The oldest field recordings in the world are in the process of being restored in a collaborative process that represents the reclamation of the Passamaquoddy Tribe's authority over a significant part of its cultural past. The recordings, which were made in Calais in 1890 on wax cylinders, provide a crucial link between the tribe's past and present, and -- thanks to the efforts of those involved -- they will play a part in building the bridge to its future.
     In 1890, anthropologist Jesse Walter Fewkes came to Calais with the intention of recording members of the tribe on a wax cylinder recording device that he borrowed from Thomas Edison. After three days, he had made 31 recordings, each lasting between two and three minutes. He took note of his work in a field journal.
     Decades later, the recordings were recovered from the Peabody Museum in Boston. Three had broken in storage, and Fewkes' journal no longer accompanied them. The Library of Congress catalogued the pieces for storage at the Smithsonian, but critical knowledge -- including what was said and which tribe they were from -- was missing.
     Once Fewkes' journal was located and paired with the cylinders, copies were made and a set was returned to the tribe in 1980. David Francis, one of the tribe's most fluent speakers, diligently listened to the tapes, but the poor recording quality made many parts indecipherable.
     In 2015 the American Folklife Center (AFC) contacted Donald Soctomah, the tribe's historic preservation officer, regarding the possibility of restoring the recordings using a combination of an Archeophone cylinder playback machine and a computer enhanced digital audio restoration system. Soctomah agreed, and in 2016 the collaboration entered a new stage.
      Key to the AFC's approach was the desire to not only restore the recordings but to reestablish Passamaquoddy ownership over their contents. Both components were viewed as fundamentally necessary to expand the available knowledge regarding the recordings, even though it potentially meant that the Passamaquoddy could deny their findings to the AFC. The effort to ensure the partnership was both challenging and incredibly rewarding, as Dr. Jane Anderson, a legal scholar based in the anthropology department at New York University, explains. "This was an enormous project because it meant facing the weight of settler colonial histories and how this plays out within institutions of cultural memory like libraries, museums and archives -- for instance, the erasure and marginalization of Passamaquoddy names, of the contents of the songs, of their cultural context," Anderson states. "What the Library of Congress had before the Passamaquoddy were invited to be involved as the rightful custodians were extremely impoverished records. Working with the Passamaquoddy has changed forever how these songs can be understood and known. And this is through the Passamaquoddy language and culture."
     Anderson became involved in the project herself through her work with developing traditional knowledge labels through the local contexts platform and the Mukurtu CMS, which she summarizes as being "tools that offer legal support and a rerouting of authority and control over collections." She is actively working with the tribe to build familiarity with attaching metadata to the recordings and storing them in digital form on Mukurtu CMS, a web‑based, collaborative platform.
     The website, which will have a public launch at the Wabanaki Cultural Center in Calais on Wednesday, September 26, from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m., will enable access to the recordings and other historic materials as determined by the tribe. "It would be open to everybody, but we would restrict access to certain things," Soctomah says. "So we'd have a little bit of control. In the past, we didn't have any control over our cultural information. People just took what they wanted and did what they wanted with it."

Reconnecting with ancestors
     With the passing of gifted speaker David Francis, Dwayne Tomah has undertaken the task of transcribing the restored recordings. Doing so is a task that requires both intense concentration and necessary periods of reflection, Tomah shares. "My job is to be able to sit there and decipher dialect, pronunciation, endings of the words and the different variations, as well as how it has evolved over time." The past 128 years have produced some changes in the language, and the differences aren't lost on Tomah in terms of their implications. He explains, "It's very emotional for me to listen to it because I'm so connected to the language that I think about how many more people would be able to even decipher what was going on. There has to be a real, real, strong community effort to be able to preserve our language."
     The connection is distinct for Tomah, who sang one of the songs recorded in 1890 -- in which his own ancestor, Newell Tomah, was recorded -- for the Library of Congress, in an emotional moment that brought tears to the eyes of everyone present, according to Anderson. Tomah has since taught his 7‑year‑old daughter Liliana the same song. Together, they sang it at the Sipayik Indian Day celebration in August.
     "She looked at me and said, 'Daddy, you sing, and I'll drum,'" Tomah recounts. "I put one of her friends in front of her to see if it would inspire her to sing. The little girl sang by herself. Liliana looked at her, and I could see the wheels turning. She looked up at me and said, 'Daddy, I can do this.' We get up there, and she starts belting it out, singing at the same time with me." Tomah's eyes shine and he grins broadly at the memory. "Powerful!"
     As the songs are transcribed and sorted, Soctomah and Tomah will be integrating and sharing them as they deem appropriate. "When we have all the background, I'm going to do a presentation to the tribe, and then to the surrounding communities, for sharing what we've learned and what's exactly on these wax cylinders," Soctomah says. Doing so will build an important bridge for tribal members, he believes. "With all the static on some of them, they just say, 'I can't hear anything,' and that's it. But if we can recreate the song like Dwayne does on his drum, people can hear the actual words."
     Being reconnected with the words of his ancestors is a sensation that Soctomah feels is imparted by one of the facets of the Passamaquoddy language -- a facet that is a testament to its past and future endurance. He explains, "We don't have 'goodbye' in our language. We say, 'apcoc' -- I'll see you again."