National Endowment for the Arts Acting Chairman Mary Anne Carter has approved more than $27 million in grants as part of the Arts Endowment’s first major funding announcement for fiscal year 2019.  Included in this announcement is an Art Works grant of $30,000 to the Association for Cultural Equity to support the collaborative and ethical repatriation of archived Native American field recordings. Art Works is the Arts Endowment’s principal grantmaking program. The agency received 1,605 Art Works applications for this round of grantmaking, and will award 972 grants in this category.

“The arts enhance our communities and our lives, and we look forward to seeing these projects take place throughout the country, giving Americans opportunities to learn, to create, to heal, and to celebrate,” said Mary Anne Carter, acting chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

ACE is pleased to have the opportunity to carry out our project, "Song by Song, Creation by Creation, Yours are the Decisions: Collaborative Repatriation and Ethical Practices for Archiving Native American Intangible Material".  With 415 songs from sixty Native nations within Canada and the United States represented on the Global Jukebox, the Association for Cultural Equity’s online educational resource, the project seeks to approach each nation to request their collaboration in properly identifying and representing their material in our metadata; to request indigenous criteria for ethical documentation and archival practice; and, to offer copies and a list of repositories or individuals with recordings of their songs.   

For more information on this National Endowment for the Arts grant announcement, visit arts.gov/news.