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Arts, Culture And Digital Storytelling · Cariboo Signals

0:00
Casey: Hey there, welcome in. On today's episode, we're looking at Iqaluit, where a new generation of Inuit filmmakers and writers is turning language and land into film, books, and even tattoos. We've got rediscovered animation from fifty years ago, a VR creator who grew up in that city, and the question of who owns the archive. Plus, Williams Lake candidates and a Patricia Bay Park closure call. That and more, coming right up.
0:37
Casey: Welcome to Cariboo Signals, an AI-generated review of the latest tech news and ideas that affect our rural communities. I'm Casey. It's Monday, October 12th, 2026, and today's theme is Arts, Culture & Digital Storytelling. Reaching you from the heart of the Cariboo, the homeland of the Secwépemc, Tŝilhqot'in, and Dakelh nations.
0:57
Riley: And I'm Riley. Cameras, editing tools and streaming platforms keep getting cheaper, so today we're asking who gets to use them and who ends up doing the work somewhere else. Quick weather check: out at Horsefly Lake this morning it's overcast and around zero, with a high of 12 and a low of minus 2 overnight, light drizzle through the day, and about a 10 percent chance of precipitation. Across the Cariboo, 100 Mile House is around minus 2 with clear skies, Williams Lake around minus 1 with clear skies, Quesnel around zero and mainly clear, and Tatla Lake around minus 1 under overcast.
1:35
Casey: Most of today's news lands close to home, and a fair chunk of it is election news. We'll start there.
1:42
Casey: Two Williams Lake city council candidates have introduced themselves to the Williams Lake Tribune ahead of the general election on Saturday, October 17th. Nathan Wiebe is one of them. The Tribune put the same four questions to every councillor candidate: the most important issue facing Williams Lake, how they would tackle it, how they see the job of councillor, and what future they picture for the city. The excerpt we have carries the questions and not Wiebe's answers, so his positions will have to come from the full profile.
2:14
Riley: Kayla Zaruk is the other candidate in the Tribune's piece. Her profile uses the same four questions, and the photo is credited to Facebook. Her answers aren't in what we have either, so for now the public record on Williams Lake council is two names and a list of questions.
2:31
Casey: Voters deserve both full profiles in writing before the 17th.
2:36
Casey: The Tribune also reports that W̱SÁNEĆ hereditary chiefs have called for the closure of Patricia Bay Park on Vancouver Island. They made the call on Saturday, standing above a site they say fails to respect their ancestors. The Victoria News photo shows the water from the park's shoreline. Who decides what happens on land that holds a community's history, and who gets asked before the decision is made? As the chiefs frame it, the answer is the people whose ancestors are there.
3:04
Riley: That question about who gets consulted carries well beyond one park, and it's worth keeping in mind as we move on.
3:11
Riley: The Nieman Lab study reports that Fox News attacks the media roughly every 15 minutes, while CNN draws the same kind of attack about every 140 minutes. The study ties that gap to trust. Gallup found that only 8 percent of Republicans expressed trust in the news media in 2025, against 51 percent of Democrats. Overall trust hit a record low that year. New data show a small uptick among Republicans, but the gap is still wide. For a rural paper, the local advantage is that readers know the names on the masthead and the streets the reporters drive. A national platform can't offer that.
3:49
Casey: Fifteen minutes is a fast clock, and most local readers would never see that pace.
3:55
Casey: Adafruit published a write-up on automating a 35mm film scanning pipeline. The author shoots a Canon AE-1P and was spending about four hours on each roll of 36 frames. The work was scanning the negatives, inverting every file by hand in darktable, cleaning dust off the scans, then editing and filing the results. The build takes most of that work off their plate. The write-up documents a first attempt, which is the part most hobbyists never publish. Four hours a roll explains why so many people shoot one roll and stop.
4:26
Riley: The bottleneck moved from the camera to the scanner, which matters for anyone running a small archive.
4:33
Riley: The Verge reports that DistroKid has been quietly taking songs off its service, and artists found their work gone without notice. DistroKid confirmed to The Verge that the takedowns respond to a lawsuit from Universal Music Group. A musician in a small town usually reaches listeners through a distributor like this one, because no record office sits down the road. When the distributor pulls a catalogue, the artist's first contact is a support form, and the artists learned about it after the fact.
5:04
Casey: So the platform is the gatekeeper, and it changed the rules without telling anyone.
