Grant funds Ninepipes Museum oral history project

Ninepipes Museum was recently awarded a grant through the Foundation for Montana History.

The project, titled “Resonance, Voices That Shaped the Ninepipes Museum,” involves recording stories about items in the museum’s collection through the people of the Flathead Reservation in collaboration with Aspen and Cameron Decker, owners of Xwlxwilt, LLC. The Deckers will create a series of podcast episodes based upon interviews with elders.

The recordings will be used as educational material to convey to visitors a more vivid sense of life on the Flathead Reservation and help engage the community with its own voices through cross-cultural perspectives.

The project also aims to build and sustain museum educational programming to transfer inter-generational knowledge of the reservation and the museum collection through storytelling, technology and museum visits, lending important context and history to various objects in the collection that may otherwise fade away as time moves on.

“We hope to help the voices of the ancestors find a way to the ears of their descendants and connect the past and present,” says museum director Jo Cheff. “Ninepipes Museum is deeply grateful to the Foundation for Montana History for providing funds for this project.”