Collins, Jayme. “In the Burn Zone.” Archival Ecologies, season 1, episode 1, 17 December 2024. 36:48.
Archival Ecologies investigates how fires, floods, mold blooms, and other ecological events are affecting cultural collections and the artifacts and memories they preserve. During the 2021 summer heatwave in the Pacific Northwest, the historic town of Lytton, BC, and nearby First Nations reserves suffered a catastrophic wildfire that took local archives, museums, and cultural collections with it. In this first season of Archival Ecologies, we’ll tell the stories of those collections and the communities who have stewarded them.
The podcast is created and hosted by Jayme Collins with research, writing, and production support from Jamie Rodriguez, Kavya Kamath, and Molly Taylor. Music by Hamilton Poe. Sincere thanks to Kouvenda Media for their partnership on this project. A production of Blue Lab with support from Princeton University.
Two years after a devastating 2021 wildfire burned through much of their village center, community members gather in Lytton, British Columbia for a prayer walk. Big questions inspire and inflect the event: How can the community rebuild? And what will the new community look like? Lytton community members weigh in on preserving their multicultural histories and recovering community identity when the artifacts and cultural collections that represented them are gone.
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