appendix 1 Building a Community-Directed Work of Oral History

By Sabina Trimble, Peter Fortna, Willow Springs Strategic Solutions

Remembering Our Relations is a community-directed, collaborative work of oral history. The book has been one important result of a long-term, justice-oriented research initiative that the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation (ACFN) community has been working on for several decades. We wanted to take some space here to discuss the work that led up to A History of Wood Buffalo National Park’s Relations with the Dënesųłıné, the 2021 research report that resulted in this book, in order to highlight the relationships on which the work depended. In this appendix, we share the history of how the report and book came together and discuss the roles of members and staff of ACFN as the leaders and overseers of the project, as well as collaborators in diverse ways, and of us at Willow Springs Strategic Solutions (WSSS) as settler partners, researchers, and consultants. We also highlight some of the complexities and challenges, and the interesting possibilities, of working together in the context of a global pandemic that has necessitated separation and isolation.

Background to Remembering Our Relations

Much of the work that led up to Remembering Our Relations began before the idea for the book emerged. Members, ancestors, and relations of ACFN laid the foundation for the work by calling out and resisting colonial encroachments and passing down their oral histories. Indeed, Dënesųłıné people have been engaged in research and activism in direct response to the history of Wood Buffalo National Park for generations. Decades of research by the late ACFN Elders Pat Marcel and Alec Bruno formed an important catalyst and starting place for this project. They spoke out often about their own families’ traumatic experiences and what they saw to be Treaty 8 violations and widespread harms that accompanied the establishment and expansion of the Park. They pressed for many years for the community’s oral histories to be gathered, along with government records and other documents, to tell the story of the Park from a Dene perspective.

In 2019, ACFN leadership, including the Elders’ Council and Chief and Council, initiated a research project with the intention to tell the story of WBNP. The goal was to gather evidence to inform ACFN’s plans to negotiate with Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) and Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada (CIRNAC) for a formal, public apology and reparations for harms the predecessors of these branches committed against members of the community through the creation, expansion, and management of Wood Buffalo National Park. Much of the archival and oral history research at the heart of this book was initially completed for this larger initiative. Before the work began, ACFN established a steering committee to direct the work and keep it in line with the community’s goals. The committee was comprised of ACFN Elders, staff, and youth, including the late Elder Pat Marcel, Rose Ross, Lisa Tssessaze, Olivia Villebrun, Leslie Wiltzen, Brian Fung, and Jay Telegdi. Later, Willow Springs and the Nation’s legal and public relations teams, including staff at Counsel Public Affairs, Inc. and Larry Innes at Olthuis Kleer Townshend Law, also became involved with the committee. The committee was a cornerstone throughout all stages of the work and oversaw all phases—developing the project, managing its progress, navigating the research and writing processes, engaging with community on a regular basis, and bringing the report to the negotiating table, and eventually, to the publication process. Lisa Tssessaze, Rose Ross, and Jay Telegdi especially played leading roles in the coordination and development of the project.

Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation hired Willow Springs Strategic Solutions in late 2019 to begin documenting the history and intergenerational impacts of WBNP. Leadership and the steering committee wanted to build a strong case through extensive archival and oral historical research and through a systematic review of existing scholarly literatures and research previously conducted by the Nation and adjacent communities. In Research as Resistance, Susan Strega and Leslie Brown argue that transparency is key for any researcher wishing to work with communities in good relation.¹ As white settler researchers living and working in Indigenous homelands, and usually working in relation with Indigenous Knowledge, we understand that it is important to reflect on our positionality and privilege and to discuss our role in the process. Willow Springs is a settler-owned research consultancy that focuses on historical research; we often work with Indigenous communities in northern Alberta. Peter had worked with ACFN on several other projects over the previous decade, so he had an existing relationship with members of the community and ACFN leadership. This meant that we came to the project familiar with Elder Pat Marcel’s foundational research, and other work that ACFN or other researchers had previously conducted that could assist in our work. The role of WSSS in this project was to gather stories and sources, help manage the project, and develop the findings and analyses into a report. Sabina Trimble, Peter Fortna and, Tara Joly (from 2019 to 2020), led the archival and oral history research. Sabina and Peter wrote the initial report drafts and the introductory text for the chapters of this book and helped with project planning and coordination.

