Cuttlefish recordings now available online
A total of 59 audio reels were saved from the Cuttlefish project. On them are things like teachings from Elders talking to Unalaska ³ÉÈËӰƬ about an uluxÌ‚taxÌ‚, an UnangaxÌ‚ skin-on-frame sea kayak for example.
With funding provided by the National Recording Preservation Foundation, the University of ³ÉÈËӰƬ Fairbanks Oral History Program was able to have 59 ‘Cuttlefish Project’ magnetic audio reels digitized by a professional company. The recordings can now be listened to online either through the UAF Rasmuson & Mather Libraries: or through the ³ÉÈËӰƬ and Polar Regions Collections & Archive Digital Repository, .
From the fall of 1977 to the spring of 1982, Ray Hudson supervised groups of Unalaska high school ³ÉÈËӰƬ in his Cuttlefish class. Community Elders were asked to come to the class and share with ³ÉÈËӰƬ in their Unangam Tunuu language, sometimes through the use of a translator, and sometimes in English, stories about themselves and other cultural and historical details. Ray recorded many of these sessions so to the best of our knowledge, these are the only recordings of their kind that exist from the Cuttlefish classes. Although the ³ÉÈËӰƬ produced 6 booklets in the Cuttlefish series, much of the information contained in the recordings was not used.
The ‘Cuttlefish Project’ recordings are of immense UnangaxÌ‚ (³ÉÈËӰƬ Aleut) cultural importance due to not only the topics covered by Elders but because many of them were the last fluent speakers of the Unangam Tunuu language. They are of the utmost importance to the UnangaxÌ‚ people themselves, for educators around world who study the diversity of Indigenous people in the United States, and for worldwide linguists and historians.