A view of Medicine Hat's light industrial district from the Scholten Hill area in the 1960s. - SUBMITTED PHOTO
As a history student entering the final year of my undergrad, the analysis of historical sources is something that occupies me daily.
The popular conception of history is usually limited to the study of dusty, decaying books and yellowed manuscripts. This was a view that I held for an embarrassingly long time. However, it’s much broader than that.
History is the study of the human past, in any documented form. This is something I have come to realize throughout my time as a student of history, and I had the chance put this into practice while working as a summer student in the Archives at the Esplanade.
My first project was to transcribe Métis oral histories, recorded via audiocassette in the 1980s.
These were not the grand biographies I was used to – lauding the achievements of powerful kings or generals – these were the intimate stories of people, real people with real struggles, told in their own voices.
Oral history (whether recorded by audio or video) makes up for the shortcomings of written history by allowing us to see and hear the emotions of people, instead of being told a collection of facts by words on a page. Historically repressed stories, such as those of the Métis and Indigenous peoples, are usually stored within their cultures orally, and so oral history allows us to record them in the medium they were intended to be retold. As historians, we are aware that our work will more than likely become useful long after we have completed it, but for the Métis oral history project, this was not the case.
I was fortunate enough to directly see the value of this work only three months after I had completed it.
In late fall, the last of the human remains stored at the University of Alberta, stolen from their graves in Medicine Hat in 1967, are scheduled to be returned to their people.
On Aug. 2, in a beautiful ceremony that I was deeply honoured to take part in, sacred artifacts were formally returned to the descendants of those to whom the goods rightfully belong.
In preparation for the event, I took a section from one of the audio tapes I had transcribed and edited it into a video with related historical images for context and engagement.
The story told was that of Daisy Legere, a late Métis matriarch. She related the recollections of her mother and grandmother of the looting from Indigenous burial sites in our city. With the approval of the Miywasin Friendship Centre, it was shown at the ceremony.
The mood in the room throughout the event was sombre, but hopeful. The removal of their ancestors and their belongings from sacred burial sites was clearly distressing and deeply personal to many of the Indigenous and Métis attendees, but there was also an air of relief as many of the remains and sacred artifacts are now coming home.
Miywasin and the Ancestor Reburial Project have contacted the University of Calgary and Simon Fraser University to have ancestral remains in their collections returned to their rightful burial grounds here in Medicine Hat. There is still work to be done, but it is clear that the collection of firsthand accounts is of vital importance in healing the wounds of the past.
The many oral histories in our collections are freely available on the Esplanade website at collections.esplanade.ca, or can be manually accessed by visiting the Archives.
If you have any stories to share, regardless of your cultural background, we would love to hear them. If you would like to have these stories immortalized, we can record them for storage in the Archives, or to share with the broader community. If you do not wish to be recorded, we are here to listen.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated “This August, the last of the human remains stored at the University of Alberta, stolen from their graves in Medicine Hat in 1967, were returned to their people.” While sacred artifacts were returned on Aug. 2, the last of the remains are scheduled to be returned in the fall.
