Repatriation and Tribesourcing of Yaqui Easter Films from 1972
Jennifer L. Jenkins was awarded a CERCLL Faculty Research grant in 2016 for a collaborative, inclusive language and cultural preservation initiative: repurposing two films from 1972 about the Yaqui people’s sacred Easter ceremonies. Made by National Geographic, these films now have value to the Yaqui people as documents of people, landscape, and cultural practices in a moment-in-time 40 years ago. The project created new digital scans and newly recorded Yaqui narrations for the films in Yaqui, Spanish, and English. By recording Yaqui tri-lingual narrations and collecting culturally competent metadata through community-based “tribesourcing,” the project is restoring the Yaqui voice and sensibility to these moving images in the three languages of the people. The work will be completed in summer, 2017. The video here describes the project.
The project was conducted by Jennifer L. Jenkins, Curator, American Indian Film Gallery, and Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Arizona; Guillermo Quiroga, Director, Old Pascua Museum and Yaqui Culture Center; and Hanni Nabahe, Knowledge River Cohort 13.
The Yaqui language is a less-commonly-taught-language (LCTL) of the Uto-Aztecan group.
CERCLL’s Faculty Research grants are awarded to University of Arizona faculty and are supported by the Office of the Vice President for Research at the University of Arizona.