Ottawa Archives - Part 2

-Ashley Austin

This is the second post of a two-part series.

            In November 2025, Ling and I travelled to Ottawa to visit Library and Archives Canada and the Canadian Museum of History. This was an important trip in order to access documents that are not available online or electronically.

Canadian Museum of History. (Image from the Canadian Museum of History Website)

            On our third and final day in Ottawa, we went to the Canadian Museum of History, located across the bridge in Gatineau, Quebec. There we meet with the Curator of Indigenous Histories and Contemporary Cultures, who had helped to oversee the process of accessing archival documents on the Oak River/Sioux Valley Dakota Nation area. The purpose of our visit was to access a collection of textual archives that were donated to the museum decades ago by two American researchers who had visited Oak River in 1914, 1951, and 1952 to learn about Canadian Dakotas on the prairies.        

            One of the researchers was particularly interested in the ways of Dakota women and spent much time interviewing women in the Oak River area, with the intent of writing a book on the subject. While a book was never published, the collected information remains in boxes in the museums archival room.

            The Canadian Museum of History has kindly offered to digitize the contents of these boxes and share them with Sioux Valley Dakota Nation community members, who can review the material and reconnect with it. The records contain tens of thousands of pages of cultural and traditional material, stories, photographs, and letters, some of which may be considered sensitive; therefore, our team has made the decision to limit our interaction with these records. Our goal is to index the contents as quickly as possible and prepare them for review by community members.       

            A new committee is being formed in the community strictly for reviewing these documents and providing guidance and feedback on the access, storage, and dissemination of this information. If you or someone you know from Sioux Valley Dakota Nation is interested in joining this committee, please contact NAME at PHONE NUMBER or EMAIL for more details. Binders of printed material can also be viewed or checked out from the Governance Building. As this is ongoing project with the Canadian Museum of History, we expect to receive more digitized material soon and will make it accessible to the committee as soon as possible.