Video Recordings, From Speaker Series to Open Access Repository

There are lifecycles of stories and lifecycles of storing recordings, and they live in cycle with ecosystems. This article features a series of environmental knowledge holders’ conversations about teachings, ecologies, and the recordings of their stories. Each cyclical process relies on an interchange between the content and the context of how that information has been shared or will be shared in the future. Librarians and coordinators of the speaker series are also in conversation here. The article highlights the care, pace, and speakers’ perspectives on how open access and librarianship practices share stories in their collections. Based on the Western Washington University (WWU) Environmental Speaker Series at the Salish Sea Institute, this article approaches Indigenous Knowledges in pedagogical design and librarianship, in consideration of long-term storage, access, and control over the stories recorded during the speaker series. These conversations contribute to negotiating consent and operating at a pace that respects both the stories and the ways the knowledge holders want to build respectful knowledge transmission.