Mukurtu (MOOK-oo-too) is a free and open-source content management system (CMS), digital archive and community-driven access platform built in collaboration with Indigenous communities. It is a grassroots project that empowers communities to curate, manage, display, and share their digital materials in culturally relevant and ethically minded ways, by providing:
1) Local cultural protocols that designate access parameters at granular levels for digital heritage items, dictionary words, and collections, determining who has access to what, when and how.
2) Cultural Narrative and Traditional Knowledge fields customizable for curating content alongside standard Dublin Core metadata fields.
3) Multiple layers of community narration or “Community Records” for all material, which allow for having multiple sets of metadata for any item or group of items.
4) Flexible and localized licensing and labeling options, including Traditional Knowledge (TK) Labels, to better serve Indigenous needs around IP rights and copyright.
5) A Dictionary and Curriculum tools designed in collaboration with Native communities.
6) Overall configuration and customization of each site according to the cultural, social, and linguistic needs of any size community, cultural center, library, archive or museum.
Our relationship with Mukurtu CMS began in 2015 through participation in the Tribal Stewardship Cohort Program through the Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation at Washington State University. Hoonah is a community of 800 people, and our organization Huna Heritage Foundation is a small non-profit. Our people have a rich cultural history that spans millennia and Huna Heritage Foundation has collected materials related to our local culture and history since our inception. However, until we learned about Mukurtu CMS, we were at a loss concerning how to ensure our collective community records were accessible and usable by community members located in Hoonah and elsewhere. Mukurtu CMS proved to be user friendly, affordable, allowed us to establish privacy settings that suit our needs, and encouraged the use of our local cultural protocols to guide the entire process.
The Huna Heritage Digital Archives is a website serving as a living record that hosts hundreds of photographs, and many video and audio recordings of cultural and historical significance to Hoonah. We invite you to visit our Mukurtu site at http://archives.hunaheritage.org/
Please feel free to reach out to us. For more information or assistance, contact Rebekah Contreras at rcontreras@hunaheritage.com or 907-789-8584.