Honors College professor Dr. Amanda Minks is working with a team of specialists to build an Indigenous Media Portal at OU. The team was recently awarded a Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Foundations grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Indigenous Media Portal will be an interactive website that provides access to Indigenous media in collaboration with Tribal heritage communities. The portal will incorporate historic photographs, radio, and other audio media starting with the OU Western History Collections, which contain invaluable oral histories and traditional singing from nearly forty Tribes across the state. The Indigenous Media Portal will also include new videos that contextualize the archival collections through the voices of Indigenous knowledge holders. Tribal partners and project leaders will choose materials appropriate for sharing in a publicly accessible platform and present them in ways that support community interests and broader public understanding.
In this stage of development, representatives from nine Tribal Nations and eight OU departments will bring a wealth of expertise and novel perspectives to the project. The current project leadership is composed of PI Amanda Minks (Associate Professor in the Honors College and Affiliate Faculty, Native American Studies) and co-PIs Amanda Cobb-Greetham ( Chickasaw), Professor of Native American Studies; Joshua Nelson (Cherokee), Associate Professor of English and Affiliate Faculty, Native American Studies; and Lina Ortega (Sac and Fox), Associate Curator of the Western History Collections and Native American Studies Librarian for OU Libraries.
Honors College alum Kamryn Yanchick (Seminole, Mvskoke), Class of 2021, also contributed to this project as a student researcher through a Digital Scholarship Fellowship which she carried out with Dr. Minks in 2020-2021.
