Archives Week, the first week of February, is celebrated with a week-long Open House, where folks are invited to come, look at the exhibits and explore many aspects of life in northern Saskatchewan.
This year’s exhibits, which are the most recent in Guest’s ongoing commitment to getting all the thousands of photos and collections digitized, so they are available for broader use.
This year, highlighted in the display are: Gordon and Joyce Stomp, 53 years of commercial fishing, which they continue to this day.“This year we didn’t have as many donations, so these are mostly newly digitized pictures that we have and there’s five of them,” Graham Guest, archival historian with the Northern Saskatchewan Archives, in an interview with the Northern Advocate.
Stomp was the Overseer for the birthing of the former La Ronge Airport community, in the process to become the Northern Village of Air Ronge, and the second Mayor of the community, spanning several decades.
Together, the Stomp’s run a business, which includes fishing, processing and selling locally caught fish.
Other exhibits include: Wallaston Lake Caribou Project 1975; Postcards of the North; DNS (Department of Northern Saskatchewan) DisCOVERS the North; The Good Old Days.
In the Wollaston Lake project, six women demonstrated and taught the process of cutting Caribou meat, making dried meat and preparing hides.
Postcards includes greetings with northern-focused photos mainly of La Ronge and Waskesiu, including some “goofy,” images.
In. the 1970’s DNS staff travelled the north gathering stories and photos of from northerners to document traditional land-use practices.
‘The Good Old Days’ involves photos of northern folks living on the trapline, practicing traditional skills and crafts.
A corner of the exhibit is dedicated to the use of students, who hare challenged with exploring the exhibits and information in the Archives from a deeper perspective.
The exhibit also includes large volumes of photos and information gathered in the Archives. They are set out on tables so people can sit and explore the contents at their leisure.
Opened in 2002, the Northern Saskatchewan Archives is housed in the Pahkisimon Nuyeʔáh Library System (PNLS) building, which has been climatized to be a place where archival documents are kept at appropriate conditions, including temperatures, to be safe for long-time storage.
