The Center's NSF-funded project to repatriate Laura Boulton's 1946 Alaskan Iñupiat recordings, led by Prof. Aaron Fox and Postdoctoral Fellow Chie Sakakibara, has recently been featured in an article on the Polar Field Services'
Notes blog.
Read the article here.
Aaron and Chie will be in Alaska from Nov. 20-29.
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The Center is delighted to announce that our project to repatriate Laura Boulton's 1946 Alaska recordings has been funded by the National Science Foundation with a two-year Early Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) of $136,000.
This article, written by Chie Sakakibara and Aaron Fox, is currently featured on the website of the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium (BASC). BASC is helping to support Aaron Fox and Chie Sakakibara in their research in the North Slope of Alaska. The article includes historical photos as well as photos from Aaron and Chie's recent research trip to Barrow, Alaska.
Further press about the project has been published in The Arctic Sounder (download the pdf). The project has also been mentioned in the "Alaska
Newsreader" section of the Anchorage Daily News -- check it
out here.
Click on the photo to see a large image of a photo taken by Laura Boulton during November, 1946 of the singers she recorded in Barrow, Alaska. From left to right, the identified singers in the photograph are: Leo Kaleak (seated left), Otis Ahkivgak (standing left), Willie Sielak, Guy Okakok, and Alfred Koonoalak. Not in the photo, but identified on the recordings, are three children: Mary (also known as "Eva") Ahvik, and Harold and Eddie Kagak (identified as "Eddie Orson" in Boulton's notes). Not in the photo, but prominently featured on the recordings, is singer Joe Sikvayugak (spelled "Sikvayunak" in Boulton's notes). This photo appears in two published locations. The version above is copied from Boulton's 1968 autobiography, now out of print, entitled The Music Hunter. A better-quality print was also published, but with extensive cropping, in the liner notes to Boulton's 1955 Folkways recording, now available from Smithsonian Global Sound, The Eskimos of Hudson Bay and Alaska.
If you are a member of the Point Barrow Iñupiat community and are looking for the website mentioned by Aaron Fox and Chie Sakakibara as heard on Earl Finkler's radio show on KBRW on Tuesday morning or at the community meeting at the Iñupiat Heritage Center on Tuesday evening, please click here for the website link.
A username and password are required to access the website. If you did not receive this information personally from Prof. Fox in Barrow, please write to him directly at aaf19@columbia.edu for the password.
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(Publicly available:)
To listen to Chie Sakakibara and Aaron Fox discuss the repatriation project with Earl Finkler on KBRW, the Voice of the North Slope (from Dec. 6, 2007) please click here (or control/right click the link to download the 19MB .mp3 file).
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