nepali refugee musicians in burlington and working to help sustain their cultural traditions so that's just a little bit about my own background but also about yourself well i first came to vermont in the late eighty's as a bennington college student where i studied literature and then eventually went to graduate school to study folklore you can do that at indiana university and while i was there i kept thinking what am i going to do with a degree in folklore so i also got a library science degree so i'm an that's what brought me to vermont was getting a message from the folklife center founder jane back saying hey are you interested in a job so they brought you know i've been here ever since that's great we're remonde folklife center is very interesting possible but but i think history of  years we've shifted to also be paying a lot of attention to contemporary life and so we do both i'd say at this point and we have four programs that we can talk about do you want to talk to the archive and yeah i mean one of the key things we do is interview people out in the state and the nature of those interviews is the best way to think about it is like we're cultural anthropologists at the bottom although we're not anthropologist which my wife who is an anthropologist likes to remind me but the archive is where all the research ends up and it's a collection of about five thousand audio recordings several hundred videotapes and we estimate about twenty five thousand images the recordings date back to the forty's as far as original recordings and the content they contain we estimate goes back to the eight hundred seventy s depending on the time they were made and the age of the person interviewed the collection we do we at our own stuff to do it as we create new recordings and we also take in donations so we have all sorts of donated collections including you know for example one is material from folk singer margaret macarthur who was recording folk songs in vermont in the sixty's so she gave us all of her tapes and we've digitized all that and made it all n a program of people and people can visit yes we are open tuesday through saturday from ten to five and we have a gallery our first floor we have two gallery spaces we have a vision and voice gallery which andy and talk more about and we also have an upstairs where our offices are and we have a workshop space there we teach workshops for people in the community and our basement is the archive and we have a recording studio down there  on the same floor as the galleries we also have a small shop where we sell vermont made i don't you know it could be somali bantu embroidery or blacksmith we  to tell us a little bit about this discovery community education project so discovering community is one of our four major programs again that's archive our vision and voice gallery and our traditional arts  program and our fourth is discovering community and that program gets young people out into the community using media to tell stories about themselves in their own experiences as well as people in their community and so we offer workshops  in public schools and private schools and we do professional learning opportunities for educators we have a summer institute in the summer which kind of puts teachers through the the the whole process of learning about and media documentation and the ethics behind that and then they go out into the field and do some research and documentation and then they create a final media piece and that's kind of the same process that the young people in the schools that we work with would go through so that's kind of a small snippet of what we do with their education program you know its focus is basically teaching teachers to do what we do interesting and you encourage class with things like  that you go out the class yup yup we do we have i think we've worked this year so far we've worked with over seven hundred students in vermont we usually do between twenty five and thirty different projects in different yeah so that program started in one thousand ninety one and it's funded by the national down for the arts and that program pairs a master in some type of cultural traditional cultural expression with someone or a group of people who are interested in learning that so that could range from somali bantu instrument making or blacksmithing or hand weaving or nepali folk dancing so every year we support between fifteen and twenty apprenticeship projects and again those are state wide over the years when it when that program started we were focusing mostly on supporting abenaki artists and basket weavers and as the years have gone by and more refugees are being resettled in vermont we've started supporting a lot of different refugee artists and musicians and dancers and helping to sustain their their cultural traditions which was in the case the changing  how they want to or folk life well we can't forget the hippies you know and the culture of vermont was radically changed by back to the landers and hippies who came up here in the seven sixty's and seventy's so that's a big piece of the culture change we've experience and then of course there are people like us who weren't born here but come here for work or for some other reason and love living in vermont and with us we bring our background and that has an impact on how things go i don't know much about the here so it's just you know every every couple of years there's there's a new new group and you know we've been working with with those groups from from the beginning really as the eighty's and ninety's i was really close partnerships with community organizations original director of education greg shero put together a book called many cultures one people that was an immigration history of vermont pulled together through primary sources and also interviews and it included the enemies who are some of the earliest refugees resettled here allow people and folks from all over the world i mean there's a chapter on finns and the finnish community in vermont and the dutch community there are a lot of dutch farmers who settled in that same county so it's vermont isn't it way more complicated than most people  that well lot of the ways in which we initially are interacting with new americans are through our apprenticeship our traditional arts apprenticeship program and so but we do field work in order to meet people and learn you know who in the community is it considers himself an artist or are there people who are doing traditional things maybe they don't consider art but you know we need support in finding the resources in order to do that and so through our research ethnography we identify people and we have conversations and we interview people to figure out what it is that we can do to help sustain their work and also we archive those interview projects was this frankel american proud to tell us about that please well he had to go back to the topic of immigrants you know franco americans were probably the largest single immigrant group to vermont over various points in time in the twentieth century and one of the things that a lot of franco americans i know will say particularly older people is that there was a period in time where it was not terribly cool to be french canadian descent you know and people there were stigmatized for it and all sorts of stuff and what i've noticed since i've been here is that via and large that stigma is gone you know and then the number of french last names in across the state as you know proliferated and what people have lost is the language that for most of the many still have it and many still do maintain connections to relatives in canada but the to prove