The oldest local ideas in history are being preserved forever thanks to the most modern local ideas.
The people of the Tsay Keh Dene, Kwadacha and Takla First Nations are scouring their traditional territories for memories, artifacts, and any indication of their indigenous history in the region. These three neighbouring Aboriginal nations have lived on the lands north of the city, adjacent to the traditional territories of the Lheidli T'enneh First Nation and the McLeod Lake First Nation for centuries.
The Tsay Keh Dene's land and resource director, Derek Ingram, and community reseach co-ordinator Adrienne Fitzpatrick embarked on a mission to catalogue the geographical history of their one nation, but found so many crossover points with the Kwadacha and Takla people (common hunting grounds, fishing holes, seasonal camps, etc.) that they easily convinced the other two to join the effort.
The research coalition then contacted Prince George high-tech firm SparkGeo to create an easy-to-use, public-friendly program to process and story all the information. The program SparkGeo proprietor Will Cadell invented is called Landsongs.
"Derek galvanized the process and built the idea for this program into his environmental monitoring program," said Cadell. "A lot of the information was oral history, or paper-based reports, and had never been captured in digital form. When you gather it all together, it makes for a great library for the community and a stronger claim to the area for the First Nation."
The three nations are sharing the cost and the human resources to collect the information, and it will be a pool of data they can all use for land-use planning, but each one will also get their nation-specific materials as proprietary stuff to do with as they individually wish, said Fitzpatrick.
"Right now it is a chance for the three nations to work together, which doesn't happen all that often," she said.
In a room in the basement of the Carrier Sekani Tribal Council office, each nation has a representative inputting data and shaking more information loose. They started on Sept. 24 and they will keep at it until Dec. 14 when the project's funding runs out.
"This information is for our future generations," said Vera Poole, working for the Tsay Keh Dene. She is old enough to remember her community being flooded out and forcibly removed from their traditional town to make way for dams on Williston Lake. "We were not prepared. I don't want future generations to be unprepared."
The information proving and quantifying Aboriginal domain over the territory is not to keep industry out, though, she stressed. It is to focus industry on land-uses that are acceptable to both corporate needs and the local community's needs.
Mitchell McCook, the Kwadacha researcher, said it was surprising at first to see how many times Poole was personally referenced in the materials he was now transcribing into the Landsongs program. In some cases the elders telling the stories are now dead, making their contributions invaluable today. Sometimes more than one person gave their version of the same event or activity, deepening the insights for the three main researchers.
"I've been learning a lot about how to use today's technologies to preserve the past," said McCook. "Using this program helps streamline our process and it will make it easy to use and easy to share for all three nations."
Poole laughed and pointed to a stack of cassettes and a couple of timeworn tape recorders. "When we first started collecting our elders' stories, many years ago, we were using those Fred Flintstone machines out in the bush. Then we transcribed what they said. Now we are inputting that into a computer. It keeps getting better."
"It is tedious work, but I have learned so much about my elders, my ancestors, and theirs [Poole and McCook] too," said Sheena Teegee, the Takla Lake researcher. "I didn't know we three had so many connections. We are spread out, we have our own ways of life, but we closely share this one area of land we're looking at now, and we always have."
The project is being helped by grassroots community members from the three nations, and by the Smithers-based Crossroads Cultural Resource Management consultant company. A final document (much of it rooted in the Land Song program) is expected in spring.
SINGING THE PRAISES OF LANDSONGS
Will Cadell's original computer program Landsongs was built at the request of three Aboriginal nations working together on a massive history-gathering exercise north of Prince George. The features of the program - data storage capabilities and easy search tools - are now up for an award.
The Ashoka Changemakers group is a global online think-tank. It is the organization behind the B.C. Ideas People's Choice Awards.
"This competition seeks innovative solutions to health, social and environmental challenges facing B.C. communities today, and in the future," said a statement from the organizers.
There were 470 entries in the competition. Eleven innovative tech inventions were shortlisted for a cash award. Landsongs is one of those nominees.
The top three, as determined by a panel of judges (including former Prince George Aboriginal leader Dan George) and online voting, will receive a cheque for $15,000 each, for further development of the initiative.
The top three are scheduled to be announced on Tuesday.
