Beginning September 2023 lasting through September 2025, the Nay’dini’aa Na’ Kayax’ Ts’iłk’ey Kezlaen Ts’ełtsii (Chickaloon Native Village We Are Making Connections) Project will take steps to address Tribal historic and intergenerational trauma and “forced social changes [that] have disrupted Tribal unity and created challenges to the traditional ways of life, values and relational systems.”[1]  The project includes digitizing selected items from the CVTC Permanent Collections and Archives, developing finding aids for the digitized materials, completing community driven metadata for each new digital item through a series of in-person and virtual gatherings with CNV Tribal citizens and other regional Ahtna Dene, contextualizing materials through curation and inclusion of Ahtna cultural attributes and links to materials recently repatriated from the Anchorage Museum, migrating the Ugheldze Hwle Cilaes (Information We Share) digital collections from Washington State University to the CVTC network, and working with a professional website designer to personalize Ugheldze Hwle Cilaes so that it better represents the CNV community.

PROJECT UPDATE: Due to the cancellation of the National Endowment of the Humanities current grant programs, funding for the project was terminated early in April 2025. The CVTC Culture & Historic Preservation Department is currently determining next steps and how to complete the final phases of the project. Project deliverables still uncompleted include the redesign of the Ugheldze Hwle Cilaes website, several community crowdsourcing information gatherings to assist in further contextualizing the repatriated Anchorage Museum materials and the final upload of the CVTC materials that were digitized during the project.

[1] Kenyon, DenYelle Baete and Jessica S. Carter. “Ethnic Identity, Sense of Community, and Psychological Well-being Among Northern Plains American Indian Youth.” Journal of Community Psychology 39.1 (2011): 1-9.