The following is a guest post by Michelle and JW Newson on the 2024 Community Collections Grant project, Indian Town, of the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi (NHBP). The American Folklife Center’s Community Collections Grant program is part of the Library’s Of the People: Widening the Path initiative, which seeks to create new opportunities to engage with the Library of Congress and enrich the Library’s collections, allowing the national library to share a more inclusive American story. This post is part of the Of the People blog series featuring the awardees of the Community Collections Grant program since 2022.
Five men stood looking up at the flag they had grown up under. A white flag with an emblem of a mshikè (turtle) on it and the words: Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi. There it hung among hundreds of flags of proud nations who have populated the Americas long before the Stars and Stripes was stitched together. These men stood in the halls of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., having journeyed from Athens, Michigan to walk the footsteps of those who had come before them and connect the past to the present. All are members of the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi (NHBP), a Native Sovereign Nation who reaffirmed federal recognition nearly 30 years prior when the previous generation of Huron Potawatomi traveled to Washington, D.C. to sign the paperwork, a trip which changed the trajectory of all the tribal members’ lives forever.
This knowledge journey began long before the flight that brought these men to the U.S. capital left Michigan soil in August, 2024. While attending the Audio Engineering Society (AES) New York Conference in October, 2022, JW Newson, who leads Multi-Media Productions for NHBP, learned of a rare opportunity to attend a special conference at the Library of Congress. The June 2023 conference, hosted at the Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation in Culpeper, VA, focused on Audio Archiving, Preservation, & Restoration. This conference was developed with the goal of bringing researchers and practitioners together for three days to support and encourage collaboration and interoperability between industry and the preservation, restoration and archiving communities. In this spirit, Mr. Newson sought the insight of a highly esteemed panel from the Recording Academy Producers & Engineers Wing for an upcoming archive initiative. This project aimed to record and preserve the voices and life experiences of the Bodéwadmi (Potawatomi) people at the Gathering of the Bodéwadmi Nations hosted by NHBP in July, 2023. Attesting to the power of professional organizations such as AES to bring together individuals in a field to share experience and insight, Mr. Newson was surrounded by support to successfully bring this project to fruition.
Additionally, it was through this network of professionals that Mr. Newson was informed of a Community Collections Grant offered through the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center to empower diverse groups to document and preserve their recent history. With the support of NHBP’s Tribal Council, JW Newson worked with NHBP Chief Planning Officer Dan Green and to apply for this opportunity, and was awarded a Community Collections Grant in February, 2024. The preservation effort empowered by this grant award has focused on ensuring that tribal members seven generations from now and beyond will still have the knowledge of this transformative time in NHBP’s history spanning three different generations: members of the generation that included boarding school survivors; members of the generation who fought to reaffirm federal recognition status for NHBP; and members of the generation who have grown alongside the transformative development that has happened on NHBP’s homeland, the Pine Creek Indian Reservation, over the last few decades.
Intergenerational involvement of NHBP Tribal Members in all aspects of the process has been designed into the project as a key priority. Elders from NHBP have shared their life experiences and the history of what life was like on Pine Creek Indian Reservation prior to the development opportunities that accompanied federal recognition status; back when it had been referred to as “Indian Town, MI.” Younger relatives have been incorporated as fieldworkers, asking the curated list of interview questions during the recorded interviews, engaging multiple generations in the sharing of knowledge and history. Real time reflections and interactions between mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, were opened by these exchanges as both parties received the questions for the first time during the interview, giving honor to the tradition of passing oral histories to the next generation. Younger tribal members were also able to share their own experiences, viewpoints, and reconnection with their ancestral lifeways through group podcast-style interviews. Membership including teenagers participating in NHBP’s Youth-Learn-Work Summer 2024 program have been involved in the behind-the-scenes production aspects of the project as well, with 25 tribal members aging from 13 to 82 comprising an 100% tribal member production support crew. Finally, an intergenerational group of NHBP Historical Advisory Consultants was assembled to give direction on who to contact for interviews and provide feedback throughout the process.
The recordings took place at one fixed location at Pine Creek Studios located on the Pine Creek Indian Reservation and two offsite temporary studio locations in Dublin, Ohio and Washington, D.C. In each of these locations, the sets were carefully curated to include culturally representative items and were artistically arranged by a collaboration of Tribal Members. Such items in the set designs included historical Black Ash Bodéwadmi Baskets, Bodéwadmi Applique works, tradition medicines, and an heirloom Buffalo Hide.
Among those who have been key contributors in this process is NHBP Tribal Member and Tribal Historic Preservation Officer Onyleen Zapata. Ms. Zapata aided in the interview question development as well as conducted several of the interviews and participated in one of the podcast-style interviews along with NHBP Tribal Member Alexandria Sulainis.
The group of five men who made the journey to Washington, D.C. in August, 2024, were also key participants in the project. Lovelle Marshall and Daejion “Ziggy” Morseau, who were involved in previous NHBP Production initiatives, served as Production Assistants. Johnathon Moulds, Photographer for NHBP, served as Director of Photography for the Indian Town collection. Brothers Kevin Harris II, NHBP Culture Specialist, and Devonne Harris, who specializes in several styles of traditional Bodéwadmi dance, served as cultural ambassadors for the visit to Washington, D.C. In addition to these five, Diop Harris, who lives and works on Capitol Hill, also joined his fellow tribal members.
The next stop for these men was the Library of Congress itself. Out of the millions of books, recordings, films, and artifacts archived and preserved within the Library of Congress, only one was of the Potawatomi. This singular artifact was a recently uncovered field recording of a Potawatomi song that was recorded in 1943 by Willard Rhodes in Lawrence, Kansas, presumably at a boarding school. These men journeyed to Washington, D.C. to be the first Bodéwadmi ears to hear this recording since students Wilma and Christiane sang these powerful songs. In a cultural repatriation, a copy of these preserved songs that were lost to time are being returned to these Bodéwadmi representatives to bring back to the language revitalizers collaborating across multiple Bodéwadmi nations.
Dressed in regalia honoring their heritage, moccasin-clad feet danced for the ancestors on the mosaic floors of the Library of Congress’s Great Hall and climbed the marble steps worn by the feet of other knowledge seekers over the last 127 years since the Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building’s construction.
These Bodéwadmi ambassadors viewed the field notes where the Potawatomi recording was referenced, saw the original device it was recorded on, and then listened to the digitized version of the 81-year-old recording. Though information on this recording is minimal, it is believed that the song was recorded at a boarding school in Kansas during a time when the policy of the U.S. Government was to eliminate the languages, cultures, and religions that had been practiced on this land for millennia. To now be bringing traditional Bodéwadmi dance to the center of the government’s archive of knowledge and culture honored the strength and resilience of generations of Bodéwadmi, showcasing what could not be stomped out.
In the dark before the dawn of August 11, 2024, the 46th anniversary of the signing into law of the American Indian Freedom of Religion Act, a lone figure danced on the National Mall, illuminated by his brethren surrounding him. The Bodéwadmi drum echoed like a heartbeat off of the marble monuments surrounding. This man danced for the ancestors who walked this land before European settlers arrived. He danced for the survivors of the boarding schools who kept the culture and the language alive. He danced for those who fought for the right to practice Indigenous religions and lifeways freely. He danced in the spirit of the Bodéwadmi: The Keepers of the Fire, burning bright as a symbol stating, “We’re still here.”
