University of Arizona

The American Indian Film Gallery (AIFG): contains over 450 non-fiction films that document Native lifeways from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego, with a large concentration on peoples of the Southwest. These films range in date from 1925-2010. Most date to the so-called Golden Age of educational filmmaking, from 1945 to the rise of consumer-grade video equipment in the 1970s. With the change in technology from film to video, films in the collection shift from being about Native people to by Native peoples. Much of the work made in the last third of the 20th century comes from Indian communities themselves--A pilot digital repatriation project is also under way to inclusively repurpose 60 mid-century films about Native peoples of the Southwest. In a process called “tribesourcing,” Native narrators are invited to re-narrate the films in indigenous or/and European languages in order to provide new audio tracks and descriptive metadata for the films. See website for details and access.