First Nations University of Canada

Purpose

This project builds on work funded through Listen, Hear Our Voices in 2020–2022, during which our university/community team repatriated 57 hours of Plains Cree recordings collected by the Royal Alberta Museum in 1972 from the community of Kawacatoose First Nation (KFN). The repatriated materials consist of digitized copies of the original reel-to-reel recordings made in the 1970s and accompanying written English summaries. While our digitized copies are now preserved from physical decay, they remain difficult to listen to due to poor recording quality and the idiomatic speech patterns of the speakers. Additionally, the transcripts produced in the 1970s were created by a speaker of Plains Cree from a different region, resulting in abbreviated shorthand and some mistranslations of the original spoken words.