Research in Indigenous communities by non-Indigenous peoples has often been extractive and violent. Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith famously describes research as “the dirtiest word in the Indigenous world’s vocabulary.” She points to the “imperial legacies of Western knowledge and the ways in which those legacies continue to influence knowledge institutions to the exclusion of Indigenous peoples and their aspirations.”² Social sciences research has advanced harmful and discriminatory ideas that inform and justify oppressive policy, colonial dispossessions and eliminationism, and extractive activity around the world. Power is also inequitably distributed in research relationships, resulting in violence within the relationship itself and in the research outcomes. This is almost inevitable when the person holding the pen (or the audio recorder) has control over research questions, the time and place where research takes place, data analysis, and the structure of the narrative. Moreover, Métis historian Adam Gaudry contends that, “just as corporations aspire to extract resources from Indigenous lands, much research within Indigenous communities is an extractive process.”³ This includes the extraction of Indigenous knowledge and stories from communities and publishing those in the name of “academic freedom” with blatant disregard for sacredness, protocol, and ceremony, or for Indigenous People’s individual and collective intellectual property rights.⁴ Researchers who work with communities extract knowledge and stories and often benefit much more from the relation than the communities themselves, whose knowledge and experience are at the centre of the research. So, while researchers enjoy income, career advancement, awards, and public respect, community goals are rarely advanced.

Critics have called “for an end to research ‘on’ the marginalized” rather than ‘with’ or ‘by’ them. They have advanced community-led and -empowering, anti-oppressive, and collaborative approaches.⁵ To realize the ethic of “nothing about us without us,” critics argue, researchers must relinquish their assumed role as “expert” and “owner” and privilege local leadership, knowledge, and ways of knowing. “Indigenous knowledge,” argues Gaudry, “is valid on its own terms and is capable of standing on its own.”⁶ All forms of knowledge-making and every historical source should thus be “read differently and evaluated on their own merits in a way that is not predetermined by their form,” as community-engaged historian Madeline Knickerbocker puts it.⁷ Anthropologist Leslie Robertson explains in her collaborative research with members of the Kwagu’ɬ> Gixsam Clan, the production of historical knowledge thus becomes “a long conversation” that honours and uplifts the “analyses, descriptions and explanations of knowledgeable partners in the research.”⁸ Moreover, researchers must “place community concerns above all others in the research process and put forward an empowering and decolonized view of the people with whom they conduct the research.”⁹ Community members centrally involved throughout the work, Gaudry argues, and “the final judges of the validity and effectiveness of the research.”¹⁰

We agree. As paid consultants whose names are on the front cover of the book, there is no question we have benefitted from the work. But the intentions of the ACFN community have always been at the heart of our involvement. We aimed to work in a way that opposes harmful practice and is on the community’s terms, within their timeline, and under their guidance. We attempted to balance our role between making meaningful and worthwhile contributions of our resources, knowledge, and capacity as a research consultancy and providing leadership where it made sense to do so, and foregrounding ACFN’s leadership, knowledge, and experiences and, most importantly, advancing their goals. Our involvement with the steering committee and engagement with the wider community were important to navigating this balance. The central goals of the History of Wood Buffalo National Park’s Relations with the Dënesųłıné report and of Remembering Our Relations have always been to honour and amplify the knowledge, stories, memories, and histories of ACFN members and their ancestors—this is why ACFN is listed as the first author. It is their stories, their knowledge, their interpretations and analyses, their goals that make this book what it is. The project was designed to be collaborative and to ensure that ACFN holds the authority over how and when the research proceeded, what questions were asked, how the narrative would be told, and where the information that went into the report—including all archival texts, secondary sources, and oral history recordings and transcriptions—would be held. Digital and physical copies of all the sources we had gathered are housed in the Nation’s own offices and archives, as well as in a shared cloud space that WSSS administrates.

Doing the work

The work depended on engagement with many members of the community and close listening to the oral histories passed down from generation to generation. We also worked with an expansive written record housed across provincial and national archives, containing tens of thousands of pages produced by various government departments and branches, churches, and local Indigenous leaders. Early on, WSSS and the community steering committee together identified research questions and developed a phased plan to guide the project. We proposed several phases to approach the work, involving community engagement and extensive analysis of diverse written texts.