5:11
Casey: OpenMedia published a piece by Isabella Wen, a University of Toronto student and OpenMedia Youth Ambassador. Wen looks at Bill C-34 and its age restrictions for social media, and asks what online safety would look like if young people helped design it. This is a youth perspective, not a bill analysis. The snippet we have doesn't include her full argument, so her specific points about the bill will have to wait for the full text. The framing is clear enough, though. She wants young people in the room when the rules get written.
5:42
Riley: The Tyee reports that Conservative Party of BC Leader Lorne Doerkson fired the party's candidate in Victoria-Beacon Hill. The action followed social media posts the BC NDP flagged as racist, some of them celebrating Donald Trump, Elon Musk and other right-wing leaders. The Globe and Mail has reported Doerkson as interim leader. Victoria-Beacon Hill isn't one of the two ridings we cover. Still, the speed is the story. A provincial party moved within days once a candidate's old posts became the public record, and the same standard applies to every candidate on every ballot.
6:18
Casey: The Tyee's ICBC story follows the same Doerkson thread. MoveUP, the union representing ICBC employees, released a letter Doerkson sent on September 29th to the Insurance Bureau of Canada, the Law Society of BC, the Trial Lawyers Association of BC and the Canadian Bar Association. The letter promised to end the province's no-fault car insurance. CBC called the letter leaked and said it proposed a hybrid system that would allow lawsuits again. The NDP is warning of a hidden agenda. We haven't found a direct Doerkson response to the letter, so we are reporting the letter as reported, not as settled.
6:53
Riley: A letter to four professional bodies, and no response on the record yet. That's the detail to watch.
7:01
Riley: ArchDaily has a write-up on Chaume Sublimé, an ephemeral installation by the practice COAT, built for Montpellier's Festival des Architectures Vives in 2025. It turns humble reed grass into a temporary space of about 10 square metres. It was built to come down, and that is the point of the project. For a town weighing public art on a budget, an installation that lasts one season tests whether people will use a space before anyone pours a foundation.
7:30
Casey: Built to be taken down, and that's a design decision, not a shortfall.
7:35
Casey: Dezeen spoke with 2026 judge Daniel Libeskind, who says architecture is "much the same" as music. Readers can vote in this year's Dezeen Awards public vote, and Libeskind picked five projects that best represent his approach. He describes the work through composition and rhythm more than through function. That's a view of architecture as something experienced over time. For a small community, a public building gets judged the way a favourite album does, by whether people keep coming back.
8:04
Riley: Return visits are harder to count than votes, and nobody publishes that number for a library.
8:11
Riley: My East Kootenay Now reports that Kimberley mayoral candidate Sandra Roberts is running on 12 years of council experience, fiscal responsibility and strengthening the city's commercial sector. Kimberley is in the East Kootenay, not the Cariboo. The campaign is still a useful example of how a small-town mayoral race is built on a council record, which is the one thing a voter can check.
8:37
Casey: The New York Times reports that some Palestinian advocates are uneasy about a protest aimed at New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a longtime ally of their cause. They acknowledged a range of views within their movement, but said they were dismayed by the vitriol directed at him. It's far from the Cariboo. It's also a story about how a movement argues with its own allies, and small communities know that argument at a smaller scale.
9:03
Riley: Hackster News reports that RFOXiA built its MultiNav Pro+ module around an STMicroelectronics STM32 chip. It's a Bluetooth Low Energy module with long-range, mesh-capable connectivity, designed to compete with LoRa-based systems like Meshtastic. The company says it has tested the module to multiple miles line of sight. For a community with dead zones between towns, the question is whether radios like this let people keep reaching each other when the cell signal drops, and what a setup costs. For a place like Tatla Lake, that's the question to ask first.
9:38
Casey: That's the roundup. The Deep Dive picks up the thread of who gets heard, and who gets left out of the room, so stick around for that.
9:46
Riley: Literacy Quesnel Society offers adult literacy, digital literacy and one-on-one tutoring in Quesnel. It runs an Indigenous stream, and it hosts an English conversation circle for newcomers, which is a good place to practise without pressure. If you've been meaning to brush up on reading, or on the computer skills a job application now demands, that's where to start. Find them at literacyquesnel.ca.
10:12
Casey: Digital literacy is the part people underestimate. You can't make a video, sign a lease online or file a tax return without it.
10:19
Casey: From here, we'll turn to the question underneath today's theme.
