Decades of recorded history, ancient songs, and family genealogies have officially returned home to Treaty 8 First Nations in B.C.’s Peace Region.
More than 60 years in the making, the Ridington Dane-zaa Archive was repatriated to Treaty 8 First Nations during a ceremony in Fort St. John, B.C., on Friday.
The vast trove includes more than 8,000 photos, hundreds of hours of audio and video recordings, and textual records tracing the lineage of family genealogies.
“I hope this archive gives justice to all of the different story tellers. I hope future generations of Dane-zaa will listen to and read the archive and be inspired in their own generations,” anthropologist Robin Ridington told an audience of more than 100 people from his home in Victoria.
Ridington first came to the region in the late 1950s, when he ventured north from the United States as a young man swept up in the back-to-the-land movement.
“I was helping friends build a cabin in what they thought was unoccupied wilderness,” he recalled. “I quickly learned that this was wrong.”
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Ridington later returned to the U.S. and changed his university major to anthropology.
In the 1960s, he and his then wife, Antonia Mills, came back to northeastern B.C. Their family began working alongside Dane-zaa elders to record traditional songs, oral histories, and everyday life spanning six decades.
It was a time of significant change and upheaval for Indigenous communities, which experienced considerable hardships under Canada’s reserve system and Indian Act, and as industrial development led to rapid settlement across the region.
“The first thing I learned was to be a good listener. Every story is connected to every other story. The elders I came to know were born at the end of the 19th Century, which now seems like ancient history, and it is,” Ridington said.
“But they carried with them the stories they had learned from their elders, so the stories go back many, many generations,” he said.
Today, thousands of the family’s historical audio reels, cassette tapes, videos and photographs have been digitized from their original file formats, consuming 14 terabytes of data storage.
The wealth of materials have helped settle outstanding land claims across the eight First Nations communities in B.C.’s portion of Treaty 8 territory.
They’re also helping younger generations rediscover their history.
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Cheyenne Kaiser-Conant, a member of the Prophet River First Nation, said the archive has been used to create language learning games for youth, including an Indigenous adaptation of the popular tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons.
“I’m very excited to see the archives come back to the communities,” Kaiser-Conant said. “Having easier access to be able to listen to the potential language resources that are available, being able to hear our elders speak, our ancestors speak.
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Len Morrisette, a filmmaker from Grande Prairie, Alta., is using the archive for a documentary he is making about Prophet River.
“The recordings and beautiful photos, I’m just barely scratching the surface,” Morrissette said.
“Every nation is different. Different teachings, different ways; some have dreamers, medicine men. It’s just been really cool to have a source to go to.”
The archive, however, were not always easily accessible and once at risk of degradation and being lost.
Though Ridington maintained the collection privately, he frequently shared his reels and other records with families.
Over the decades, he sent out “hundreds and hundreds” of cassette tapes to community members eager to hear recordings of their relatives singing.
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“People would play them over and over again until they just wore out,” he said. “But now we have digital technology and now these songs and stories are more available and more accessible.”
Efforts to inventory and digitize content in the collection began in 2020, and materials are still being processed.
Ridington’s daughter, folklorist Amber Ridington, believes the archive is one of the largest collection of ethnographic material about sub-Arctic people in the world.
She said the records contains sacred and culturally sensitive knowledge, including accounts of residential schools, displacement, and the colonial impacts of racism and violence.
Because the information was scattered across dozens of hard drives and file formats copied over the years, identifying master materials required significant collaboration, she said.
“These are … families’ voices, stories, songs, and histories,” she said. “Today is really about bringing them back to the people where they belong.”
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The Treaty 8 Tribal Association is the new steward of the collection.
The association is working with local communities and families on how the materials will be managed and which records, if any, will be made available to the public.
“We hold it in trust for the communities,” said archive manager Denée Renouf.
Renouf said the collection will help the association hold governments accountable for breaches of Treaty 8.
“We have some interviews and studies going back to the 1990s and 1980s,” Renouf said.
“But this is two, three decades before that, which adds just another voice to our understanding of history, and the understanding of the promises that were supposed to be kept.”
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