Clyde Ellis, Professor of History, delivered an invited address on Oct. 30 in Oklahoma City at the 75th anniversary symposium on the Oklahoma Historical Society’s Indian Archive.
The Indian Archive is one of the most important research collections on American Indian history and culture in the United States, and holds more than 3 million documents. Ellis’s paper, “’Singing To Us, Singing For Us’: The Ralph Kotay Collection at the Oklahoma Indian Archives,” discussed the donation to the archive last fall of several hundred field recordings of Indian music collected by the late Ralph Kotay, a highly regarded singer, native speaker, and member of the Kiowa Tribe.
Kotay co-authored The Jesus Road: Kiowas, Christianity, and Indian Hymns with Ellis and Luke Eric Lassiter in 2002. The book was nominated for the 2002 Society for Humanistic Anthropology’s Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing, and for the 2003 Society for Ethnomusicology’s Alan P. Merriam Prize for the most distinguished, published English-language monograph in the field of ethnomusicology. It was also named to Choice magazine’s list of the most significant university press titles published in 2001–2002.