Honouring Stories: Performing, Recording and Archiving Yolngu Cultural Heritage

Abstract

A proliferation of databases containing digitized musical knowledge and associated cultural heritage information of indigenous societies has created dilemmas for archivists, researchers and indigenous groups. The web age has also facilitated access to musical information for the masses at the touch of a keypad, changing the nature of access and contributing to the democratization of knowledge worldwide. As knowledge and the power it provides are types of currencies, the Internet has enabled indigenous communities to participate in a distance education of the West in ways not previously imagined. However, the processes by which particular kinds of information come to be stored as narratives of cultural history are often tacit. Many of the conflictual processes behind documentation, reproduction and repatriation are masked behind authoritative as well as competing versions of history recorded in different modalities such as the web, commercially available CDs, royalty payments, cultural centre displays, archival collections and indigenous knowledge repositories. These end products obscure their making and the kinds of performances that shape the documentation of indigenous cultural heritage.