Click here to access our YouTube channel (where our videos are housed): Sweetgrass Stories: A 21st Century Perspective.
This time last year we applied for our first grant ever. Wes Fineday – an Elder, Knowledge Keeper and Medicine Man from Sweetgrass – offered the Cree Literacy Network the very rare privilege of working with him directly. Aaron Fay and I jumped at the chance and Canadian Heritage provided the funding.
We have now collected approximately 30 hours of recordings, representing between 50 and 80 individual stories, varying in length from five minutes to an hour. Mostly in Cree, but some also include Wes’s own translations into English. And we’re planning to collect even more in the coming year.
As a gifted Knowledge Keeper, Wes is uniquely placed to provide that “21st-century Perspective” on the events that helped shape the beloved books, Sacred Stories of the Sweet Grass Cree and Plains Cree Texts. It is both an honour and a responsibility to be part of this work, along with my friend and colleague Aaron Fay (whose videos of Wes have had well over a half-million views on TikTok, on YouTube, but mostly on FaceBook, all during the working term of the grant).
At Wes’s direction, we have embedded here one of the first recordings from our collection. This early video captures Wes’s personal declaration of his ownership of this material, and of the stature and autonomy with which he has chosen to share it through us (because people are sure to ask). We’re also preparing transcriptions and translations as time permits (using Aaron’s kiyânaw: Transcribe software), but for the moment, while we’re able, gathering the recordings is our primary goal.
Video 1: As Aaron Fay recently wrote on FaceBook: “We know there’s a larger discussion around copyright, ownership, when & how to share stories and the language. For the videos produced for this project, we’re operating at the direction of our Elder Wes Fineday and we look to him for direction regarding our project as we try to do things in the best way we know how. Here are his thoughts and words as it pertains to sharing these stories.”
“…they have no standing to question why do I share these things that are so sacred, because many people have heard that these stories are not for the general public. But if I don’t share them, what happens to the people … they will hit a brick wall.”
n time, we hope we may be able to provide full transcriptions of each of these videos, to encourage learners to listen to fully fluent language and read along. For now, we invited you to simply listen to the Cree. To understand what you can, and to come back again later to understand a little more. This is a powerful way of learning!
One Response
It struck me how hearing Wes Fineday read in the [y]-dialect brings the language to life in a way text alone can’t. Do you find that listeners pick up pronunciation nuances faster through these audio recordings?