Grants and Contributions

This project serves the communities of Eeyou Istchee by protecting our heritage, making analog materials accessible through digitization, and expanding the collections of archival materials we can preserve for the future. Building on the success of a previously funded initiative, this project will focus on promoting digitization services to the communities in Eeyou Istchee.

The project aims to digitize 125 cassette tapes and three VHS videos containing valuable Oji-Cree language recordings while fostering the skills of our community's emerging language experts. Activities include transcribing and translating a selection of the collection and adding the collection to our existing language and culture archive. The project will build the capacity of the community to digitize and safely store local cultural materials.

This project will provide the technological infrastructure needed to digitize older media and build archiving and research capacity through a training workshop on how to inventory oral narratives and language recordings. The main goals of this project include digitizing older media for preservation and future use; building community research capacity to inventory, record and digitize oral narratives; and purchasing new technology for the resource centre, including software and audiovisual equipment to assist with digitization and language recordings.

The Tlicho Government has a vast archive of audio and video recordings dating back to the 1940s, which includes significant events in our recent history as a government, as well as culturally, historically and anthropologically important information dating back many decades. The Tlicho Government recognizes the importance of digitizing these recordings and hopes that this project will both protect the information and make it more easily searchable and accessible to Tlicho people and to researchers across the country who may be interested in the information or who may want to continue long-standing research.

The project will digitize and migrate these materials to UNB’s existing online archival database. Once uploaded, materials will be organized by keyword and research topic, ensuring that they are easily searchable. All applicable meta-data (date, author, origin, etc.) will be included. A digital map exhibit based on the digitized materials will show locations of important cultural sites (captikwl/creation stories, transformer sites, villages, Syilx/Okanagan place names) and provide contextual information about each site. A wall map version of the digital map will also be printed and posted in UNB’s office. The project will further UNB’s goal to collect, record, and preserve the UNB’s cultural heritage for the benefit of future generations.

The main goal of the TARR Program Archive's project is to digitize key cultural and language recordings for preservation and access and translation purposes. The Archive houses cassettes and VHS formats dating from 1969 to the early 2000s, featuring language recordings by Elders who discuss the making of treaties in Alberta. These discussions form a significant part of the First Nations’ relations to Canada. Many of these Elders have since passed, making these recordings the sole known source of their voices sharing stories about treaty making in Alberta.

This project has three goals:

The first goal is to digitize a group of 173 audiocassettes and 22 VHS tapes containing recordings of Blackfoot ceremonies, songs, worldview stories, and history. Most of the recordings are in Blackfoot, with the remainder in English. The collection, recorded in Alberta and Montana in the early 1960s and the 1980s, contains approximately 90 hours of invaluable audiovisual material. After digitizing the Crowshoe collection, we will work with the United Way of Calgary and Area (UWCA) to produce copies for archival purposes and share among local Elders.

The project’s second goal will be to train a Blackfoot cultural consultant to index, archive and organize the digitized collection.

The project's third goal is to distribute copies to Elders working with the UWCA, enabling them to study the stories and histories held in the collection.

Together, these three goals will lay the foundation for the work of the Elders Knowledge Circle (EKC). This project, led by a group of Treaty Seven Elders, is dedicated to protecting, revitalizing and sharing the stories, language, oral knowledge and practices from Treaty Seven Nations; helping reconciliation efforts; transferring knowledge to future generations; and serving as a centralized resource for Western organizations—public, private and non-profit—to consult with Elders and Indigenous communities using appropriate protocols.

The Council of Yukon First Nations (CYFN) Archives Access Project application for the 2021-22 DHCP focuses on completion of finding aids for 6 key series to enable Yukon First Nations (YFNs) to research documentation for: 50th anniversary commemoration of Together Today for Our Children Tomorrow (TTFOCT); treaty implementation initiatives; Indigenous language revitalization and cultural curriculum development. Yukon Chiefs met Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in 1973 to present their Yukon land claims resulting in 11 YFN self-government agreements by 2005. The CYFN 2021-22 DHCP project would include appraisal, arrangement, RAD series descriptions plus file listings for @450 boxes of unorganized series: Education (100), Health and Social Development (150), Economic Development (25), Land Claims (25), Joint Federal-territorial-YFN Committees (100), Yukon Native Language Centre Indigenous Language Preservation (50).

The project will ensure that McLeod Lake Indian Band’s (MLIB) audio and visual archives are digitized for preservation and access purposes. The main objective is the digitization of 400 Califone cards, 40 audiocassettes, 15 CDs, 20 records, and 10 mini visual cassettes, which have been selected for their valuable content, preservation concerns, and their ability to provide evidence of Tse'Khene culture and language. The project also aims to provide communities with evidence to support the redevelopment of their traditional governance structures; facilitate the repatriation of physical recordings and digitized files back to origin as requested; and improve MLIB’s capacity to digitize materials and offer training in digitization.

The Inuit Broadcasting Corporation (IBC) undertakes the annual cataloguing and digitization of as many analog tapes as possible, storing them on hard drives for viewing, describing and presenting on publicly accessible web platforms. Historically, this effort has processed between 400 and 1 000 tapes per year. Since the project’s inception in 2014, IBC has digitized approximately 2 000 tapes. For the 2021–2022 fiscal year, the project’s main goal is to catalogue, digitize, view in real time, describe and edit 500 U-Matic tapes. The uploading of digitized videos to publicly accessible web platforms will proceed as funding, staffing and web platform capacities allow.