Total Indigitization Grant Funding awarded = $68,692
Project Title: Cowichan Tribes Hul’q’umi’num Digitization Project
Participant: Cowichan Tribes Quw’utsun Syuw’entst Lelum (Cultural Education)
Amount: $10,000
Description: Cowichan Tribes Quw’utsun Syuw’entst Lelum (Cultural Education) Language and Culture program has an inventory of archived audiocassettes, which contain recordings of elders’ interviews, oral history, stories and songs. In order to preserve this knowledge for present and future generations, these materials are being digitized.
Project Title: Musqueam Governance Digitization Project
Participant: Musqueam Indian Band
Amount: $10,000
Description: This project will digitize and preserve an estimated 200 cassettes containing Musqueam Chief and Council Meetings, General Band Meetings, and Committee Meetings, and allow for controlled access to these recordings of immense administrative, cultural, historical, and archival value.
Project Title: Preserving the past for the future and present
Participant: Splatsin Tsm7aksaltn (Splatsin Teaching Centre Society)
Amount: $6,998.37
Description: Preserving the past for the future and present will greatly add to the collection at the Splatsin Tsm7aksaltn to help in the creation of curriculum to teach the children of the community. The collection includes stories, unique conversations with the elders of the community remembering unique words and phrases, language lessons, and other historical recordings.
Project Title: Stellat’en Gets Digitized
Participant: Stellat’en First Nation
Amount: $10,000
Description: The Stellat’en First Nation has over 100 hours of traditional land use and cultural information that is sitting on out-dated tapes. There is a need to not only access this information for current environmental planning purposes but also to preserve this information for the transmission of traditional knowledge to future generations.
Project Title: Tl’azt’en Nation Digitization Project
Participant: Tl’azt’en Nation
Amount: $7,781.30
Description: The words of our Elders have the power to reach into the future and touch current generations with their knowledge of a traditional life that is gradually fading away from our modern lives. They compel us to abide by their requests to “teach the young people about our ways” and to try as best as we can to “raise the children the way we were raised, to respect each other and all living things”; to “treat the land well so that it will treat you well”. Without their words and the language in which these words are spoken, the last remnants of colonialism will have prevailed. Tl’azt’en Nation’s history, identity, present, future, knowledge, existence is all predicated on the words of the previous generation of Elders who lived life off the land and who defined what it was to be Tl’azt’enne (“the people at the end of the lake”).
Project Title: A Decade of Indigenous Governance, Part II: Digitizing UBCIC Chiefs Council Meetings (1999-2008)
Participant: Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs
Amount: $8,860
Description: The Union of BC Indian Chiefs is a non-governmental organization founded in 1969, representing and advocating for Indigenous interests, rights and title. This project will preserve a further decade of archival audiotape recordings of UBCIC Chiefs Council meetings (from 1999-2008), continuing the process of digitizing these historically and culturally valuable records.
Project Title: Digitizing Witsuwit’en Language and Culture Archive Project
Participant: Witsuwit’en Language Authority
Amount: $6,775
Description: The Digitizing Witsuwit’en Language and Culture Archive Project will preserve the valuable audio-recordings of our Witsuwit’en Elders and language resources made from the 1970s to early 2000s, which will contribute to creating educational resources and the language and culture archive and library in our future Witsuwit’en cultural centre.
Project Title: Digitize to Optimize: Yekooche Cultural Knowledge Preservation Project
Participant: Yekooche First Nation
Amount: $8,177.34
Description: Ensuring that the linguistic and cultural knowledge of Yekooche First Nation is preserved for future generations is a top priority for our people. We believe that by digitizing and archiving our audiocassettes, we will be able to make better use of their contents and preserve our unique ways of knowing, language, stories, and life for the generations to come. Musi!