Tim Powell, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies,
was recently awarded a Humanities Initiatives at Tribal Colleges and
Universities grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities
through Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College, on one of the
Ojibwe Indian reservations in northern Minnesota. Dr. Powell will
serve as the co-project director of the grant, entitled "Teaching
Ojibwe Values through Stories and Songs: Building a Digital
Repository at the Ojibwewomining Center" ($100K). Partners on the
project include the Library of Congress (LOC), the American
Philosophical Society (APS), and the University of Pennsylvania.
More than 100 hours of audio recordings from the LOC and APS will be
repatriated to the new Ojibwemowing Resource Center at the Tribal
College ('Ojibwemowining' means, 'place where people speak the
Ojibwe language').
The digital materials that will be repatriated include Ojibwe songs
recorded on wax cylinders in 1907 by Frances Densmore, one of the
first women to work in the field of anthropology. These songs will
be re-recorded by a drum circle of Ojibwe women, which will then be
used in language preservation and cultural revitalization projects
that reach Ojibwe high school and tribal colleges students across
northern Minnesota. Penn hosts the website for the project,
Gibagadinamaagoom (?to Sanction, to Give Authority, to Bring to
Life?). Four Penn undergraduates will be working on the project.