The first phase of the project, and a large role that WSSS played, was to gather copies of relevant texts to construct the research report and provide the ACFN with digital and physical copies of all texts, so the community could grow their local archives for future use. We conducted a deep review of archival texts and of prior research by ACFN, as well as in-depth reviews of other relevant academic literature and texts produced by other Indigenous communities, local industry, governments, and other consultants. Peter and Tara did most of the labour of identifying and digitizing textual sources that would be critical to this story, initially working with ACFN members and staff from Parks Canada. All texts gathered have been digitized and saved in multiple formats now housed by the Nation. Parks Canada staff helped identify, access, and prioritize non-digitized texts from relevant collections at Library and Archives Canada (LAC). The team also gathered records from the Provincial Archives of Alberta and ACFN’s community records.

Our access to archival documents was strained in several ways. Archival records are not always easily accessible to remote Indigenous communities researching their histories. For projects like this, the limitations can be serious even though the stakes are high: communities are often working with restrictive budgets and narrow timelines to pursue research that could have long-term, material impacts on members. While LAC has digitized many non-restricted Indian Affairs files (RG10) and Parks Branch files (RG84), the same could not be said of the full extent of the Department of the Interior – Northern Affairs Branch (RG85) collection, where the pre-1950s documents related to the Park are housed.¹¹ Travel to archives in Ottawa, Winnipeg, or Vancouver and costly copy requests were the only means to access many of the files documenting the most critical decades in ACFN’s history with the Park. These challenges were compounded by the global pandemic—something many historical researchers in Canada experienced during these years. Library and Archives Canada was closed to visitors for much of 2020 and 2021 and the copy request system was backed up for months. When the archives re-opened in summer 2021, physical access was by appointment only and spots were limited. We worked around these challenges through requesting digital copies of records from LAC and the Provincial Archives of Alberta, by working with copies of documents that Parks Canada shared with the team digitally, and by accessing copies that ACFN already had in their community records for other projects. The volume of material we amassed was substantive, notwithstanding the limitations. In summer 2022, after the report and an initial book draft were complete, we received copies of thousands of additional pages of archival materials that LAC digitized for us. We updated both the report and the book manuscript after receiving the new documents.

The second phase of the research plan was to focus on the oral histories. Sabina and Peter began, as discussed in the Introduction to Remembering Our Relations, by gathering and reviewing the existing transcriptions and audio recordings of oral histories that had been recorded for other community-led projects from the 1970s to the 2010s. With the leadership and coordination of the steering committee, Willow Springs also conducted the oral history interviews that occurred from 2020 to 2021. The interview questions were drafted by Tara Joly and then underwent several revisions by the committee. The oral history work progressed relatively smoothly until spring 2020, when the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic halted all plans of in-person community engagement, leading to delays and compromises. To ensure the health and safety of the community and all participants, in-person committee meetings and plans for oral history interviews and focus groups were put on hold. In December 2020, ACFN leadership determined that the work must proceed remotely. This was in part so the team could time the release of the report so it would align with the national celebrations likely to accompany the 100th anniversary of the Park in 2022, and in part to keep the momentum going on the larger negotiations with the Government of Canada.

Recruiting community members for remote interviews presented logistical challenges in the initial months. It was difficult to decide on the most appropriate medium to complete the interviews. Video conferencing would have been preferred to conducting interviews over the phone, but internet connectivity in remote places and comfort with emergent (and changing) technologies posed challenges. In February 2021, ACFN hired Angela Marcel, a Nation member with strong connections across the community, to directly contact Elders and schedule remote interviews. The community made the decision to complete the remaining interviews over the phone, which removed a number of key barriers. Angela helped the team to schedule discussions with twenty-nine individuals from ACFN and the wider community. Along with committee members Lisa and Jay, Angela played a pivotal role in the community engagement and in keeping the work moving forward.

