The Southern California Tribal Chairman's Association
Tribal Digital Village Project


		The Storyscape Project is working with the Southern California Tribal Chairman's Association (representing 18 tribes in the San Diego, California area) and the University of California at San Diego to provide a part of the cultural component the Tribal Digital Village Project designed to link the tribes through wireless technologies. Support for the project is provided by a grant from Hewlett-Packard.

The Storyscape Project is helping to design and equip a complete sound studio with production and post-production capacities. The studio would be shared by the tribes in the association and used for ethnographic audio and video recordings as well as contemporary cultural programming. We are also helping to design an outdoor sound studio in a grove of oaks to create a more conducive recording environment.

We are providing audio ethnographic recording workshops to train tribal members to record their own culture bearers, elders, and storytellers. Contemporary arts programming will be encouraged and the skills gained through the workshops can be applied to employment and business services.

Our three-day workshop in spring 2003 provided participants with hands-on training on-site on a number of technological levels from cassette tape recording to digital technologies capable of a computer interface with mastering and editing and duplication capabilities. The workshops are designed to train cultural workers who will develop and lead projects in their communities by involving and training others. The workshops cover the basic concepts and methods of ethnographic audio recording including proficiency in the equipment, intellectual and cultural property rights, fundraising, project design, archive, ethics, linguistic colonialism and other considerations. We consult on the design and completion of tribal and individual projects and provide on-going technological support and post-production advice for our training partners.

We have developed a collaborative curriculum for audio ethnographic recording design for the purpose of language preservation. The recordings, accompanied by written materials and master/apprentice programs, can serve as a curriculum for native language revitalization.

The Tribal Digital Village Storyscape Project combines cultural preservation and contemporary arts with technologies that will link tribes to the past and present, and each other. By training trainers, we can assist tribes to become more self-sufficient in their cultural preservation efforts.