OU Receives $200,000 Grant to Help Preserve and Seek out Native American Oral Histories

The history of Native Americans in Oklahoma is an important part of the history and heritage of the Sooner State, and thanks to a recently-acquired grant, the University of Oklahoma will soon begin making sure that Native American oral histories collected by OU students in the 1960s and 70s will live on and be joined by new recordings, to help educate and inform historians, scholars and the public.

Between 1967 and 1972, OU students and faculty recorded interviews with more than 600 Native American elders across Oklahoma, including some old enough to recall events of the late 1800s. Known as the Doris Duke American Indian Oral History Collection, the priceless recordings have been archived since their recording in the OU Libraries’ Western History Collections.

Recently, the New York-based Doris Duke Charitable Foundation — the same non-profit that originally helped fund the collection of the stories in the late 1960s and early 1970s — provided OU with a $200,000 grant, which will be used to preserve the recordings forever through high-definition audio digitization. The grant will also fund efforts to make the recordings more accessible to the public, including providing digitized copies of the recording to Native American communities so they can become part of tribes’ own archives.

In addition, the grant will fund the opening stages of an effort to expand and update the oral history collection by seeking out today’s Native American elders, leaders and thinkers across the state for interviews so their own voices and viewpoints can live on

interviewed more than 600 Native elders across Oklahoma. The resulting Doris Duke American Indian Oral History Collection has since been archived in the OU Libraries’ Western History Collections. The new project enables the preservation of this unique and valuable oral history collection through digitization and will extend the partnership with the Native American communities who are represented in the recordings to determine respectful terms of access for both the general public and scholarly researchers.

“The importance of this gift cannot be overestimated,” said OU Libraries Interim Dean Karen Rupp-Serrano. “These collections have been at risk in all the participating institutions because of the original format in which they were recorded. The DDCF grant preserves these irreplaceable collections, leverages their value by creating a shared website where users can search all seven collections simultaneously, and ensures that terms of access are respectful of the Native communities represented. We are honored to be involved in this important effort.”

Originally the University of Oklahoma was one of seven colleges and universities across the U.S. that participated in the project to collect Native American oral histories. Many of those same universities will also participate in the renewed effort to collect Native American stories, which is known as the Doris Duke Native American Oral History Revitalization project.
“The Native oral history collection housed at OU represents a rich repository of the diverse lived experiences and cultural traditions of Native peoples in the region told in their own voices,” said Lola Adedokun, program director for child well-being at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. “I credit the leadership at the University and the Western History Collections in the OU Libraries, and their tribal partners who have taken great care of the collection since the 1960s, and we are honored to be able to partner with them as they refresh and digitize the collection for active use in the future. We are thrilled to fund this effort to preserve and amplify the reach of these stories.”

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To learn more about the Western History Collections in the University of Oklahoma Libraries, click here.