Mukurtu
The All Our Kin Collective Digital Archive
A digital repository for projects and materials relating to, or derived from, the All Our Kin Collective programs.
The Archive is a digital repository for projects and materials relating to, or derived from, the All Our Kin Collective programs. Like the Institute, the fellowship, the certificate program, and the Teaching Indigenous Languages course, the All Our Kin Mukurtu Archive is intended to facilitate the preservation and celebration of Indigenous language, cultures, knowledge systems, and peoples.
The Archive also accepts culturally significant materials from the tribal communities represented on Fort Lewis College’s campus and the surrounding area. As Mukurtu was developed in collaboration with Indigenous peoples to be a private, secure, and culturally sensitive archival software, its usage is determined by participating parties.
AOKC Fellows in the Archive: Bala Sinem
All Our Kin Collective student fellow Alysha Arrates (Ute Mountain Ute) focused her 2024 fellowship project on developing a Mukurtu collection for Bala Sinem, an Indigenous language singing group run by Fort Lewis College students from the 1971-2013. Alysha worked closely with FLC’s Center of Southwest Studies Collections Manager & NAGPRA Specialist, Amy Cao, and the AOKC Mukurtu Administrator, Rosalinda Linares-Gray, to research, develop, and upload the collection.
Alysha presented about her work at the Association of Tribal Libraries, Museums, and Archives (ATALM) conference in November of 2024.
AOKC Dictionary Archive:
All Our Kin Collective Summer Language Institute students devote one hour of their class time every day to building the AOKC Indigenous language dictionary. This dictionary is meant to give students the opportunity to reindigenize archival records of Indigenous languages and return agency over language learning to Indigenous students, speakers, and community members. Instead of following a prescribed structure, students are encouraged to upload words, phrases, songs, or other spoken materials that resonate with their experience in the Institute. Students also include a recording of themselves speaking their Indigenous language in their entries. The dictionary is available to them to look back on the progress they make with their languages, and is also available to future students or non-AOKC affiliated community members who want to explore what an Indigenous dictionary can be.
AOKC Fellows in the Archive: Intertribal News
The first entries into the All Our Kin Collective Mukurtu archive were issues of Intertribal News, a newspaper created and run by Indigenous students at Fort Lewis College from 1987-2012. Currently held by the Colorado Historic Newspaper Collection, past student fellows Laurel Grimes (Chickasaw) and Lauryn Baldwin (Ińupiaq) worked to locate, edit, and consolidate photographs of individual pages into whole issue files. These files were uploaded to the Mukurtu archive by Laurel and Lauryn as one of their 2022-2023 fellowship projects.
These newspapers show the FLC experience of Indigenous students from their own perspective. Major social events, like the Tuition Waiver Walk-out, and the happenings of daily life, like a Wanbli-Ota taco sale, alike are recorded; highlighting the fact that Indigenous students have always been and continue to be key actors in creating FLC’s student and campus culture.