Gwich'in Tribal Council

Published purpose

The GTC-GSCI fonds contains the complete research and administrative records created by the Gwich’in Tribal Council Department of Culture and Heritage (GTC-CH), formerly the Gwich’in Social and Cultural Institute (GSCI). Donated to the Northwest Territories Archives (NWT Archives) in 2018, this collection was added in 2021 to the Canada Memory of the World Register (part of the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme) in acknowledgement of its incredible linguistic and cultural richness and significance to the Gwich’in, northern, and Canadian cultural landscapes. This irreplaceable collection preserves Indigenous traditional knowledge, language, and cultural material, created with the specific goal of safeguarding and promoting Gwich’in language and culture. This project proposes a continued partnership between GTC-CH and the NWT Archives to hire a professional archivist. Now entering its fourth phase, the project is titled “Arrangement, description and digitization of special media in the GSCI-GTC fonds.” This phase is part of a broader, multi-phase effort to fully arrange, describe, and preserve the GTC-GSCI fonds. The partnership between the GTC and the NWT Archives has resulted in an agreement that will provide security, high preservation standards, advanced intellectual control, and increased access for the material.