Jimmy Awashu, Zuni Storyteller
Jimmy Awashu, Zuni Storyteller
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Even in the most traditional Pueblos, such as Zuni, storytelling
traditions are being eroded under the impact of mass media, public
education and the rise of English as the dominant language. To strenthen
this tradition, the Pueblo engaged the Heritage Center to transform
original field recordings of traditional storytellers from the Pueblo of
Zuni into Zuni-language radio programs for broadcast over KSHI, the local
Zuni radio station. With a grant from the National Endowment for the
Arts, recordings were made, edited and framed with appropriate title and
credit sequences to produce more than twenty half-hour radio programs. As
a result of this project, the Heritage Center located a treasure of more
than 400 hours of Zuni storytelliing recorded from more than a dozen
individuals, now all deceased, in the 1960s. The tapes had been kept in a
closet in one of the public buildings and were deteriorating rapidly.
With a contract from the Archive of Folk Culture at the Library of
Congress, the Heritage Center took on the task of remastering all of these
tapes and sending the originals to the Library of Congress for
professional conservation. With a second grant from the National
Endowment for the Arts, stories from this collection were edited into 20
additional Zuni-language radio programs.
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Jimmy Awashu, Zuni Storyteller
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