Project aims to keep Indigenous voices alive
Decades of music, stories, interviews on tape reels being digitized in Alberta
An Indigenous media group and researchers are racing the clock to save a slice of history before it turns to dust.
Their project, dubbed Digitizing the Ancestors, is a joint venture of the Sound Studies Institute at the University of Alberta, and the Aboriginal MultiMedia Society of Alberta (AMMSA), an organization behind digital and broadcast news outlets serving Indigenous communities throughout the province.
Together, they’re trying to copy old audio and video tapes saved by Indigenous news media over the years and convert them to a digital format for posterity.
CEO Bert Crowfoot said that in the 1980s, AMMSA bought the liquidated archives of its predecessor, the Alberta Native Communication Society, which published a newspaper and provided broadcast programming and news for Indigenous communities in the province with studios in Edmonton, Lac la Biche, Fort Chipewyan and Wabasca-Desmarais in northern Alberta.
The cache includes thousands of reels of tape — dating back to the 1960s — containing Indigenous music, stories, and audio and video interviews with el- ders and community leaders, such as the late Anne Anderson, Crowfoot added, an author of Métis history and Cree language books, including a Cree dictionary.
“We own all of these archives, and we did nothing with them for about 33 years,” Crowfoot said of the stockpile, which was, until now, stacked and stored in boxes in a spare room. “But if it sits on a tape that deteriorates, and we can’t digitize it, then that’s lost information that we have no access to.”
Much of the store is saved on fragile magnetic tape nearing the end of its shelf life, a reality that prompted the partnership between AMMSA and the Sound Studies Institute, directed by University of Alberta musicologist Mary Ingraham, to catalogue and transfer the tapes to digital media.
After an inventory, the first step was to flag and triage the most sensitive tapes needing urgent action, Ingraham said, “meaning magnetic tape that was starting to deteriorate, because it does that after 50 to 60 years.”
“By doing this, you’re keeping them alive,” Crowfoot said, “You’re keeping their words alive, you’re keeping their message alive, and that’s what’s important.”