10:23
Riley: The New York Times ran a piece this month on Iqaluit, the only city in Canada's Arctic, where a new generation of Inuit writers and artists is turning language, land and identity into books, films and even tattoos. When a talented kid leaves a small town, is that a loss for the town or a win for the kid, and what does the town owe the people who stay?
10:44
Casey: Start with the policy, because the article doesn't lead with it. Nunavut's Inuit Language Protection Act, as publicly reported, requires businesses and government offices to offer services and communications in Inuktitut or Inuinnaqtun, including signs, posters, advertising and invoices.
11:01
Riley: That touches every poster in town. Nunavut's languages commissioner has argued that Inuktut advertising pays off, which makes it a market argument as well as a rights one.
11:12
Casey: The commissioner says it pays off. But compliance costs money, and somebody covers it. Who pays for a shop to print a bilingual sign?
11:19
Riley: Every creative economy has a subsidy underneath it. The question is whether the subsidy builds something that keeps running after the grant ends. Public money has backed Inuktut in film, television and digital media for years, and language funding programs continue to run.
11:35
Casey: Long isn't the same as large. I'd want to know how much of that money reaches the people making the work, and how much goes to administering it.
11:44
Riley: Then look at what the money and the people found. Reporting describes a rediscovery of animation by Inuit filmmakers from about half a century ago, including work by Aoudla Pudlat and Pitaloosie Saila, after that work had been effectively lost. It's back, and audiences are seeing it.
12:02
Casey: Lost is the important word. Those films went missing because nobody kept the prints, the masters or the paperwork that proves who made them. That's an archive problem before it's a film problem.
12:13
Riley: The rediscovery happened because someone went looking. Digital tools make looking cheaper, and a digitized print makes the work findable again.
12:22
Casey: Cheaper to find, and no cheaper to keep. A film nobody holds the rights to becomes an orphan. Who owns the archive the Iqaluit animators are rediscovering now?
12:31
Riley: The reporting doesn't say. But the training pipeline is the piece I'd watch. Reporting describes a media production program teaching Inuit youth scripting and filmmaking, and the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation has launched hands-on training for Inuit youth. That's an institutional base, and it answers the research question better than a single talent profile can.
12:55
Casey: A training program is only a base if the graduates still have work after the course. Did anyone report how many of them stayed in the field?
13:02
Riley: Not that I've seen. So we have the programs, not their outcomes. Nyla Innuksuk is the example I'd use. As publicly reported, she grew up in Iqaluit and works as a director, writer and VR creator, and she runs Mixtape VR. A kid from the Arctic capital is running a digital storytelling company.
13:20
Casey: Innuksuk built a company, and her audience isn't sitting in Iqaluit. Who buys the VR experience she makes? If it's festival juries and institutional buyers in southern cities, then the talent left and the audience left with it.
13:33
Riley: You're describing distribution, which is what digital tools change. A VR piece can reach a viewer in Toronto or Tokyo without a theatre or a broadcaster in the middle. Thirty years ago that wasn't possible at all.
13:47
Casey: Thirty years ago the problem was getting a film into a theatre. Now the problem is getting noticed on a platform someone else owns. Those are different gatekeepers, and the second one doesn't publish its rules.
13:59
Riley: The reach is real, though. imagineNATIVE in Toronto screens Inuit filmmakers, and TIFF has featured circumpolar Indigenous filmmakers. Those festivals are how work from half a century ago reaches a global audience today.
14:13
Casey: Festivals are the export channel. Who watches the work in Iqaluit? If the local audience is small and the festival audience is large, the city is a farm team for southern screens.
14:23
Riley: Some of that is the economics of a small market. A city that size can't fill a multiplex every weekend. Nobody expects it to.
14:31
Casey: Nobody expects it, and that's my point. If success means being shown in Toronto, Iqaluit gets judged by what it exports. Nobody has said that's the right measure.
14:41
Riley: So what measure would you use?
14:43
Casey: The audience a town keeps. Whether the people who watch the film live there, and whether they can see it in their own language.
14:50
Riley: That's where language and distribution meet, and it cuts both ways. A film in Inuktut can reach a worldwide audience and a smaller audience at home in the same language. Digital distribution could preserve the language or thin it out. The tools don't choose which one happens.
15:07
Casey: A subtitled file on a global platform is still a film about Iqaluit made for people who don't speak Inuktut. The language survives in the archive and gets lost in the audience.
15:18
Riley: The Iqaluit work is in Inuktut, and that's the point. Local audiences get the original, and outsiders get the subtitles. Subtitles are the reason the film travels at all.
