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Treaty 8 launches in multimedia

Paul Bickford
Northern News Services
Monday, July 30, 2007

FORT SMITH - Treaty 8 has entered the multimedia age.

On July 24, Fort Smith's Northern Life Museum unveiled an interactive multimedia display to accompany a copy of the treaty which has been on display for about three years.

The new display provides background information on the treaty as well as conservation work in 1993 to preserve the document.

Fort Smith resident Jane Dragon said the display will help everyone, especially First Nations' people, learn more about the treaty.

"It's our people's life," she said, while looking over the display at the unveiling.

Dragon has a personal connection to the treaty. Her great-grandfather Pierre Mercredi, a fur trader with Hudson's Bay Company and an interpreter for the negotiations, was one of the signatories to the treaty.

Mary Pat Short, another Fort Smith resident, found the new display intriguing.

"This is a way to bring history alive," she said.

Short added the fact there are people in Fort Smith with ancestors who signed the treaty creates a "living connection" to the document. "That makes it particularly exciting."

Museum chair Jeri Miltenberger said people talk a lot about Treaty 8, but not many people have read it or know the history behind it.

"It's important for us all to know the context in which Treaty 8 was developed and signed, and what's happened since then, in order to understand our community and understand what's happened in the past and what's happening now," she said.

Museum curator Kevin Brunt explained the multimedia display contains a wealth of information, including details on such topics as the people involved in negotiations, how talks progressed, a map of the area covered by Treaty 8 and overall concepts of treaty-making in Canada.

The information is provided on a computer offering many pages of text, nearly an hour of audio and slide shows.

It would take a person about two-and-a-half hours to go through all the information.

Brunt said he is pleased with the multimedia display, the first of its kind at the museum.

Children seem particularly drawn to the display, he noted "That's fantastic. That's exactly what we want."

It was created with donations from the community, and only cost the museum $400-$500 to create.

A copy of the treaty signed in 1899 in Fort Fitzgerald, Alta., has been in the museum's collection for more than 30 years, but was in a secure dark room until put on display several years ago.

"This is a more formalized document," he noted. "The original is just sheets of paper."

The parchment document is 108 years old.