Voices Across Generations: An Alaska Native Audiovisual Preservation Project was created to ensure that important Alaska Native voices, stories, songs, language and knowledge are not lost with time. It brings together two needs: caring for what has already been documented and recording what can still be shared today.

 

Voices Across Generations is a three-year statewide initiative of the nonprofit Alaska Music Archives, funded by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

 

Working with Alaska Native communities, the project will identify historical audio and visual recordings, songs and stories, language materials, photographs and documents, while recording new interviews with elders and knowledge holders. It will also aid in locating historical materials held outside the communities they document and reconnect those materials to the communities. Selected materials will be professionally digitized, documented and organized, with appropriate copies provided to participating communities and authorized materials made available for research, education, and future generations.

 

The project is being directed by Kurt Riemann, founder of the Alaska Music Archives and owner of Surreal Studios in Anchorage. For more than four decades, Riemann and Surreal Studios have worked with Alaska Native voices, languages, oral histories, and cultural materials. That experience provides the foundation for Voices Across Generations.

 

Communities will be partners throughout the process. The Alaska Music Archives will provide archival and technical expertise, while communities will bring the cultural knowledge needed to understand the materials and guide how they are described and shared. A the complete discretion of the community, access may be public, community-based, limited or private , and ownership of original recordings remains with their owners.

 

We invite Alaska Native communities to help shape and participate in this work by identifying important materials, Elders and knowledge holders, locating historical collections, and guiding how their cultural materials are understood and shared. Each community can participate in the ways most meaningful and appropriate for its people.