
The Best Practices in Rural Development Project
Rural Alberta's Indigenous communities are the subject of a research and documentation effort that ran two and a half years, wrapping up in September 2012. The project pairs community engagement with youth training, sending young people out with cameras to interview elders and leaders about what makes local economic development work. The resulting footage covers initiatives in renewable energy, tourism, and agriculture, with community members explaining how partnerships with non-Indigenous businesses and organizations got projects off the ground without sidelining Indigenous knowledge or values. Interview subjects speak directly about the practices behind their successes, and the youth participants describe what they learned about their own culture and history while doing the interviewing and editing. The film stays close to Alberta and to the people running these programs rather than generalizing, treating the specific choices behind each initiative as the real subject. It reads as a working record of what these communities tried and what held together.