Reuters: Sidelined from academia, India’s Dalits archive caste history. “Vijay Surwade may have worked as a bank manager by day – but for five decades he spent his evenings building one of the world’s biggest archives dedicated to India’s pioneering Dalit rights campaigner BR Ambedkar.”
Baltic Times: Lithuanian architects pool European counterparts to preserve cultural heritage in Ukraine. “Lithuanian architects are bringing together European and Ukrainian counterparts to preserve cultural heritage in Ukraine. During the three-year cultural project, European and Ukrainian architects will work on the preservation and restoration of Ukraine’s cultural heritage through research, workshops, public discussions, events, refresher courses and architectural studies.”
Sydney Morning Herald: Race against time to preserve rare Pacific recordings. “This year, PARADISEC, a vast online archive, celebrates two decades of caring for valuable cultural records of some of the world’s most endangered languages and musical practices, mainly across the Asia-Pacific region. Over 20 years, the PARADISEC collection has grown to house audio and video from 1,350 languages, with a particular focus on Oceania from countries including Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands and Australia.”
Independent (UK): Inside Sudan’s decade-long effort to preserve culture threatened by devastating conflict. “Fighting erupted in Sudan on 15 April, and while a ceasefire is currently in place at least 730 civilians have been killed and 1.3 million people have fled their homes. Omdurman Ahlia University’s library is believed to be just one of the buildings that have recently been set on fire by looters, as Sudan’s cultural institutions are caught in the crossfire.”
New York Times: Inside Sudan’s War, ‘There’s Another War for Art’. “Dozens of Sudanese artists and curators have fled their studios and galleries in the capital, jeopardizing thousands of artworks and imperiling an art scene central to the 2019 revolution.”
Interfax-Ukraine: Almost 1,500 objects of cultural infrastructure of Ukraine suffer due to Russian aggression – Culture Ministry. “In connection with the Russian armed aggression against Ukraine, 1,464 objects of cultural infrastructure have already suffered, almost a third of them have been destroyed, the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy reports.”
Hackaday: Wearable Skobots Full Of Steam And Vanishing Indigenous Languages. “[Danielle Boyer] is Ojibwe: Sault Ste Marie Tribe and passionate about preserving vanishing indigenous languages. She’s invented a shoulder-worn talking companion, called a SkoBot, to teach STEAM to children through building robots programmed with indigenous language lessons and founded the STEAM Connection to give them away.”
News@Northeastern: The Harriet Tubman House May Be Gone, But Its Legacy Is Preserved Forever Thanks To Northeastern’s Library. “The house was a fixture of Boston’s Black community, but its century-spanning history–the kind that doesn’t get told in museums or textbooks–was in danger of getting lost with the demolition too. Fortunately, the building’s history and the community’s memories were saved through the hard work of residents who banded together under the I Am Harriet coalition, USES itself and the resources and ingenuity of the Boston Research Center.”
Engadget: The Morning After: Tuvalu, threatened by climate change, turns to the metaverse. “Tuvalu’s foreign minister, Simon Kofe, told the COP27 climate summit yesterday that Tuvalu would look to the metaverse to preserve its culture and history.”
University of Melbourne: How Data Expertise Is Fostering Endangered Languages. “The PARADISEC digital archive model revitalising endangered languages around the Pacific has now been taken up in North America by the Cherokee Nation.”
National Geographic: Rising seas threaten the Gullah Geechee culture. Here’s how they’re fighting back.. “Latitude, topography, and proximity to the Atlantic Ocean make the stretch of coastline from Jacksonville, North Carolina, to Jacksonville, Florida—called the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor— particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, such as sea level rise, storm frequency and intensity, higher temperatures, and a warmer, more acidic ocean.”
Washington Post: Residential schools banned native languages. The Cree want theirs back.. “Across Canada, the often brutal residential school system, designed to assimilate Indigenous people into White, European culture, succeeded in breaking the tradition of passing on languages from generation to generation — and put the survival of some in jeopardy. But now, 25 years after the last residential school was shuttered, some Indigenous communities — including the one here that Pope Francis visited Monday — are reviving and relearning their native languages.” Please be advised that the first few paragraphs in this story have references to sexual abuse.
University of Maryland: Who Owns the Sounds and Images of Native People’s Pasts?. “The last known fluent speaker of the tribe’s native Western dialect died in 2010, and the remaining tribal citizens–who traditionally don’t count their members but are estimated to number about 350 speak an amalgam of Ahtna’s Western and Central dialects. Audio recordings of Western Ahtna exist, but many are kept in mainstream archives that don’t belong to the Chickaloon tribe. Now, two University of Maryland faculty members are part of a new effort to bring those recordings, and other pieces of history, back to the Native people who lived the stories within them.”
Europa Nostra: Heritage Solidarity Fellowship for Ukraine – Call for Applications. “On International Museum Day, Europa Nostra and Global Heritage Fund, in partnership with ALIPH and with the vital collaboration of the Heritage Emergency Response Initiative (HERI), are launching the Heritage Solidarity Fellowship for Ukraine. The aim of this scheme is to provide much-needed support to heritage professionals in Ukraine who are currently facing hardships.”
Lieber Institute West Point: Ukraine Symposium – The Ukraine Conflict And The Future Of Digital Cultural Property. “Various international instruments explicitly provide for the protection of cultural property in armed conflict. As conceived, the law was formulated to protect physical works from damage or destruction in war. Events in Ukraine, however, have demonstrated that armed conflict can endanger digital material as well. Some digital creations might even qualify as a digital form of cultural property—that is, digital cultural property. Given the growing prevalence of digital material and the threat posed to all forms of cultural works in war, how should States approach their legal obligation to protect digital cultural property in the event of armed conflict?”
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