On Saturday, 10 June 2017, I was invited to give the keynote at Oral History Victoria’s symposium ‘Oral history in a digital age’. This post is an edited version of that talk.

A little over a hundred years ago, the ethnographer and anthropologist Frances Densmore sat down with the Blackfoot chief, Mountain Chief. She was capturing Native American music and culture using a phonograph, a device already around 40 years old when this photograph was taken.