Wampum, sequoyan, and story: Decolonizing the digital archive
or some years, the Cherokee Nation has hosted a digital archive that includes stories in the Cherokee language, available to anyone who registers for the Nation's free online language classes or requests them to be sent in DVD format. On the tsalagi dikanohesda dikanogida /tsalagi dikanohesda dikanogida/ Cherokee Stories and Songs DVD for instance, users see an opening interface that offers selections of digital stories, kids shows, songs, and animated books. All feature the eighty five character Cherokee syllabary.2 The Cherokee Songs and Stories DVD was created to support the curriculum of the K 6 Cherokee immersion school in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, as one facet of larger language perseverance efforts, which take advantage of the affordances of digital archiving to reproduce often told Cherokee stories in the Cherokee language. The DVD presents a particularly rich illustration of the promise of digital language preservation materials for one tribe and for scholars who hope to engage in historiographical inquiry using digital spaces like these. Digital archives, such as the Cherokee Stories and Songs DVD, have captured the imagination of humanities scholars and rhetoric and composition scholars alike for good reason. Digital archives provide opportunities for cross disciplinary collaborations around collections (Bulger et al. Methodologically, they can provide scholars with a means to gather and analyze literacy narratives, as the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN) does (Selfe) DALN provides models for one of the most common first year writing assignments and also serves as a repository of data