By Ashley Burr

Boxes Of Lheidli T’enneh Tapes Could Be Lost If Not Digitized Soon

Mar 29, 2018 | 12:23 PM

PRINCE GEORGE – Almost 150 oral history tapes are being held at The Exploration Place for the Lheidli T’enneh.

As the 30-year lifespan of these tapes nears its end, the museum is racing against the clock to digitize them. Over half of the tapes are spoken in the Lheidli dialect of Dakelh, an endangered language with just a few speakers left.

Alyssa Tobin, curator at The Exploration Place hopes some of the money the federal government has allocated to language revitalization can go to digitizing and translating the tapes.

“We realized that they were really important, we did play a couple of them with Elders in the room and we all realized that we really wanted to do this work. Funding has been a little bit difficult to find, we have applied for a few different grants and were not successful. We are hoping now that we have signed a MoU, and we are official partners, that maybe together working on these grants we will have more luck,” Alyssa Tobin, The Exploration Place. 

So far, a third of the tapes have been transcribed. They contained ethnographic information and place names.

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Tobin hopes funding will come soon because at any point these tapes could expire.