It's when he has time to send us more things. But yeah, creating more metadata so that it's helps people identify more what is on the recordings and then that for will increase use.
Jesse: So in my experience, I know you very rarely get complete information about reel to reel recordings like this. But what were you relying on? I'm imagining the situation was you basically had whatever was written on the boxes or slips of paper within the box.
Leslie: Basically, it's what's written on the box. And sometimes what's written on the box isn't right, you know, it doesn't match with the reels inside. But it's it's it was pretty good. And like I say, I created a spreadsheet at first with everything that was written on the boxes sent it to Ray.
He sent it back and said, you know, even the spellings are wrong, you know, some of the spellings are even erroneous or whatever. So he's helped us with a lot of the Russian names, which was which was very, very helpful.
And as I say, he's going through and listening to them and creating more metadata.
Jesse: And can you tell me a little bit about how people can search for and find these recordings?
Leslie: We have a library cataloger, Rachel. And so when Ray sends us a new summary, she will go back into OCLC, which has the catalog record and goes into WorldCat 2. And she will update the the record. So she'll add extra information that's available.
Perhaps there's more Library of Congress terms that he's identified that can be can be updated. And then she basically updates that from there. So that's how we've been doing that.
Jesse: I'd love to talk about the collection contents a bit more. You mentioned Ray Hudson was a teacher. So how did his project with the students come about?
Leslie: Well, that's really funny. I asked Ray about that. So these were high school students. I'm not too sure how it came about. But Ray was very passionate about bringing elders into the into the classroom to teach the children.
Because you've already got that generation that doesn't even speak the language, right? And so it's trying to reconnect that. And it's really interesting listening to some of the recordings. There's one recording, I think it's an elder talking about building a watercraft.
And he is there and I believe it's his son. So it's an elderly gentleman and then a grown person. And it's interesting, you know, how the kids ask questions, he translates it for his dad, and then his father answers them. And there's also another couple of there's one another one with two women talking back and forth about different food stuffs and things like that.
There's another one that just lists a whole bunch of terms like like you would do like a linguist asking what is this word? What is this word for this and that? And it's quite a long list. And it's interesting how you can hear the native language and then you'll hear Russian mixed in with it, of course, right?
[14:14 Excerpts from "Aleut Words and Phrases" narrated by Nick Galaktionoff, from a 1977 audiotape, courtesy Elmer E. Rasmuson Library, University of Alaska Fairbanks, identifer ORAL HISTORY 97-245-48. Link: https://anch.ent.sirsi.net/client/en_US/uaf/search/detailnonmodal/ent:$002f$002fSD_ILS$002f0$002fSD_ILS:5819070/ada?rw=36&d=ent%3A%2F%2FSD_ILS%2F0%2FSD_ILS%3A5819070~ILS~38&lm=UAF-ORAL&rt=false%7C%7C%7CSERIES%7C%7C%7CSeries&isd=true]
Lightning. Rainbow. To want. To help. Wing. Alive. My mother. Let's have some tea. Chay. Are you ready?
[14:45]
Leslie: So the recordings are interesting that way. And I asked Ray once, I said, how did the word cuttlefish ever come to be? You know, and it was just he ran a poll with the kids in the class as to what they wanted to call this. And that was the name they picked. So it doesn't, it's not like it has any great significance or anything. It's just what a bunch of high school kids decided that they wanted to do.
Jesse: Oh, that's interesting. So cuttlefish weren't even a major topic, it sounds like. But what other sorts of people and conversations did they record in the project?
Leslie: You know, some of the record, some of the recordings, you know, there's one here with William Tcheripanoff, if I'm saying it correctly. He was born in 1902, and he was really known for his willingness to promote his culture. And he was one of the last traditional dancers and the last traditional drum maker.
So having things like that on recordings for people to hear today, and also to he discusses World War II, which Ray pointed out to me was of great value because very little had been recorded about World War II on Acton Island, which is where he was from. So it's not, there's just a lot of gold in these recordings about a lot of different things.
[16:00 - music]
[16:48]
Jesse: These sound like incredibly vibrant and varied recordings. So once they became more widely available and discoverable in your online catalog, were there new options for finding the recordings? And was there more interest in them?
Leslie: Yes, the radio, the radio stations down in Unalaska picked up on this. I think we ran a short story in Cornerstone, which is the newspaper for the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. And I believe that's where the radio stations saw about these recordings.
