A story of Helen Crowchief
"Helen Crowchief tends a community garden on the Kainai Nation (Stand Off, Alberta). In this video portrait, she speaks about the land, the language her grandmother taught her among the seed rows, and what it means to grow food in a place your family has never left."
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HELEN: My grandmother used to tell us stories by the fire. She'd say, 'These stories are not mine. They belong to the land. When I am gone, you must carry them.' I didn't understand what she meant until I was forty years old and my grandmother had been gone for ten. I looked around and realized — the people who spoke our language fluently, there were maybe a hundred left. And most of them were over seventy. That's when I started recording. Not just the words, but the faces. The hands. The way my uncle's eyes change when he talks about the buffalo. You can't put that in a book. INTERVIEWER: What do you want people to take from these recordings? HELEN: I want our children to know that their language is not a relic. It is alive. It is waiting for them to speak it.
Helen Crowchief is a Blackfoot elder from the Kainai Nation in southern Alberta. She has spent her life teaching the Blackfoot language to children and preserving the stories of her grandmother's generation through video and oral history.
Your language is not just words. It is a map of how your people see the world. When you lose the language, you lose the map.
Songs That Changed My Life
Songs that shaped a chapter, carried a memory, or became inseparable from a moment in time.
Buffalo Soldier
Bob Marley
"My uncle played this record every morning. It made me proud to be who I am, even when the world told us to be ashamed."
Drum Song
Buffy Sainte-Marie
"Buffy's voice was the first time I heard our pain and our strength in the same breath."
One Drum
Northern Cree Singers
"The powwow drum — it's not a song you listen to. It's a heartbeat you join."
A small space for family, neighbours, and visitors to leave a note about Helen Crowchief. Reflections are read by our team before they appear here.
Handled with care.
Every submission is reviewed before publication. Memory House prioritizes consent, dignity, privacy, cultural respect, and the right to request corrections or removal.
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James 'Jimmy' Donnelly · 1940s
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A preserved letter written by Private James 'Jimmy' Donnelly from the front in December 1944, sent home to his young wife in Kingston, Ontario. The letter — carefully kept in a biscuit tin for eighty years — speaks of cold nights, a photograph of his children, and the hope of spring.
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