Collins, Jayme. “Salvage.” Archival Ecologies, season 1, episode 2, 6 March 2024. 38:56.
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.
In the wake of the fire, concerns about contamination slow down efforts to salvage material from the burn site. The BC Heritage Emergency Response Network aids Lytton’s organizations—especially the Lytton Chinese History Museum, founded by Lorna Fandrich—to access and recover material from the sites. Most of Lorna’s collection burned, but she was able to recover about 200 objects that will provide the foundation for the new museum. With a combination of salvaged and newly acquired objects, Lorna plans to rebuild the Lytton Chinese History Museum to tell the same story: the history of Chinese life in the Fraser Canyon region.
© 2024 Jayme Collins and Blue Lab. All rights reserved.