And they, they've called me and interviewed me and were really keen about this because it's, you know, recordings of their homeland, right?
And also, too, the library in Alaska has contacted us a few times, thrilled with them. And now that they're available online through the library catalog, it's not even like they even have to house them, you know, like this is the wonder of putting them in the recordings directly in WorldCat or in our repository.
We have an audio, historical audio repository online, so anybody can listen to them at any time anywhere as long as there's a, you know, decent enough internet connection, which can be problematic in a lot of the communities, but at least the library can just access it.
I think they called me once wanting copies and I said, you don't even need copies because it's here online. But, you know, if you want copies, you know, we can send them to you. That's not a problem.
Jesse: It was my understanding that there were also some books or other projects that were done by the classes around the time that these were recorded?
Leslie: Yeah, so they took a lot of the recordings and then the children made these different books. And according to Ray, of course, they're just a thumbnail of the information that was actually captured on the recordings.
So the recordings are the primary, of course, because they're everything, right? So these books are pretty rare to find in our library. We do have copies of most of them, but not all of them.
And, you know, they're lovely books that are made by high school students, right, about their traditional culture and language.
But like Ray says, they didn't use, you know, 80 percent of what's on the recordings to make these books. So as wonderful as the books are, the real meat of the information is actually on these recordings.
Jesse: Yeah, it sounds like a real treasure trove.
Leslie: Yes. So what the grant was for is because we don't have the expertise in-house, like I said, to digitize something this precious.
We have worked with Paul Adams before at Mass Productions. We have had wonderful relationship with him and he has excellent work. He delivers on time. He's very conscientious and respectful about the preciousness of the recordings that you're sending him and how important they are.
So great care is taken. And so we managed to get a quote from him of the 59 recordings that we wanted done and it came in around the ballpark of the grant. And that's why it was submitted and we had him do the work.
Jesse: So you've told us a lot of wonderful information about these collections and the work that you did with them. But can we just talk a little bit about the grant? What specifically were you able to support with the NRPF grant?
Leslie: Basically, the grant paid for the digitization of the actual recordings. We also needed some new tape boxes. Some of the boxes that the original tapes were in were homemade, put together with sticky tape falling apart.
So we needed 10 new boxes that were going to house the actual recordings in a good way. And of course, the FedEx, as you can imagine, from Alaska to Massachusetts is not cheap.
And so basically the grant was to cover the cost of digitizing, a few new boxes, and the shipping back and forth. All the staff time and prep time that went into creating this was basically myself and one other staff person.
Jesse: You said a lot about the details of the collection formats and the work that it took to prep them. But let's return to the audio of the recordings. Were there any that stand out to you as ones that you would say were particularly notable or memorable?
Leslie: Yes, there was a couple. There's one that I really enjoy. It's actually a bunch of people in a room playing a game and singing a song. And it's very much in the language. And so it's really delightful, lively recording, and it's a game.
And it seems like Ray said they're passing something around. And when you get this or you hide who you're passing it along to and then you sing this phrase. So it's just a wonderful little recording of joy, actually, and laughter, which I really, really thought was really nice.
It's a guessing game. And then you shout a "Woo!" when you think the player has tossed it or there's a guess. And of course, everybody laughs and it just sounds like it's such a good time.
[22:13 Excerpts from "Games and songs with Anfesia Shapsnikoff, Vasilii "Bill" Tcheripanoff and Dorothy Jones" digitized from an audiotape, courtesy Elmer E. Rasmuson Library, University of Alaska Fairbanks, recording identifer ORAL HISTORY 97-245-43. Link: https://anch.ent.sirsi.net/client/en_US/uaf/search/detailnonmodal/ent:$002f$002fSD_ILS$002f0$002fSD_ILS:5816915/ada?rw=12&d=ent%3A%2F%2FSD_ILS%2F0%2FSD_ILS%3A5816915~ILS~21&lm=UAF-ORAL&rt=false%7C%7C%7CSERIES%7C%7C%7CSeries&isd=true]
[23:08]
Leslie: There's a woman by the name of Sophie. She was born in Chernovsky, which is a now abandoned village in the southwestern coast of on Alaska Island. So it's an abandoned village. Nobody lives there. And she was known for her basketry and gut sewing and doll making.
