Reclaiming Ownership of the Indigenous Voice

Abstract

This chapter discusses the origins, methodology, and preliminary results of the Hopi Music Repatriation Project (HMRP), a community-partnered initiative aimed at securing the return of Hopi ceremonial song recordings and their associated intellectual property rights back to the Hopi Tribe. While scholars have extensively documented the legal and ethical imperatives for the repatriation of Indigenous documentary materials from archives, museums, and other institutions, relatively little has been written about how to conceptualize and carry out a reincorporation of archived ancestral voices back into Indigenous communities. This chapter grapples with a methodology for recirculating archived Indigenous voices in ways that resist dependence on settler-imposed legal frameworks, relying instead on the social and political relationships that already govern ownership of and access to Indigenous knowledge, creativity, and ritual expression. Ultimately, community-based theorizing of repatriation methodologies is necessary to carry out a decolonizing repatriation of archived Indigenous voices.