#bringithome Campaign Urges Indigenous Canadians to Connect With Their Heritage
Members of the Tahltan Nation are calling Indigenous Canadians to share visual documents of their heritage online and with their nations.
Dease Lake, British Columbia – March 19, 2024 – The Tahltan Central Government (TCG), has created a plan to protect and preserve their history and are calling to Canada to get involved. Their culture and heritage department has began the process of creating a community archive to preserve their nations history. A large part of this process has been negotiating with the Royal British Columbia Museum and BC Archives to begin repatriating Indigenous items back to their communities. While initial conversations have been positive, The TCG has received no indication from either party on how long this process may take.
The culture and heritage department has decided to start an online social media campaign in hopes of starting community archives from the bottom-up. They are urging all and any Indigenous Canadians, especially those that no longer have immediate connections to their nation, to search for visual documentation of their ancestry and share any findings with the #bringithome. The TCG has experienced great success connecting people and communities from old documents people have found and brought in to them. They hope that by spreading this campaign, they can not only make more connections, but encourage other nations to start creating their own archives and give Indigenous peoples a reason to come home.
“If there’s information out there about your nation, about your family, anything to do with your identity as an Indigenous Individual, you are supposed to have unaltered access to that information, and you’re supposed to be able to bring it… bring it home,” says Sandra Marion, Director of Cultural Heritage at Tahltan Central Government. Sandra has been very active in the creation of TCG’s archive and has a lot of hope for this campaign.
The TCG hopes that a successful public campaign celebrating Indigenous heritage will push institutional archives to recognize the value repatriating documents would bring to communities nation-wide.
ABOUT THE TAHLTAN NATION
The Tahltan Central Government (TCG) is the representing governing body of the Tahltan Nation. The Tahltan Nation’s territory encompasses a large part of Northwest British Columbia and 11% of all of the province as a whole. For more information about the Tahltan Nation, visit: www.tahltan.org
For further information on the campaign, please contact: Abby Perrin, Communications Director and Media Contact, Tahltan Central Government, 778-227-3982, abigailperrin@shaw.ca