Pasadena Ethnomusicologist Receives GRAMMY Museum Grant to Preserve Native American Musical Heritage

The GRAMMY Museum Grant Program has awarded $200,000 to 15 recipients across the United States to support music research and sound preservation, with Pasadena-based ethnomusicologist T. Christopher Aplin among those selected for his work preserving Indigenous musical recordings.

Aplin will receive $5,000 to help digitize surviving American Indian Soundchiefs recordings featuring Kiowa-language songs, a project that supports cultural revitalization efforts.

The grant will assist Aplin, Mary Helen Deer (granddaughter of label founder Linn D. Pauahty), the Linn D. Pauahty Foundation, and the Kiowa tribe in preserving instantaneous discs, reel-to-reels, and cassettes that contain irreplaceable cultural heritage.

“These recordings allow us to reimagine Native peoples not only as bonneted Plains warriors, but more importantly as artists and musicians,” Aplin said in an interview in 2022.^[a] “That opens a real space for rethinking what we know about Native peoples.”

American Indian Soundchiefs, founded in the 1940s by Kiowa Methodist minister Rev. Linn D. Pauahty, is recognized as the earliest and longest-running record label launched with Indigenous aesthetics in mind. The label pioneered an “in-depth” approach to recording, focusing on specific tribal groups and dance forms rather than presenting varied collections.

Aplin, who specializes in the analysis of Native American musical song forms, emphasizes the urgency of digitizing these aging analog recordings.

“Those old analog records, reels, and cassettes are aging and will disintegrate,” Aplin said in 2022. “While universities and cultural institutions easily maintain budgets to digitize their historic materials, Native communities generally do not.”

This marks Aplin’s second GRAMMY Museum grant. In 2022, he received $3,000 for a related digitization project focused on American Indian Soundchiefs recordings.

As an ethnomusicologist, Aplin studies “music in culture,” working to preserve recordings that document endangered indigenous languages and tribe-based oral histories. He has contributed to scholarly works including “Music of the First Nations: Tradition and Innovation in Native North America,” which explores various aspects of Native North American musical expression.

“The GRAMMY Museum and Recording Academy have continued their partnership to provide fundamental funding for music research and preservation projects,” said Michael Sticka, President/CEO of the GRAMMY Museum. “We are incredibly inspired by this year’s recipients and what they set (out) to accomplish.”

The GRAMMY Museum Grant Program, now in its 37th year, is funded by the Recording Academy and supports efforts to advance the archiving and preservation of recorded sound heritage of the Americas, as well as research related to music’s impact on the human condition.