In 2016, the Tomaquag Museum was one of ten institutions across the United States to receive the Institute of Museum and Library Service’s National Medal. As part of the being awarded the medal, these ten institutions were asked to participate in the Story Corps oral history project, which began in 2003 in Grand Central Terminal in New York City. The mission of the Story Corps Project is to “preserve and share humanity’s stories in order to build connections between people and create a more just and compassionate world.” In the Tomaquag Museum Archives, the recordings of the Story Corps Project are part of a collection of oral history recordings going back more than 50 years. In this guest blog post, our summer intern, Ryan Savage from the University of Rhode Island shares his experience working with these oral history recordings.
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This story begins a few years ago when Narragansett Tribal Elder Dawn Dove donated her own personal signed copy of a vinyl record by a recording artist Leonda entitled, Woman in the Sun (1968). A wonderful donation for the collection-not only because the archive does not have very many vinyl records but it is also signed by the artist, which as something an archivist who is trying to build a archive here at the Tomaquag made this record unique and immediately worth preserving. In this installment, we’ll see how a worn vinyl record in the archives led us to discover the music of Leonda Hardison and her performance at the dedication of the “New Tomaquag Indian Memorial Museum” in 1972.
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Welcome to the next installment in the Belongings Blog’s new series, From the Archives where we’ll share some interesting things found in the Tomaquag Museum’s archival collections. In this installment, our Archivist Anthony Belz will highlight a cassette tape recording of a television interview with Princess Red Wing (Mary E. Gongdon) from WHDA in Boston on December 19, 1971.
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