This past November, ELAR partnered with the Indigenous Peoples’ Centre for Documentation, Research and Information (Docip) to create an online archiving platform using Mukurtu CMS. Senior Archive Assistant, Martha Tsutsui spent four weeks in Geneva, Switzerland, interning at the Docip headquarters as a consultant on the Oral History Project. The materials archived included digital heritage items collected from two symposiums (2013 and 2015) that brought indigenous peoples from all over the world together to share their stories at the United Nations in Geneva. At these symposiums, elders were interviewed and recorded by youth participants. The digital heritage collected from these events is now in the process of being archived on the Mukurtu site: http://bridge-to-the-future.com. The project focused on archiving the materials on a platform which would be useful to the community, user-friendly, and built according the community’s wishes and goals for archiving the materials. The majority of the site’s materials are open to anyone with an internet connection (with access restrictions on sensitive materials per the communities’ wishes).

Youth participants at the symposiums and subsequent workshops have committed to continue to collect digital heritage from their elders, which they can self-upload onto the mukurtu platform.

This video was produced from the 2013 Symposium:

Currently, the platform is still in the early stages and materials are still being uploaded. Docip planning to officially launch its Mukurtu site later this year.

Learn more about the Oral History and Memory Project here: https://www.docip.org/en/oral-history-and-memory/

By Martha Tsutsui Billins