A Community Foundation of Lethbridge and Southwestern Alberta grant will support the Lethbridge and Area Metis Association’s Oral History of Metis in Southern Alberta project.
The project, funded by the Henry S. Varley Fund for Rural Life, started earlier this year and will continue thanks to the generous funding support.
Senior Administrator Kimberly Hansen of the Lethbridge and Area Metis Association says the project helps the public to better understand local Metis history. “Even before it was Alberta, before the settlers came in the late 1800s, Metis people were already here. There’s a lot of census and archeological data we want to connect with family histories to breathe life into that data and teach people about how the Metis shaped the cultural landscape.”
“Many Metis people don’t even know a lot of this history. By collecting the stories and sharing them, we’re hoping to encourage that understanding and education,” Hansen explains.
The original grant funding was supposed to go towards a public gathering, so participants could come together and experience the shared stories with a database of information.
“With this new grant, we’re just adding onto those same goals. I don’t know what the date will be for that yet, but if we continue to receive funding, we can continue to make the project bigger and better,” Hansen notes.
“What we’ve done so far is – we worked with people in the field. We worked with academics and professionals that work in oral history. They helped us to prepare questions and ethic policies and the protocols around the interview processes to make sure we’re doing it appropriately and according to the correct principles,” adds Hansen.
The cool thing about this type of work is the more interviews you do within the community opens the door to more people, says Hansen. “You’ll talk to somebody and they say, ‘you really need to talk to Jerry or you really need to talk to whoever.'”
“We get leads on more people that have family histories in the area or might know people that have even moved away since growing up in the area.”
According to Hansen, the rural fund is for those people that might not be able to come into Lethbridge to do an interview or they might not be able to do a phone interview or they don’t want to do a digital interview. “It provides us with travel expenses and honouraria for those people that want to participate. There’s a cost with the digital management of all these audio files and transcriptions and things like that.”
Now that all the back-end work is complete on the project, Hansen says the funds can go directly to finding more people and making it accessible for them to participate.
The association is an Indigenous registered charity, Hansen explains. “Our mission is to foster a vibrant cultural identity that preserves, revitalizes and celebrates Metis culture, language and traditions, cultivating a sense of unity and belonging among Metis people.”
Hansen adds the association offers regular workshops that focus on Metis culture and traditional skills. “We have youth and elder groups, community gatherings and a variety of different support services throughout the year.”
“We also partner with local organizations to connect our members with broader Indigenous services through systems navigation, and we help with education. If other organizations have an Indigenous initiative, we can support that throughout the city and surrounding communities.”