a sieve things that stick around are food in certain types of celebrations and also music so a lot of our interaction around french canadian culture franco american culture in vermont has been around using in the ninety's we work with a woman named martha pellerin who some people may remember who was a cultural advocate and singer song collector herself and she when she passed away gave her whole collection of recordings and song books to the folklife center and one of our projects several years ago was scanning those transcribing them and then trying to make them available online to people to access the content and one of the things we realized is that well if you have songs that area to figure out what the tunes are classify them a little better and then also one of our key things was figure out a way to make this material accessible to people of franco american descent who don't speak french you know so to provide phonetic versions of the song so that they can sing the words and then provide synopsys or translation so they could understand what the songs are about and then also have some of the context of the song within the family that created the songbook or within french again culture in general so the two projects are working on simultaneously and lisa ornstein is involved in both of them is to do more and more as a more deeper more deeper deeper cataloguing of the collections we have which include  expression the full life how do you work with that well the primary way we do that is through our exhibit program and the long short of our exhibit program is the organization as a independent organization got its start with an exhibit jane beck put pulled together an exhibit called always in season folk art in vermont that toward the state and since that time we've had different flavors of an exhibit program going on lately we've been doing a lot of exhibits that focus on photography and often mix that photography with audio either from our archive or stuff that we've created or stuff people have loaned us so the current exhibit we have is photos taken by a couple named neal and suzanne rappoport and neil and suzanne both taught at bennington college they were there when i was there neal used to really intimidate me and didn't know suzanne when i was a student but when i came up here met her and really really came to love suzanne sheep they both passed away they both died of cancer over a period of several years but b avocations was doing this massive documentary project of paula they photographed everybody in town from the early seventy's until the mid eighty's and that's another resource we actually have online we're working on revamping the database that neil created so you could see all these pictures but  so they were aware of this house and they were interested in seeing the inside and one day that one of the brothers unlocked the door and let him in and what they saw was essentially a time capsule of this woman's home so neil took really very beautiful powerful photographs of it and then to add to it suzanne sat in the house and hand colored each photo from life wow so in the course of a year yeah a year in the cold until it got too cold and then she had to bring them with bring you know bring the images home with her and work on so that that exhibit is currently on this plane it's a powerful collection of photos and really an interesting way to think about documentary right where you have these photographs of this place telling a story of this woman's life and then you have someone else bringing their own personal and subjective touch to how they interpret that space which honestly is something that we would say is all documentary whether it's a photo film or whatever there's always a subjective element to it and in the case of neal's nailed shoes and photos the subjective element is you can't escape it because it's it's i  papers and letters associated with certain collections but usually when they're tied to a larger body of media so greg shero did a series many any interviews with a woman named katherine to close who lived in and braintree vermont and katherine gave us recording she made with her father in the sixty's and then when katherine passed away a whole collection of family photographs and diaries came to us so that collection is a whole cohesive body and the reason we have that extra stuff is because we have all the other stuff too we have a very interesting website there's a lot of interactive kind of what forces have been through a post about that we're going to put that on our lawn here in the post about the website available well we just read at our website about two years ago now and we it's through squarespace the platform and we were able to do it largely within our staff but we have a you know an outside consultant helps a little bit and on our website you can find information about the work we do in our different programs some archival collections are on the e we have a blog called field notes where we write about some of the recent work that we're doing and share photos or audio from from that you can sign up to read as reese and about you can sign up to get a notice when it gets updated ok so when we do we put up a new field note every couple of weeks or so we also have a newsletter that you can sign up for to be our web site and that goes out once a month just to update people about what we're doing but also about our website can we say well there's links through the archives section to the online archive and some other resources that way and we've also are discovering community education program we have kind of a separate site for that but you can access it through our the beginning of march and one you know our audience what's going to be happening throughout the rest of the year ok well right now we have the exhibit called up home which and he spoke about with the hand colored photographs and that will be out through i believe the end of this month's end of march and then we'll have another exhibit starting in april of richard brown's photographs and the next exhibit i believe is about the farming renaissance of happening in the rutland area with a lot of older farmers who are mental oring younger farmers who are just interested in and getting involved in farming but there's a lot of you know  workshops through our cultural sustainability institute and series so those workshops range from storytelling for social change which we're offering on march seventeenth instow to the art of the interview which andy we also have a fund raising concert in middlebury on april twenty first at seven pm and that is an on elizabeth who are given up and coming folk music duo and us from vermont do you want to talk a little bit yeah yeah i mean the and elizabeth really started focusing on appalachian music and they got interested in looking at new england and from obviously so they came to us to access the archives and see what material was there and they also work with the helen hartness flanders ballad collection which is a huge collection of traditional songs at middlebury what they do is really their own thing but it's very much tied to the tradition so it's a curious it's an updating and  reinvention of the same time it's really fascinating in that that's exactly the kind of thing like we like to support these things don't exist in amber you know they're constantly changing and evolving and if there's one one thing we want to take away for to that that we're interested in the past but we're interested in the past and things vermont check out their website and all the very exciting things in going on in this very interesting field this has been dennis mcmahon for positively