Story 1: Voices of the Land Introduction

Voices of the Land is a digital public space that supports communities to create, share, discover, and celebrate Indigenous content online. We tried, to the best of our ability, to honours and safeguard the practices of Indigenous data sovereignty.

Voices of the Land is the culmination of collaborations with Elders, Knowledge Keepers, Indigenous community members, community organizations, and public libraries throughout Alberta. Voices of the Land is hosted and supported by the Government of Alberta’s Public Library Services Branch.

The work is led by Edmonton public library and guided by a steering committee of librarians across the province. This digital space is specifically built to care for Indigenous content online, and according to the needs and interests of diverse communities across the region. Voices of the Land aims to be an ongoing conversation that will live, grow and change as the community deems necessary.

We built this website as a database for Indigenous digital stories in Edmonton, but as the project grew so did the bounds. It is now pan-Albertan, but we are happy to receive submissions from nearly anywhere. We wanted a safer place to store digital stories without surrendering ownership, rights, or data to website owners. We will touch on all these topics throughout the training, but if you have any questions feel free to contact us through VoL@gov.ab.ca
Through this training, we will teach you exactly how to participate on Voices of the Land. For now, essentially you tell a story in whatever medium you’re comfortable with, you fill out the digital form, and then you submit it and we take the time to approve it.

In this series you will learn the background to the site, our website base—Mukurtu, some basics about Indigenous data sovereignty, navigation of most of the major features , and understand the ins and outs of posting content on the site as an individual. Further modules will teach you about creating and managing a community.