Congrats to Gareth Seymour
GARETH SEYMOUR, RECIPIENT OF THE 2019 PAUL REYNOLDS ‘NO NUMPTIES’ GRANT
LIANZA is delighted to announce that the Paul Reynolds ‘No Numpties’ Grant for 2019 has been awarded to Gareth Seymour, from Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, enabling him to discuss indigenous archiving with key groups in Saskatchewan and North West Territories, Canada.
The grant was established in 2010 from donations made by the National Library of New Zealand, Internet NZ and friends of Paul Reynolds, which are held in trust by LIANZA. The selection panel is made up of representatives from National Library of New Zealand, National Digital Forum and LIANZA.
LIANZA Communications Advisor, Helen Heath, caught up with Gareth to hear about his plans.
Q KIA ORA GARETH AND CONGRATULATIONS! CAN YOU PLEASE TELL OUR READERS ABOUT YOUR WORK AT NGĀ TAONGA AND WHAT YOU’LL BE USING THE GRANT TO DO.
A Ngā Taonga plays a unique role in the landscape of heritage institutions of Aotearoa. I have been employed by Ngā Taonga for three and a half years, and have managed Te Māngai Pāho archival programme and support our access pathways such as oversight of Māori language standards and connecting iwi with collections items.
The grant will allow me to discuss Indigenous archiving with two key Indigenous groups in Canada:
■ The Saskatchewan Indigenous Cultural Centre (SICC) First Nations Language Gathering in November 2019; and
■ The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Indigenous Archiving Project in the North West Territories of Canada.
Held annually in November, the SICC hosts its First Nations Language Keepers Gathering. It is the leading national gathering devoted to preserving, promoting and protecting First Nations’ languages and cultures. It brings together academics, elders, knowledge keepers, master speakers, educators, community leaders and students from across Canada and the United States. It will be held in Saskatoon on November 6-7, 2019 and the theme is ‘Our Sacred Languages Walk With Us.’
The purpose of attending the SICC First Nations Language Gathering is to share experiences with those groups around language revitalisation and the role that digitally preserved audio visual archives play.
As this is a national gathering I intend to share and gather information about the extent that these indigenous communities are utilising such resources in their revitalisation programmes, reflecting on their diverse realities in such a large nation. Ngā Taonga is at the forefront of delivery of access to digitally preserved audio visual materials to support language revitalisation, and it will be important to share and discuss experiences with other cultural institutions and their partners.
The purpose of the visit to the CBC Indigenous Archiving Project is to undertake a five-day collaboration with them to canvas, and share
the similarities and challenges faced when digitally preserving large legacy collections in our respective Indigenous languages. The CBC project shares these similarities with the Te Māngai Pāho archiving project that Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision is responsible for in that:
■ Significant legacy audio collections of Indigenous speakers are being digitally preserved.
■ Cataloguing backlogs are arising as a result of digitisation.
■ There is a commitment to providing online access for communities to the collections and discovering how best to achieve this.
■ Shared ethical challenges around issues related to content, open access and kaitiakitanga defined by Ngā Taonga as ‘those whose lineage or calling creates an obligation to safeguard the taonga itself and the mātauranga that underlies it.’
As there are many indigenous languages spoken in Canada there is a difference between the scale of the CBC and the Ngā Taonga projects. The CBC project has 18 cataloguers who speak several languages. How does this inform the roll-out of their project? By comparison, Ngā Taonga has two EFT Māori language cataloguers who can understand recordings from all iwi, given that Māori speak one language with different dialects.
For two years now Ngā Taonga has been corresponding with the CBC project via email and video conference. Some of the issues to be addressed in the visit to the CBC are:
■ How the CBC prioritises the digital preservation of their collections.
■ Engagement with iwi in this process (or their equivalent).
■ Cataloguing approaches and standards and how to enhance metadata.
■ Database issues such as Indigenous script, language used and the use of key terms to increase findability.
■ Digital access pathways and how these are managed and communicated to communities.
SO, YOU’RE GOING OVER THERE TO SEE HOW THEY’RE DOING THINGS AND IF THERE ARE ANY IDEAS YOU CAN BRING BACK WITH YOU OR EVEN VICE VERSA?
Yes, when I first made contact with the CBC I was managing the contract at Ngā Taonga to archive indigenous radio and TV, and I saw an article about the CBC indigenous language archiving project and thought oh, it’s got some similarities with what we are doing at Ngā Taonga; so I made contact with them by email.
They have 18 catalogers all speaking and cataloguing in different languages. We’ve got two catalogers. Obviously in Māori you’ve just got the one language. They often catalogue in English because some of their characters don’t work on standard keyboards. Challenges like that are areas we will be paying attention to. So, being able to spend a few days at CBC we’ll really have time to wānanga that and spend some quality time exchanging tips.
IS THERE ANYTHING SPECIFICALLY THAT YOU’RE INTERESTED IN?
We’re always interested in the access component so, for example, with the funding that they have, they indicate that they’ll be digitising an entire collection. I’ll find out how they’re doing that. I’m interested in the funding parameters that they’ve got over there as well as the access end of the process, so it will be interesting to see how they make their content available.
One of the initial discussions we had over video conference was about restrictions. They’re interested in restrictions where they have sacred material or material that they feel shouldn’t be available in the public domain; they asked us some questions about that aspect and I’m interested in how they approach it. In their collections there are a whole range of languages, so we are wondering: do you put them up online, do you target particular communities?
The communities are relatively small and the cataloguers will be members of the communities. Since we only have two cataloguers we don’t have the same opportunities to have that full engagement with the people that the content belongs to. We are interested in comparing notes and seeing how we are operating in different contexts.
Geographically, Canada is massive, it’s a bit like Australia. We are interested in whether their collections cover the whole country or just a particular area. CBC breaks down into regions.
HH: HOW DOES NEW ZEALAND’S APPROACH COMPARE TO AUSTRALIA’S?
In some ways it feels like we are 20–30 years ahead of Australia in our approach. I’ve been to forums where we talk about kōhanga and emerging education and for them it’s beyond their imaginations in many ways. It’s interesting to have that comparison. It’s not that we’re ahead in all aspects – there are some communities that have a strong sense of uniqueness and separateness because they are far from the cities and maintain a ‘country within a country’ identity. There’s some really high levels of innovation in some Aboriginal communities in the way they are creating content and looking into speakers and Elders that we can learn from, the way they present it online. There’s a lot of broadcasting going on in te ao Māori but they’ve got local community production going on to a high degree.
AND ARE THEY REALLY FRAGMENTED NATIONALLY OR QUITE UNIFIED?
It’s really diverse, some languages have only got a word list so they are recreating their grammar based on their neighbours.’ Without speakers there is no model for pronunciation. By comparison, from the archives we have, we have a really rich starting point to do that.
It will be really interesting to compare that again with Canada and see what their spectrum is across geography and tribes and timelines of interaction.
WHAT ABOUT THE FIRST NATIONS GATHERING?
There are two Maori speakers, one of the keynotes is from Faculty of Law at Victoria University of Wellington so again it opens our eyes, exposes us to new ideas. I intend to share our experiences as a national archive from an audio visual perspective and compare notes with attendees.
I’m presenting a paper on the kaupapa of Ngā Taonga and the ways we share our taonga Māori, the responsibilities that come with that. It’s a very specific focus within the broader ambit of Nga Tāonga. I’ll be talking specifically about the Māori language collections that we hold and the way that we digitise and share them. It will be very exciting!
WE CAN’T WAIT TO HEAR ALL ABOUT YOUR TRIP WHEN YOU GET BACK!