A Native American Tribe Revives Its Culture With The Help Of Old Wax-Cylinder Recordings

“In 1890, just months before the murder of some hundred and fifty Lakota Indians at Wounded Knee, a mustachioed anthropologist named Jesse Walter Fewkes dragged a state-of-the-art Edison phonograph to Passamaquoddy country [in northeastern Maine]. This was during the height of ‘salvage anthropology,’ an attempt to document the many tribes that were being massacred into extinction.” Those recordings have now been digitized and returned to the Passamaquoddy, and they’re being slowly deciphered and used to teach younger tribe members their people’s traditions. — The New Yorker

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