This is a report of my pilot anthropological study on the ethnographic data collected by Professor Kazuyuki Tanimoto, a former director of the Hokkaido Museum of Northern Peoples. He made audio recording of several traditional songs performed by Yup’ik/Cupi’k, which is the self-designation of peoples who had long lived in southwestern Alaska, in 1979. These songs are sung when the performance of yuraq, a Yup’ik/Cupi’k way of dancing. The purpose of this project is to create a pathway of access to this data, not only for scholars, but also for a Yup’ik/Cupi’k, who have cultural, historical, and emotional ties to the ethnographic materials. In this report, I summarize the features of his audio recordings, explain their content and reconstruct the socio-political context which he conducted his study in rural Alaska. I suggest that one of the significances of this ethnographic data is providing the possibility for us to look into Yup’ik/Cupi’k experiences during the era of rapid socio-economical changes triggered by the land claim settlement in 1971. The report also describes what Yup’ik/Cupi0’k think about the materials. All of the people whom I asked to listen to the recordings were very pleased. Unfortunately there was nobody who remembered Professor Tanimoto’s visit since most of his informants had passed away, and his collaborators could not be indentified. However, his recordings did have an impact on them in one way or another. Some made a decision to learn the songs again and to revive them. Others wanted to find out if“our song” had been included in his recordings. Moreover this preliminary research shows that Yup’ik/Cupi’k way of “owning” culture should be studied in detail in order to create the appropriate pathway to their “Cultural Heritage”.
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