Indigenous Projects in Canada

The Indigenous Storybooks Canada Project
In 2018, EwB began to provide support for collaboration with Indigenous Storybooks – a Canadian website for children, families, community members and educators. The Indigenous Storybooks project aims to make the text, images, and audio of open access stories available in Indigenous languages, English, French, and Spanish. These translated stories currently come from the Little Cree Books project in Alberta, Canada – a groundbreaking digital initiative promoting literacy in the Cree language. The site indigenousstorybookscanada.ca also has a resource section that includes reviewed and vetted storytelling resources to support educators to bring traditional Indigenous stories into their classrooms.

Remember Podcast: Recordings of Elders Explored
Launched on Canada’s National Truth and Reconciliation day in 2022, Education without Borders has partnered with 100.7 FM The Raven to produce an Indigenous-led podcast exploring memories of First Nations elders. Episodes are available here, and cover themes such as hunting and food, traditional burial grounds, growing up on the reserve, and more.

Funding for this podcast was provided by EwB, with a donation from Hammerco Lawyers LLP in memory of Mel Beaton, to contribute to a legacy of reconciliation and cultural education for the benefit of Canadian society. Funding was also supplemented by the UBC Comics Studies Cluster.

Graphic Novel Project
Archival recordings of Elders featured in the “Remember” podcasts have been translated into three short comics. Each collection of clips explores life in the Bute Inlet in decades past, and the “Remember” Comics Project uses comic art to visually re-present selections of the podcast’s recordings to produce graphic materials that engage with the podcast’s themes. This project is a collaboration between EwB, the UBC Comics Studies Cluster, and the Homalco First Nation. Read more in an article by CBC here. This project has stimulated interest in other Indigenous communities such as the Haida Gwai, Sechelt and Anishinabe nations.