CBC News·Canada·Saturday, September 26, 2026 at 11:00 AM

6 decades of Treaty 8 history repatriated to Dane-zaa people in northern B.C.

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Matt Preprost, Tom Summer

Anthropologists from the Ridington family began working alongside Dane-zaa elders in the 1960s to record traditional songs, oral histories, and everyday life spanning six decades.

Songs, stories, and oral history are helping communities settle land claims and revitalize their culture

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a smiling woman in headphones reads a brochure beside a table of audio equipment and exhibits — Nancy Chipesia listens to an archival recording taken by anthropologists Robin Ridington and Antonia Mills, who recorded hundreds of hours of oral history of the Dane-Zaa indigenous peoples of northeastern B.C. in the 1960s. (Matt Preprost/CBC)

Decades of recorded history, ancient songs, and family genealogies have officially returned home to Treaty 8 First Nations in B.C.'s Peace Region.

More than 60 years in the making, the Ridington Dane-zaa Archive was repatriated to Treaty 8 First Nations during a ceremony in Fort St. John, B.C., on Friday.

The vast trove includes more than 8,000 photos, hundreds of hours of audio and video recordings, and textual records tracing the lineage of family genealogies.

"I hope this archive gives justice to all of the different story tellers. I hope future generations of Dane-zaa will listen to and read the archive and be inspired in their own generations," anthropologist Robin Ridington told an audience of more than 100 people from his home in Victoria.

Ridington first came to the region in the late 1950s, when he ventured north from the United States as a young man swept up in the back-to-the-land movement.

"I was helping friends build a cabin in what they thought was unoccupied wilderness," he recalled. "I quickly learned that this was wrong."

a seated audience watches an older man on a large video screen as two presenters stand nearby at a community event in a banquet hall — Anthropologist Robin Ridington speaks to attendees during a repatriation ceremony in Fort St. John, B.C., on Friday, Sept. 25, 2026. (Matt Preprost/CBC)

A life-long project

Ridington later returned to the U.S. and changed his university major to anthropology.

In the 1960s, he and his then wife, Antonia Mills, came back to northeastern B.C. Their family began working alongside Dane-zaa elders to record traditional songs, oral histories, and everyday life spanning six decades.

It was a time of significant change and upheaval for Indigenous communities, which experienced considerable hardships under Canada's reserve system and Indian Act, and as industrial development led to rapid settlement across the region.

"The first thing I learned was to be a good listener. Every story is connected to every other story. The elders I came to know were born at the end of the 19th Century, which now seems like ancient history, and it is," Ridington said.

"But they carried with them the stories they had learned from their elders, so the stories go back many, many generations," he said.

two women work at a computer showing image scans — Prophet River First Nation member Cheyenne Kaiser-Conant exploring the now digitized Ridington Dane-zaa Archive with folklorist and daughter of the collectors, Amber Ridington, at a temporary archival space in Vancouver where the collection has been inventoried and prepared for return to home territory, in March 2026. (Photo by Morgan Tams, shared courtesy of Cheyenne Kaiser-Conant.)

From cassette to the cloud

Today, thousands of the family's historical audio reels, cassette tapes, videos and photographs have been digitized from their original file formats, consuming 14 terabytes of data storage.

The wealth of materials have helped settle outstanding land claims across the eight First Nations communities in B.C.'s portion of Treaty 8 territory.

They're also helping younger generations rediscover their history.

Cheyenne Kaiser-Conant, a member of the Prophet River First Nation, said the archive has been used to create language learning games for youth, including an Indigenous adaptation of the popular tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons.

"I'm very excited to see the archives come back to the communities," Kaiser-Conant said. "Having easier access to be able to listen to the potential language resources that are available, being able to hear our elders speak, our ancestors speak.

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The Tse’k’wa National Historic Site hosted a field school this summer, uncovering more than 12,000 years of Indigenous history. As the CBC's Tom Summer reports, it’s the third field school in five years, inviting students to the site located roughly 10 kilometres west of Fort St. John, B.C.

Len Morrisette, a filmmaker from Grande Prairie, Alta., is using the archive for a documentary he is making about Prophet River.

"The recordings and beautiful photos, I'm just barely scratching the surface," Morrissette said.

"Every nation is different. Different teachings, different ways; some have dreamers, medicine men. It's just been really cool to have a source to go to."

black and white photo of two women resting under a fabric shade outdoors; one lies on a mattress while the other writes in a notebook — Prophet River First Nation member Liza Wolf (left) and anthropologist Antonia Mills translate oral histories at Halfway River, 1966. The tape recorder in the foreground was used for documentation as well as playback during translation work with knowledge holders. (Photo by Robin Ridington, shared courtesy of Liza Wolf’s daughter Lorraine Wolf-Notseta Chipesia)

Vital for cultural revival

The archive, however, were not always easily accessible and once at risk of degradation and being lost.

Though Ridington maintained the collection privately, he frequently shared his reels and other records with families.

Over the decades, he sent out "hundreds and hundreds" of cassette tapes to community members eager to hear recordings of their relatives singing.

Teepee cover stolen 100 years ago finally being repatriated to Sask.

"People would play them over and over again until they just wore out," he said. "But now we have digital technology and now these songs and stories are more available and more accessible."

Efforts to inventory and digitize content in the collection began in 2020, and materials are still being processed.

two presenters address a seated audience beneath an “Archival Processing” presentation slide with photos of records — Folklorist Amber Ridington and Denée Renouf of the Treaty 8 Tribal Association during a repatriation ceremony in Fort St. John on Friday, Sept. 25, 2026. (Matt Preprost/CBC)

Ridington’s daughter, folklorist Amber Ridington, believes the archive is one of the largest collection of ethnographic material about sub-Arctic people in the world.

She said the records contains sacred and culturally sensitive knowledge, including accounts of residential schools, displacement, and the colonial impacts of racism and violence.

Because the information was scattered across dozens of hard drives and file formats copied over the years, identifying master materials required significant collaboration, she said.

"These are ... families' voices, stories, songs, and histories," she said. "Today is really about bringing them back to the people where they belong."

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Preserving the future

The Treaty 8 Tribal Association is the new steward of the collection.

The association is working with local communities and families on how the materials will be managed and which records, if any, will be made available to the public.

"We hold it in trust for the communities," said archive manager Denée Renouf.

LISTEN | Six decades of Treaty 8 history returning home:

Daybreak North8:54Six decades of Treaty 8 history returning home

Nearly 8000 recordings and photos to be handed back to families.

Renouf said the collection will help the association hold governments accountable for breaches of Treaty 8.

"We have some interviews and studies going back to the 1990s and 1980s," Renouf said.

"But this is two, three decades before that, which adds just another voice to our understanding of history, and the understanding of the promises that were supposed to be kept."

Subscribe to CBC’s Fort St. John Weekly for a roundup of the best news and stories from B.C.’s Peace and Northern Rockies.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Matt Preprost is a reporter with CBC British Columbia based in Fort St. John. He has covered the B.C Peace region and Northern Rockies since 2013. Email him at fsj@cbc.ca

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