Indigenous media archive to be digitized in Alberta

EDMONTON — He bought them for a dollar.

Now, “boxes and boxes and boxes” of old audiotape and film that Bert Crowfoot has safeguarded for decades are turning out to be a priceless trove of Indigenous stories, culture and language.

“This is a continuation of our oral traditions,” said Crowfoot, who’s helping direct a project to turn a roomful of old interviews, talk, music and movies from a defunct Indigenous media organization into a digital archive.

In the early 1980s, Crowfoot worked for a group that had produced Indigenous programming for a public broadcast network.

From a studio in west Edmonton, it beamed interviews with Indigenous leaders, stories from elders and talk shows. It also shot abundant video and film.

In 1982, the society went under. To keep the archive together, Crowfoot bought it for a buck.

The old reel-to-reels, VCR cassettes, 16-mm film and floppy disks went into a warehouse. For 36 years, that’s where they sat.

“I always walked by and said, ‘Man, we gotta do something with this stuff,” Crowfoot said.

Enter the University of Alberta’s Institute for Sound Studies.

“I reached out to Bert and we started building this project,” said institute director Mary Ingraham.

The project is called “Digitizing The Ancestors.”

Ingraham estimates there are 2,000 reel-to-reel audio tapes and about 1,000 reels of 16-mm film, as well as piles of defunct and deteriorating analogue media.