Ahtna Incorporated

Ahtna Incorporated and the Ahtna Heritage Foundation plan to digitize and make available more than 280 hours of cassette recordings and more than 150 hours of VHS recordings of cultural significance to the Ahtna community. These recordings, many from the 1970s, are of Ahtna Athabascan elders sharing their knowledge, in English and the Ahtna language, of oral history, traditional stories, family and clan lineage, subsistence, and geography. The collection is deteriorating rapidly and is not accessible to community members. The project will include collecting metadata for each item according to internationally recognized standards, establishing appropriate access protocols, assembling a high-quality digitization facility, providing public workstations for accessing the collection, and providing proper fireproof storage facilities for the original collection of recordings.