Denali National Park: Upper Kuskokwim Place Names Grant

This Funding Announcement is not a request for applications. This announcement is to provide public notice of the National Park Service’s intention to fund the following project activities without full and open competition.
This notice servies to identify a partnership through a cooperative agreement between the National Park Service, Denali National Park and Preserve and the Telida Village Council for the project titled Place Names of the Upper Kuskokwim for the period of May 2014 to September 2014. OVERVIEW:

The National Park Service and the Telida Village Council intend to collaborate on a project to study how places were named in and around Denali National Park & Preserve, document the historical use of the land and waters for subsistence, and describe how and where people traveled and what resources were harvested in specific places. Place names and their associated stories are important not only as a tool for understanding our traditional land use, but also in preserving the complex knowledge of our people who have lived here for centuries.
The goal of this project is to complete the ongoing Upper Kuskokwim Place Names Project through a comprehensive interview and research process. In partnership with Telida Village Council this project will interview Elders who possess the knowledge, technology and expertise needed to annotate the place names. Elders will be interview to collect their stories about subsistence activities both in the past and the present. Information gathered will be used to further Telida Village’s language, historical and cultural preservation and revitalization project.

STATEMENT OF JOINT OBJECTIVES/PROJECT MANAGEMENT PLAN:

Over the past three years, Telida Village has been conducting an extensive Upper Kuskokwim Regional Place Names Project. The methods used in this place name research is based on work that was funded by Denali National Park and jointly developed by staff from University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) in the late 1990’s. Continuing to draw on this work, Telida Village Council has expanded local place names by a couple hundred words. This proposed project will continue working with Elders and other knowledge bearers to learn and document the stories of places in the Upper Kuskokwim. The information gained from this cooperative agreement will be used on an interactive GIS map of places with names, audio stories, and photographs; a project fact sheet; and it will later be developed into a place-based book of the Upper Kuskokwim River region by the National Park Service. The information gained from this partnership will be shared with tribal members, local schools, and the public.

RECIPIENT INVOLVEMENT:

The recipient’s principal investigator (PI) and tribal administrator will serve as co-principal investigators for this project. The PI will be responsible for traveling throughout the study area and interviewing Elders to document their subsistence travels and stories. The first year of the project the recipient agrees to conduct approximately 10 interviews and collect photographs. The second year the PI will incorporate new interview with existing information collected in previous years by digitizing and converting video, time-coding transcripts, scanning release forms, writing biographies, and uploading all content into Drupal.

NATIONAL PARK SERVICE INVOLVEMENT:

NPS will provide GIS expertise for the development of an interactive map, and help conduct interviews with elders and meetings in the communities. The NPS will provide access to historical photographs and written references. Additionally the NPS Project Manager will collaboratively plan, develop, and implement the project. The NPS will review all work as it progresses to ensure that the project is completed in a timely manner and that the information from the project will be easily accessible to the public. And separately from this cooperative agreement, the NPS will use the data gained from this project to create a fact sheet and book.

SINGLE-SOURCE JUSTIFICATION: The National Park Service did not solicit full and open competition for this award based the following critera: Continuation- The activity to be funded is necessary to the satisfactory completion of, or is a continuation of an activity presently being funded, and for which competition would have a significant adverse effect on the continuity or completion of the activity;
and Unique Qualifications – The applicant is uniquely qualified to perform the activity based upon a variety of demonstrable factors such as location, property ownership, voluntary support capacity, cost-sharing ability if applicable, technical expertise, or other such unique qualifications.
Continuation- This proposed agreement will update and enhance the previous Upper Kuskokwim Regional Place Names Project that drew on Dr. James Kari¿s work with Telida Village Council from the late 1990¿s that was funded by Denali National Park. Because of their previous involvement with this project and familiarity with the local communities and elders, Telida Village Council is the obvious choice for continuing this work. Recently with their own funds they were able to expand the number of place names collected in the 1990s by a couple hundred words. Unique qualifications – The applicants are uniquely qualified to perform this localized place name research based upon their unique technical expertise and qualifications. Both researchers were involved in the researching and writing the seminal ethnographic book of the proposed area titled Dichinanek¿ Hwt¿ana: History of the People of the Upper Kuskowim who Live in Nikoali and Telida. This project will draw on the integrity of the original research collected for this book as well as continue working with the same families and communities from the book. The PI and the researcher already have a preexisting working relationship with the local community and are well known by the local elders.
The Agreement Technical Representative for this project is Phoebe Gilbert, phoebe_gilbert@nps.gov.