Lynda Holland writes in the Introduction, " The Dene Elders Project had it origins in 1977 when Lois Dalby from Saskatchewan Education in La Ronge hired Larry Hewitt to gather information about the life, stories and legends of the Dene of Saskatchewan. At that time the Saskatchewan Education collection included several materials on Cree history and culture, but very little on the Dene of the far north and northwest of the province.
Larry spent two and a half years interviewing Dene Elders throughout northern Saskatchewan. The result was 60 audiocassette tapes, 22 of these are from Saskatchewan's Far North. The majority of these tapes are in a combination of English and Dene. In most cases a translator was present to provide an English version of the words.
As Larry explains the project in one interview,
What they have me do is this. They said, "For years and years and years, we've had schools here for children but," they said "you know for all this time we never had anything about history or the culture." And they said, "Now we should hurry and do that because for too long we haven't had that." And they said, "Now a lot of the children don't appreciate what the people did before, what it was like, the kind of life they lived and how it was different from now." There were a lot of good things the way people used to live. Really good things. So, they said, "Learn as much as you can" they told me, "Go out and learn as much as you can from the people and we can make something out of this for the school. Maybe we'll change the way school is." I think it's a good idea." Volume Two of The Dene Elders Project collects stories, legends and recollections from residents of Wollaston Lake, Fond du Lac, Black Lake, Stony Rapids and Uranium City.
