Brent Pin­heiro

brent.pin­heiro@guardian.co.tt

Days af­ter the Bar­ba­dos gov­ern­ment’s an­nounce­ment that it would buy the Banyan archives from T&T caused an up­roar in some quar­ters, the THA has re­vealed it is work­ing on a dig­i­tal archive meant to pre­serve To­ba­go’s his­to­ry. Speak­ing ex­clu­sive­ly with Guardian Me­dia at Car­ifes­ta XV in Bar­ba­dos,  Sec­re­tary of Tourism, Cul­ture, An­tiq­ui­ties & Trans­porta­tion Tashia Bur­ris said they are work­ing on a dig­i­tal her­itage archive.

She said, “We have tons of footage, we have old VHS tapes, we have CDs, we have peo­ple who have record­ed his­to­ry in their hous­es. We still have a lot of our knowl­edge bear­ers alive that were able to record the sto­ries live and to be able to pre­serve them in a data­base and a cloud set­up that is de­signed for stor­age of those kinds of repli­cas of our his­to­ry. And for me, that is crit­i­cal be­cause if we don't do that, we're go­ing to lose that. We're go­ing to lose that his­to­ry.”

Bur­ris said the pri­or­i­ty is to get the ma­te­r­i­al un­der the di­vi­sion’s care in­to the archives and then the gen­er­al­ly pub­lic will be in­vit­ed to con­tribute to their own ma­te­r­i­al. The di­vi­sion al­so plans to ad­vo­cate for the re­turn of items from To­ba­go’s past to be brought back to the is­land. “We are try­ing to build out our mu­se­ums, so there are some ex­hibits that we will have to re­quest to make sure that we have cer­tain things res­i­dent in To­ba­go that re­al­ly tru­ly be­long to To­ba­go. But we're start­ing with what we have first be­fore we can go out­side, be­cause it's not just what the Na­tion­al Archives has, we al­so have some stuff in mu­se­ums in Eng­land, for ex­am­ple. So when that time comes, we want to be able to write those let­ters and re­quest our items, our arte­facts to come back home.”

Weigh­ing in on the loss of the Banyan archives, Bur­ris ex­pressed dis­ap­point­ment in the loss. She said, “I feel like if we don't take the time when it is crit­i­cal to ap­pre­ci­ate the val­ue of what we have, the val­ue of us telling our sto­ries and the val­ues of those records. And I don't un­der­stand why it took the Bar­ba­dos gov­ern­ment for them to buy it for the kind of con­ver­sa­tion that has start­ed hap­pen­ing around it to hap­pen. This is some­thing that I think the av­er­age Trin­bag­on­ian should feel our ways about.”

But she al­so urged stake­hold­ers to pre­serve oth­er archives be­fore they too are lost. “we may have quote-un­quote lost Banyan, but we have Gayelle. Are we putting things in place to make sure that the same thing doesn't hap­pen to Gayelle? The same thing doesn't hap­pen to TTT archives? The same thing doesn't hap­pen to wher­ev­er we have archives stored? So, I think that we have to walk away from this ex­pe­ri­ence learn­ing a les­son that it shouldn't take some­body else to ap­pre­ci­ate what we have, that we should put sys­tems in place to ap­pre­ci­ate what we have be­cause we have it,” she said.

The Banyan archives are his­tor­i­cal records from Trinidad and To­ba­go, which cap­ture the dig­i­tal archives of the last 40 years of the Caribbean.