C’ek’aedi Hwnax, the Ahtna Regional Linguistic and Ethnographic Archive

Date
2012-08
Authors
Berez, Andrea
Finnesand, Taña
Linnell, Karen
Contributor
Advisor
Department
Instructor
Depositor
Speaker
Researcher
Consultant
Interviewer
Annotator
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Hawaii Press
Volume
6
Number/Issue
Starting Page
237
Ending Page
252
Alternative Title
Abstract
We discuss the development of the C’ek’aedi Hwnax Ahtna Regional Linguistic and Ethnographic Archive, located in the Copper River valley of south central Alaska. C’ek’aedi Hwnax is the first OLAC-compliant, Indigenously-administered digital language archive in North America. Against the backdrop of the history of language archiving at the Alaska Native Language Center in Fairbanks, we present the Ahtna community’s voiced desire for local control over decades’ worth of irreplaceable linguistic and cultural recordings, along with the steps we took to build the archive. These include the aggregation of recordings from various locations, the process by which they were digitized, and the increase of access to their contents. The Ahtna archive follows guidelines for best practices already undertaken by established university-based archives around the world. At the same time, the archive represents a new model of distributed linguistic archiving in Alaska via a Memorandum of Agreement with the University of Alaska Fairbanks, which provides permanent off-site backup of the Ahtna collection on its servers and allows C’ek’aedi Hwnax full administrative control over access to the collection at the university. In this model, the responsibility for administration of language materials traditionally held in a central location is apportioned to different parties according to their needs and resources.
Description
Keywords
Ahtna, language archive, Alaska, Ahtna Heritage Foundation
Citation
Berez, Andrea, Taña Finnesand and Karen Linnell. 2012. C’ek’aedi Hwnax, the Ahtna Regional Linguistic and Ethnographic Archive. Language Documentation & Conservation. 6:237-252.
Extent
16
Format
Geographic Location
Time Period
Related To
Table of Contents
Rights
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported
Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 United States
Rights Holder
Local Contexts
Email libraryada-l@lists.hawaii.edu if you need this content in ADA-compliant format.