This week marks one year since Chris Chang-Yen Phillips took over the position of Edmonton’s Historian Laureate. After a busy year of connecting with Edmontonians and the city’s stories, Chris shared some insight into what the gig has taught him at the halfway point. Edmonton is currently the only city in Canada that appoints a… Read more »
One year ago, seven heroes began a journey to venture through universal themes of life, including ancestral history, home, learning, artistic expression, spirituality & healing, justice and migration. These “Natural Leaders”—with backgrounds from a multitude of countries worldwide—met monthly at the Multicultural Health Brokers Cooperative to connect through painting, storytelling and letter scribing. As months… Read more »
What do you get when you combine two historians, an artist, and many local communities? YEG Tales! Supported by a ECAMP Partnership Demonstration micro-grant, the YEG Tales team met with numerous local cultural groups, connecting over their stories and reproducing them in comic book form! We spoke with historian Leslie Holmes about what they learned about art, story, and… Read more »
Beginning with 2016’s edition of Silver Skate, festival-goers have enjoyed a new heritage experience down in Hawrelak. The Heritage Village Project created three Indigenous winter experiences including a winter hunting camp, a Métis camp and a winter tipi, allowing Silver Skate to build community around sharing Indigenous stories with Edmontonians. We caught up with Creative Director Ritchie Velthuis to find… Read more »
On Monday, January 23rd, Edmonton City Council approved the EHC’s recommendations for funding from the Heritage Community Investment Program’s 2017 run. From new published books and online exhibits to oral histories and artistic celebrations, here are 16 examples of the great heritage work currently happening in our city. Here are the summaries of 16 new projects and existing… Read more »
In 2016, the Film & Video Arts Society of Alberta (FAVA) began a project to transfer more than three decades’ worth of Alberta media art created by its members to modern digital media. The originals will live on in the Provincial Archives of Alberta, while FAVA uses the digital copies to more widely share their members’ art… Read more »
April 19, 2016 marked the 100 year anniversary of the passage of Alberta’s Act for Equal Suffrage. To mark the occasion, The Alberta League Encouraging Storytelling (TALES) developed a traveling storytelling piece wherein costumed storytellers told the story of the fight for women’s suffrage in Alberta—in character! We caught up with TALES’ Renee Englot about her experience… Read more »
As someone who is still fairly new to the formal heritage sector, I am constantly learning more about the heritage community and its operating norms. And as an Indigenous person, I continually struggle with the emphasis placed on built heritage as our primary link to the past and where we come from as a community. I recently… Read more »
In 2015, the Francis Winspear Centre for Music embarked on a project to create a digital archive of key moments in Edmonton’s musical history. With Know Your Winspear, what began as an online collection photographs, ads, pamphlets and other ephemera,has become a physical museum of sorts, sharing this history with guests on the Winspear’s lobby and backstage… Read more »
Last November, Chief Wilton Littlechild, Mayor Don Iveson and MLA Rod Loyola sat with Edmonton Heritage Council’s board and staff to speak about their vision of how Edmontonians would live into (and beyond) the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) Calls to Action. At the time, the release of the final report of the TRC was… Read more »