DEH CHO - An innovative project is using Deh Cho students to help create an online learning tool that will introduce a new generation to an important historical event.

Deanna Jumbo, left, interviews elder Joe Punch in Trout Lake for the Berger project. The project is creating an interactive website containing both archival and new material about the Berger Inquiry. - photo courtesy of Peter Gorrie

Thirty-six years ago Justice Thomas Berger travelled throughout the North gathering input on the proposed Mackenzie Valley Pipeline. Now a group of journalists and staff who were connected to the inquiry are travelling to the schools in the Deh Cho communities that Berger visited to gather material for an interactive website.

The final product, which will be launched in Fort Simpson, will be aimed at all Canadians. The website will include background and archival material from the inquiry as well as new material that students are helping to create, said Brian Jaffray, the Dehcho Divisional Education Council's liaison with the project.

The inquiry was a ground-breaking approach to how the federal government dealt with aboriginal people and students need to learn about it before they graduate, Jaffray said. The website will be in part a tool to get students actively engaged in making connections between the past and the present.

The inquiry is a key piece of aboriginal history and the report contained recommendations that are still relevant today, he said. Although the inquiry is the focal point for the website other topics will branch off from it.

The impetus for the project started to build two years ago. It began when Drew Ann Wake was cleaning out a storage area and found a box of original audio tapes she recorded while covering the inquiry as a young CBC reporter.

Together with Linda MacCannell, a photographer, Wake decided to bring the tapes along with some photographs to the territory to see if anyone was interested in them. During their first trip in 2009 the women were looking for contemporaries who they thought would be the most interested in seeing themselves and family members in the material.

Wake remembers being shocked when 30 to 35-year-olds who were born after the inquiry started stopping them, asking to see the material.

"There was really an interest in passing this from a generation of parents to a generation of children," she said.

In 2010, Wake was introduced to Terry Jaffray, the superintendent of the Dehcho Divisional Education Council, who invited her to show the photos in the schools. That September, Wake put photos on the walls of the schools in Jean Marie River, Nahanni Butte, Fort Simpson, Wrigley and Fort Liard and challenged students to name the people in them. In the evenings elders would come and write down the correct answers.

"Everyone got so excited so they started to tell stories," she said.

That led Wake to invite Michael Jackson, who was Berger's special counsel during the inquiry, to accompany her with his collection of approximately 1,000 photos.

"It's been interesting to see the continuity and the change," Jackson said.

While things such as the connection to the land have stayed the same many things, including the roads to Kakisa and Nahanni Butte, are different.

The inquiry set the tone for self-determination in the North, said Jackson, who's been trying to explain to students that they hold destiny in their hands.

Other members of the project include Peter Gorrie, who was a reporter with News of the North during the inquiry, and local filmmaker Felix Isiah.

Since May 30 the group has been travelling to all of the Deh Cho schools interacting with the students. Students have been helping create material for the website by interviewing elders who spoke at the inquiry. In Trout Lake, students put their questions to elders Joe Punch and Edward Jumbo.

The students have been very engaged in the project, said Wake.

"They leap in and they ask great questions," she said.

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