15:29
Casey: Only if the local audience has a screen and a reason to watch. The language rules cover signs and invoices. They don't cover whether a teenager in Iqaluit can stream a film in her own language on her phone.
15:41
Riley: Identity also sells, and the tattoos in the piece prove it. A tattoo design is about as local as a product gets. The artist is down the street and the client walks in off the same street. It's also the only marketing campaign that never needs a renewal.
15:57
Casey: Unless the design is bad, and then it's a lifetime campaign. Identity sells, and that's the risk. Once the symbol is the product, the buyer may not ask who made the design. The local artist gets the commission, and the brand gets the story.
16:11
Riley: Then the good version is a local economy with a global price tag. The artist keeps the commission and the buyer gets the work from the source.
16:19
Casey: That only holds if the artist keeps the copyright. Nobody in the article mentions who holds the rights to the designs.
16:27
Riley: That's a real gap, and it's the next policy problem. The language law already covers the signs. Streaming and rights are where it stops.
16:36
Casey: Now bring it south. A festival organizer in a town like Quesnel or Williams Lake books touring acts into a hall and hopes the tickets sell, and the act's fee leaves town on the night. A painter in the same town sells work to people who walk past the gallery window.
16:51
Riley: Which is the Iqaluit question at a smaller scale. If the festival organizer keeps booking acts from away, is the town a consumer or a creator?
17:00
Casey: The painter who stayed is the test case. Her audience is local, so her success shows up in the people who keep coming back. Nobody sends her work to a festival in Toronto, and nobody counts her as an export.
17:12
Riley: She can be counted. A painter can photograph the work, put it online and sell prints to buyers in other provinces. That's the same distribution Innuksuk uses, with a smaller canvas.
17:23
Casey: Then her audience becomes a platform's audience, and the platform decides who sees it. The gatekeeping problem is still there. It's just smaller.
17:32
Riley: A small town has more doors now than it did. The festival organizer can put a local filmmaker's work on the same bill as a touring act. That's a local audience that didn't exist when the only screen in town ran a broadcast schedule.
17:46
Casey: It exists if someone pays for the hall, the projector and the staff. Who owns the record of what gets screened, and who still has the file in five years?
17:55
Riley: That's the structural question I'd put on the table. Ownership of the archive. The Iqaluit animation is the warning. Lost work can be found, but only if someone kept a copy and wrote down who made it.
18:07
Casey: Agreed on the archive. It doesn't answer the measurement question, though. A town can keep every file and still lose its filmmakers to a bigger city.
18:16
Riley: Then measure the audience. If the people who stayed can see what the people who left made, that's a creative economy. If they can't, it's a talent export with a nice website.
18:27
Casey: A clean line, and I'd rather a town measure the audience than the export. Audiences are harder to count. Festival attendance shows up on a ticket report. Who in Williams Lake watched the film on a phone, nobody has a number for.
18:40
Riley: Then the first experiment is cheap. A town screens one local film a season, tracks who comes, and publishes the number with the method attached. No new grant. Just a count.
18:50
Casey: Labelled counts with the method attached. A count with no method is a press release.
18:56
Riley: The objection is the labour. Somebody has to stand at the door with a clicker and then write it up. It sounds like bingo night with a projector, and volunteer jobs end.
19:06
Casey: They end, and the count goes with them. That's the part a grant cycle never covers.
19:11
Riley: So the count goes into the regional district's records, not one volunteer's inbox. A public body can hold a dataset for the long term, the way a library holds a collection.
19:22
Casey: A library holds a collection because someone pays a librarian. Is anyone paying to hold a town's film count?
19:28
Riley: Not today. That's the gap, and I don't think it closes by itself.
19:32
Casey: Then we agree on what's missing. You still think the export is a success. I still think it's a loss nobody can see.
19:39
Riley: The export is a success for the person who left. It's a loss for the people who stayed and never got the screening.
19:47
Casey: The loss is real, and the count will say whether it's a loss or a bigger door. Nobody has taken that count yet.
19:52
Riley: Who would you want to take it?
19:55
Casey: Whoever owns the hall.
19:56
Riley: Then that's the first name on the list. Same address you heard on Monday, October 5: feedback at cariboo signals dot c-a. If you run a hall or a festival that keeps its audience at home, that's the story I'd want. Have a great rest of your day.
20:11
Casey: Ha. Bring a clicker to the hall, and count carefully.