Remote interviewing is not always ideal. A key characteristic of oral history is its relationality—it is alive in ways that written texts are not. The interactive nature and physical and social context and delivery of the spoken word are as important as the words themselves. In-person conversations breathe with inflection, connection, emotion, gestures, facial expressions, and other forms of body language. Remote interviews can strip words from context, resulting in what some oral historians have termed disembodiment.¹² To some extent, this disembodiment is inevitable—even when interviews are conducted in person, disembodiment occurs at the point of transcribing oral interviews to writing—but it can be managed more effectively when talking to someone in person. Another challenge came as the committee worked out how to honour protocol and ceremony from a distance. Elders and community leaders provided suggestions such as tobacco offerings. When these could not be made in person, Elders suggested a digital tobacco offering. Others requested that the tobacco be mailed to them along with their interview transcription. Most members asked that we make offerings at our homes on their behalf and say a prayer for them. Everyone received honoraria in advance of their sharing. Where we had permissions, we digitally recorded the interviews and transcribed them. In two instances, interviewees requested that their interviews not be recorded, preferring instead that the interviewer take notes and only make general references to the interview rather than directly quoting them. Audio recordings and physical and digital transcriptions were sent to all members who requested them, and copies of the recordings and transcriptions are held and managed by the Nation.

Throughout the research process, we kept the dialogue open and frequent. The committee met remotely every week after the pandemic began. Where possible, we joined in larger community meetings to share and discuss progress, including meetings with the Elders’ Council, Chief and Council, and other members of ACFN staff and membership. The committee decided we should send the physical transcripts, drafts, gifts, and thank you cards by mail, either directly to those who participated or to the Nation office to be hand-delivered to members during Treaty Days in June 2021. The packages included our phone numbers and email addresses with invitations to review and comment on the material at any time. We followed up directly with most of the interviewees by phone or email, and the committee communicated regularly with the wider community through ACFN’s quarterly newsletter, the website and social media, and at other community gatherings. Committee members, Elders, and Chief and Council reviewed iterations of the report before ACFN submitted a strong draft in July 2021 to Ministers of ECCC and CIRNAC and made it public through social media and news outlets. The steering committee also decided to treat the online report as a living document that will evolve as additional feedback comes in, further evidence is established, and ACFN continues to make progress on the government negotiations.

Willow Springs staff regularly updated the writing based on community reviews. For example, after reviewing an early draft of the report, committee member and ACFN member Olivia Villebrun recommended that we place more emphasis on the intergenerational nature of the Park’s impacts—especially on youth. Olivia described the loss of language that resulted from the 1944 membership transfer (described in Chapter 4) and the removals from the wider territory, which compounded the violence of residential schools. She explained that youth have suffered from this outcome in specific ways. Her important feedback dramatically strengthened the section of the report focused on impacts and led to an additional critical interpretation that we had not previously considered—that Dene youth members’ connections to language and knowledge in the present are critically influenced by Park policies that had interrupted knowledge transmission from Elders to youth for generations. Many other important points of feedback from the steering committee, Chief and Council, Elders, and the wider community contributed to the strength of the final report. We resubmitted a revised report to the government in early 2023. Likewise, Remembering Our Relations has been shaped and reshaped by ongoing conversations.

Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation began discussions with representatives from ECCC and CIRNAC in 2022 to obtain formal, public acknowledgement and reparations for the damage caused to the Dënesųłıné people after the Park was created.¹³ Once the negotiations started, Lisa Tssessaze emphasized that the team should find a way to highlight and honour the oral histories and testimony of Elders who have gone before. ACFN determined shortly thereafter that the initial research report should be reworked into a book manuscript that would be owned by the community. We then began to shift our focus to gathering everything together for Remembering Our Relations. The book manuscript developed over roughly two years. Like the original report, this book has also been centrally guided by the work of the steering committee, as well as contributions from leadership, community participants, Elders, and other ACFN members who had been involved with the report.

There are a few important differences between this book and the original report. The central distinction has to do with intentions: the report was written with the goal of informing negotiations with governments, whereas this book was written primarily to highlight and honour the oral history and experiences of the community. The second difference has to do with the format. The report integrates evidence from both written and oral archives with our analysis and interpretations throughout. Dene oral histories are, of course, deeply important to the report, and the key interpretations and themes of the report are based on the oral histories. However, we felt the traditional report style and the language used to communicate with governments was limiting, not only in the extent to which we could directly incorporate oral history excerpts, but also in the levels to which the report could speak meaningfully to community members. For this reason, we adopted a format in this book that emphasizes the oral history. The goal was to gather stories by the community, for the community, in ways that made some of the stories more accessible than the report format could allow. Elder and member voices form the core of the book. Because the steering committee also felt it was important to make some of the written sources accessible to readers, we worked with UCalgary Press to include copies of several archival sources as an appendix to the e-book. The steering committee also decided that samples of some of the interviews should be included as audio recordings so that the voices of speakers could be heard—especially the few that have been recorded in Dene. These passages are linked throughout the book and are available online for listeners. ACFN plans to host more digital audio recordings from the oral history interviews on its website in the future.

