Recordings of Maine’s Passamaquoddy Tribe restored more than a century later | Hacker News Reader

Recordings of Maine’s Passamaquoddy Tribe restored more than a century later

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76 pointsmstats9 comments

Any of these tribes could be the next Monaco, which was also in disrepair for centuries

The first step is recognizing the 500+ individual semi-autonomous cultures instead of an amorphous "indigenous peoples"

The next step is releasing maps that show tribal lands as distinct administrative districts, just like Monaco, San Marino, Andorra etc in Europe, but as any other state in the US

They have all autonomy to have their own courts and distinct systems of governance, and the federal government barely leverages its enforcement powers over any of them

Navajo Nation spans 3 states and you need a special map to see it, all while the laws there are completely different including their own business formation statutes. Doesn't make sense this has gone on so long.

Whoa, never heard anyone talk about my ancestors before! My great-great grandmother was Passamaquoddy, and absolutely nobody knows who they are.

Would be nice if there were direct links to the recordings.

(I don't want to click around the podcast version of this story just to hear short snippits.)

Some of the recordings are on the tribe's website [1].

[1] https://passamaquoddypeople.com/collection/1890-passamaquodd...

Wow, these are amazing. My immediate thought is that tools like iZotope RX (in the hands of the right person) could be used to make them much better.

Some of those old recordings are really low quality to start with. There are a couple of maybe unprocessed tracks from 1899 on the "Ojibway Music from Minnesota" CD that the Minnesota Historical Society released in 1988. I'm not seeing it freely available anywhere but it looks like at least last.fm has a page for it (however the CD only has 15 tracks and they list 20, not sure why...). The 1899 tracks are the two by Swift Flying Feather, "Moccasin Game Song" and "Love Song" (not the others of the same names on that CD that are from the 70s and 80s). The track "Dream Song" by Kimiwun was recorded by Frances Densmore in 1910 and is much clearer (the "Women's Dance Song" by Ponemah Singers is a 1972 version of the same song from the same community). They are all excellent songs. I can highly recommend the whole CD. According to the booklet there were also 6 recordings of Swift Flying Feather made in 1869 by Alice Fletcher. I'm not sure if those (or any other of these old recordings) are available anywhere. Edit: The page I link to below mentions these as being 1899 so I think the 1869 was a typo in the booklet and the two Swift Flying Feather tracks on the CD are the recordings made by Fletcher in 1899.

I think this page is a small part of the text from the booklet that came with that CD:

http://www.pbs.org/riverofsong/music/e1-ojibway.html

Looking more, they have the rest of the booklet text also:

http://www.pbs.org/riverofsong/music/e1-continuity.html

http://www.pbs.org/riverofsong/music/e1-dream.html

http://www.pbs.org/riverofsong/music/e1-mocassin.html

http://www.pbs.org/riverofsong/music/e1-story.html

http://www.pbs.org/riverofsong/music/e1-love.html

http://www.pbs.org/riverofsong/music/e1-contemporary.html

willywon (translation: "Thank you")

I can highly recommend the children’s book Thanks to the Animals by Allen Sockabasin, a Passamaquoddy storyteller and historian

As a bonus the last couple pages of the book, after the story, tell some history of the tribe’s seasonal migration and the pronunciation of many of the animal names. It’s really great

https://www.tilburyhouse.com/product-page/thanks-to-the-anim...

How did they transfer the recordings from the cylinders to some more modern media? Did they simply play them on one of the original devices and recorded that? Or were the cylinders laser scanned or something? I think the article doesn't say, and I couldn't listen to the podcast yet.

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