It all started with a grant from Manitoba 150 to put on a homecoming celebration in McCreary...in 2020. The pandemic scrapped those plans, but the granting body allowed a pivot to use the funding for another local project, and a longtime dream of the McCreary Heritage Committee was realised. Alongside a Heritage Event in the summer of 2021, which they held in partnership with the McCreary Ag Society and the Burrows Trail Arts Council, the committee began a project to record oral histories of the area.

Pam Little, committee secretary, spearheaded the oral history project, from securing grants to hire two students for the summer to providing the framework and support to get it started. They used the McCreary historic walking tour as a starting point, and found interviewees, often former residents or employees of the locations, to share stories about each site on the tour.

The idea of recording oral history is to preserve some of the voices of McCreary, and Little says that having those stories really brings the locations to life.

Staff from NACTV travelled to McCreary, which is about 40 minutes north of the Neepawa studio, to do on-site training with the students, teaching them practical skills in conducting and filming interviews. Little’s main role once things got started was to help the students make contacts within the community; the bulk of the project was then done entirely by the students.

“I think the people that were interviewed really enjoyed being interviewed by the students,” says Little. “The students both were enthused about interviewing and they went away from the summer with these new skills. … That day that [the NACTV staff] spent with them they were quite excited about the interview process and what [they] taught them, and then the experience of doing it was great.”

Little considers the walking tour just a starting point. One of her personal goals is to record the stories of some of the people involved in the old logging trade in the area while they are still with us. Beyond that, she already has a list of potential interviewees to continue the oral history project.