And I, when I do conferences, I play a couple of clips because she talks about how they traditionally salted some fish, but not others and why they would use one fish over another and how they dried their fish, and how they dried it and then put it in sea lion stomachs and also talks about how they prepared whale and how they got sinew from the whale. So she goes into quite detail about about how all of that was done, which I thought was really an interesting one.
[23:55 Excerpts from "An interview with Sophie Pletnikoff in 1978" digitized from an audiotape, courtesy Elmer E. Rasmuson Library, University of Alaska Fairbanks, recording identifier ORAL HISTORY 97-245-17. Link: https://anch.ent.sirsi.net/client/en_US/uaf/search/detailnonmodal/ent:$002f$002fSD_ILS$002f0$002fSD_ILS:5808718/ada?d=ent%3A%2F%2FSD_ILS%2F0%2FSD_ILS%3A5808718~ILS~1&h=8]
Voices of Sophie Pletnikoff, Platonida Gromoff, and Nick Galaktionoff, only partially transcribed:
So we used to use the whole bit of whale also salted or dry the meat and eat it the way it was and salt the blubber and eat it with dried fish. And that's when they used those sinew out of that. I mean, sinew out of that. Yeah, we call it sinew is
[24:47]
Leslie: Then there's ones where it's just really interesting and to hear elders interacting with children and Dr. Anna Berge, who's a linguist, pointed out to me, which I did not know, that it's extremely rare to find recordings where elders are actually interacting with high school children.
And so this makes these recordings especially valuable.
Jesse: I suppose there wouldn't be much recorded intergenerational audio if the language is now so rarely spoken.
Leslie: Yeah, so she said that there were several dialects of the language and today there's three remaining dialects of the Unangam Tunuu, which are all critically endangered.
So linguists who specialize in this language such as Dr. Anna Berge and Knut Bergsland, they estimate there's maybe only one to 200 speakers left of these three remaining dialects.
And many of the elders featured in this collection of the last generation whose that was their mother tongue.
And she said here, she pointed out to me that from a documentation of an endangered language point of view, which is what Dr. Berge does as she documents endangered languages, there's almost no documentation of interactions between elders and children, which is exactly what these recordings are.
So from a documentation, linguist point of view, these are invaluable recordings because of that.
Jesse: Do you work with the Alaska Native Language Archive?
Leslie: Dr. Anna Berge is the director of ANLA, the Alaska Native Language, and John DiCandeloro who works with her.
So yes, we are in touch all the time about different collections. There's quite an overlap.
ANLA exists more for linguists and documentation of languages.
So this could be used for that, but it's also got more so I can understand why it's in our collection.
[26:48 - music]
Jesse: In a broader sense, do you have any thoughts on why it's important to preserve historical audio recordings like this?
Leslie: Oh, definitely.
Historical audio, whatever it is, is a part of a culture that has been.
And to hear the immediacy of someone's voice is so much more moving and important than reading it on a page.
I teach a class on oral sources where I give students something to read and then I have them listen to the person deliver it as a speech or a talk and the differences between the two.
And without a doubt, you know, the oral and listening to the audio, you understand the pauses differently, you understand the humor differently.
You may have missed innuendos or something like that that were written on paper that you but you hear them in the audio.
So it's so important to preserve our audio heritage, wherever that is.
And, you know, it's not a long heritage, right? When we think about things, you know, audio has not been around, you know, as long as paper has been, for instance, and it's just precious.
And once we have spoken, our words are gone.
But if they're if they're recorded on something, we have that to listen to for future generations.
And I think it's just so, so important to save audio heritage in whatever whatever language and culture it's in.
Jesse: Yeah. And I think the time period, too, is also really special.
You know, now people have mobile phones and things like that.
And it's very easy to record audio, even though many of us don't.
And we probably think of recording as ubiquitous.
But these are so unique from that time period where, like you were saying, it would have been rare to have an audio recorder, especially in such a remote place.
Leslie: And to get, you know, and to get tapes mailed up and sent in.
I mean, it shows the dedication of somebody who really thought this was important to capture at the time.
Jesse: Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge of the collection and some of the things that make it so interesting.
Leslie: No problem, Jesse. Thank you. I'm so glad you're so glad that you funded it and so glad that you're interested.
Evan: Sound Files is produced by 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.
Evan: And don't forget to subscribe to the Sound Files podcast. Rate us or leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform.
Jesse: Thank you for listening to this episode of Sound Files.