How often are you given the opportunity to work closely with the archives? Amherst College has recently incorporated the Collection of Native American Literature which includes writing from Native authors in the 18th century to literature published today. A little storytime behind the acquisition of this Collection dates back to 2013 (which is still pretty recent) when the alumnus Younghee Kim-Wait (AC 1982) supported the purchase of a collection of 1,400 Native-authored books assembled by private collector Pablo Eisenberg. Since then, in 2022, an additional 1,700 published works have been added to the collection. The collection ranges from fiction, poetry, history, philosophy, Indigenous-language texts, anthropological works, photography, activist manifestos, comics, books for children, printed ephemera, and a wide range of texts which highlight the literary traditions of Indigenous communities across the continent.
This semester I am taking a course called Rethinking Pocahontas with Professor Vigil (Professor of American Studies) and working closely with the Archives and Special Collections as well as Mead Art Museum.
Our mid-semester project/paper was to do some digging in the KWE(Kim-Wait/Eisenberg) Collection and write about a book that interests us in relation to the topics we have learned in class. After reading Phillip J. Deloria’s Indians in Unexpected Places I uncovered more about Native music. In film and in attempts to transpose Native music using tools of Western Music theory transforms the ways in which the music is presented to the audience, for example, the Congress of Music (group of trained musicians). Along the way, stereotypes in sound help represent Native people in soundtracks in Western films and movies like Pocahontas. In search to learn more about Native Music, I focused my project on Indian Story and Song from North America by Alice Fletcher. The book includes short stories and small pieces showing Omaha culture/storytelling tales.
After spending time reading and analyzing the Indian Story and Song from North America I narrowed down whether Fletcher’s methodology was effective or not. The beauty and also anxiousness of visiting the Archives and Special Collections is that you are left with more questions. After finishing this project more connections to film arose. Now for those who did not know about the Archives or the collections they have, I hope this sheds a spotlight on the various resources Amherst College has for people to access. A couple of these items can be accessed online through Amherst’s Digital Collections. This class prompts students to look “into the past” and learn through experiences in our modern world. Connecting this to my previous Blog post about attending concerts, Indian Country was presented two months ago which is an example to reflect on the music that does not usually have the largest platforms in a society that has developed from Western foundations.