Zuni Cultural Heritage Materials in the American Folklife Center: The Potential of Return

This article focuses on an ongoing collaboration between the American Folklife Center (AFC) at the Library of Congress and Zuni Pueblo, in New Mexico, that seeks to make recorded cultural heritage materials accessible to Pueblo residents. Authors Guha Shankar, AFC folklife specialist, and Cordelia Hooee, director of the Zuni Public Library, who have been centrally involved in this process, focus attention here on the critical issues of forging and sustaining partnerships in order to facilitate the return or repatriation of cultural and linguistic documentation to communities of origin. Their reflections direct attention to the cultural and institutional contexts and technologies that both set the limits and exert pressures on the planning, production, and execution of such initiatives.