The Laura Boulton Collection: Francophone Canada
I began working at the Center for Ethnomusicology at Columbia University as a Student Researcher in 2018. A year was spent re-organizing the Francophone Canada portion of CU’s Laura Boulton Archive, before I spearheaded an outreach effort with Canadian institutions and independent researchers including the Canadian National Museum of History, Université Laval, Laura Risk, Glenn Patterson, and many others.
Interested parties from this group convened in a virtual meeting in October 2019 (after I had visited many in Canada the summer prior) to discuss the future of the Laura Boulton materials. A panel consisting of these members was accepted to the ARSC 2020 Conference to discuss archival repatriation.
To conclude my undergraduate studies, I wrote a thesis chronicling the project and studying the economic ties between archives, individuals, source communities, and non-profit institutions. I am also lucky to have collaborated with researcher Glenn Patterson to connect with relatives of some of the singers in the 1941 archival recordings. These relatives were able to share personal stories and hear their ancestor’s voices again.