Much of the existing writing in the report formed the basis for the chapter introductions for this book. The committee and WSSS also took time to identify the oral history passages to be included in each chapter, with the help of interviewees. Oral histories included in each chapter were selected with explicit permissions from the speakers, who revised, removed, or added to their testimony up until the final submission of the manuscript to the press. For interviews with Elders who have since passed away that were recorded for previous community research projects such as the Treaty and Aboriginal Rights Research interviews in the 1970s, we requested permissions from members of the family and next-of-kin for inclusion in the work. The book manuscript also underwent multiple layers of community review in addition to the academic peer review process. The steering committee, with recommendations from Elders’ Council, Chief and Council, and the ACFN board membership, appointed a community review panel with three Elders: Edouard Trippe de Roche, Keltie Paul, and Alice Rigney. Elder reviews and peer reviews were central to the revisions and development of the manuscript. Elders and members Rene Bruno, Jimmy Deranger, Kristi Deranger, Dora Flett, Garry Flett, Lorraine Hoffman, Julie Mercredi, Hazel Mercredi, and Les Wiltzen reviewed oral history transcripts and several sections of the manuscript. Several other ACFN Elders shared oral feedback during project updates at Elders’ meetings and Treaty Days in Fort Chipewyan in 2021 and 2022.

ACFN Elders and members have made important contributions to the many other moving parts that brought this book together. During summer 2022 ACFN hosted a title and cover contest, inviting members to propose a title and design a book cover. ACFN Elder Leonard Flett’s watercolour painting of wood bison won the competition and is the central image of the Remembering Our Relations cover. Staff member Josh Holden worked with Elder Cecilia Adam to develop titles in Dënesųłıné in summer 2023. This was a critical development since, as discussed in the Introduction, there are few Dënesųłıné oral history recordings in this book, and the committee wanted to find other ways that the language could feature prominently. Youth members have been involved in the public engagement, including through sharing histories on social media and through an essay contest about the history and impacts of the Park, which ACFN hosted in 2022.

Rose Ross and Lisa Tssessaze coordinated the work of obtaining permissions and revisions from members whose testimony is included in the book, and from next-of-kin for those who have since passed. They also drafted many of the biographies included in the front matter of this book. Several members and Elders wrote their own biographies, and other ACFN members assisted in that process. Chief Allan Adam’s Foreword and Elder Alice Rigney’s Preface provided a powerful opening to the rest of the book, setting the tone for the narrative and demonstrating the intergenerational importance of telling this story.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that this research process has been filled with compromise, especially in the surrounding context of the pandemic. We worked hard to do things in a good way and in good relation, within the constraints the circumstances posed. Out of necessity spurred by short timelines and the pandemic, we sacrificed some of the long-term engagement and organic, close-up conversation that is so crucial to this kind of work. We have aimed nonetheless to approach our involvement with sensitivity and respect, taking Dene knowledge, memory, history, and experience seriously and holding space to ensure the community has the first and final say over the research process, the story, and the outcomes. The power of this book comes from the community members who graciously agreed to share their time and space, histories, and often difficult and traumatic memories.

Remembering Our Relations is a call to return the land and a concerted effort to honour, amplify, and reflect on the powerful work that has gone before and on this community’s resilient ways of being and knowing. That this work continued in the face of deeply challenging global circumstances, and amidst the many other crises it has faced in the past two years—including the Imperial Oil tailings ponds leaks in Spring 2023 and a wildfire evacuation order in summer 2023—is a testament to its value and importance to ACFN. It is also evidence of the strength and creativity of Dënesųłıné people who have always courageously stewarded their homelands and endured and resisted the violence of colonial transformations. It has been a deep honour, a joy, and a great privilege to share in this journey.