The University of Arizona will receive funding to help revive the state’s tribal histories that were recorded decades ago.
In the 1960s, a philanthropist named Doris Duke funded a project to record thousands of tribal histories at seven American universities.
The Arizona State Museum in Tucson has hundreds of these recordings in storage.
But researchers lack permission to use them, and the technology to access them is outdated.
Duke’s Charitable Foundation recently granted the universities more than a million dollars to update the collections.
“They kind of realized that a lot of the content wasn’t available, and it wasn’t available in a way that could be used by researchers,” said Molly Stothert-Maurer of the Arizona State Museum.
The museum will receive funding to work on the collection over the next two years.
