It’s actually super important that OP is Indigenous, because Indigenous people were directly involved in the creation of one of the first cultural archives that used audio recordings.
In 1933, ethnologist John Peabody Harrington took up the task of recording and documenting the languages, history and culture of the Indigenous peoples of California and the Big Sur region. Using aluminum discs and wax cylinders, he created the first, and in some cases only, recordings of Indigenous languages, as well as songs, stories and rituals. These recordings would supplement his written records, which would include over a million pages of the phonetics of languages from the top of Alaska to the tip of South America. After his death, over six tons of unpublished records were found stored in various places across the western United States.
The languages he recorded include:
Abenaki
Chumash
Hupa
Kiliwa Ute
Mojave
Paiute
Shasta
Serrano
Yurok
These records are now held at the National Anthropological Archives, which you can browse for free here.
