Museum Grant
Museum Grant
Cultural Center receives grant to develop digital storytelling series
SALAMANCA - The Onöhsagwë:de’ Cultural Center has been awarded a $64,000 grant through the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH). The award will fund the research and development of a multi-platform digital storytelling series about Seneca history, language, and culture tentatively titled Our Ancestors, Ourselves: Stories from the Western Door. The series is envisioned as a podcast and public radio program with supporting multimedia content that tells the stories of the Seneca people - those of our distant and near ancestors, our elders, and the ongoing stories of the emerging leaders and younger generations of Seneca today.
Over the course of thirteen one-hour episodes, which will be formatted for public radio broadcast, the series will explore key turning points in Seneca and Haudenosaunee history and examine the interrelationship between our language, Onöndowa’ga:’ Gawë:nö’, and our worldview. inviting listeners to reassess their understanding of history and our places in the world and to consider another way of looking at our shared present, past, and future.
The series will travel across Seneca and Haudenosaunee country today, touring cultural and landmark sites and conversing with people living in modern and traditional ways, exploring connections to Seneca ancestry. Complementing these stories are academic and oral tradition narratives by historians, artists, and storykeepers.
The stories in the podcast and radio series will be identified and developed in consultation with an advisory panel of humanities scholars: Lori Quigley, Jolene Rickard, Michael Oberg, Mike Frisch, and Percy Abrams. Ancillary productions for a planned website and social media include video interviews with scholars and Seneca elders, curators, and artists, guided video tours of historic sites visited in the podcast series as they appear today. An accompanying community oral history project will seek to capture the ongoing oral traditions for an oral history collection housed by the Onöhsagwë:de’ Cultural Center.
Seneca filmmaker and multimedia artist, Caleb G. Abrams and his producing partner, filmmaker and public media producer, Scott Sackett have been hired to lead the project as co-producers. Seneca-Iroquois National Museum director, Hayden Haynes will serve as the series’ executive producer.
Many thanks to Donielle Heron-Lovell, Reesa Renee Abrams, and the rest of the Seneca Nation of Indians Grants team for all their work on this grant.