The American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, houses the works of the ethnomusicologist Frances Theresa Densmore, including a collection of more than 2,500 American Indian songs she recorded between 1907 and 1941. Approximately 260 of Densmore's cataloged recordings were made at the Standing Rock Reservation in the Dakotas between 1911 and 1914. These wax cylinder recordings made over a century ago are a voice from the past that still speaks to the Lakota people today. Densmore's work, along with other available ethnographic materials, represent an opportunity for reclaiming heritage and culture, and for teaching difficult or unknown histories. Teaching with primary sources reveals very complex influences--gender, gender roles, familial relationships, language barriers, language translation, changes in technology for good or bad, politics, and, above all, reclamation and hope for a voice to be heard--that shape and guide those very materials. These influences are revealed to great extent in the groundbreaking work that ensued with the original Lakota and Dakota songs Densmore recorded and with the current Densmore Repatriation Project, repatriating the music back to the Lakota.