In a situation of language endangerment, communities express a strong need for the documentation and preservation of their language which is increasingly threatened as the older generations of monolinguals pass away. This paper presents the documentation project of Innu, an endangered Algonquian language spoken by roughly 13,000 people in 11 communities spread out over Northeastern Quebec and Labrador in Canada. It will specifically address the issues related to retrieving and converting a large body of existing linguistic materials into digital format, and making old language records available for the benefit of the people in their efforts of revitalization. Since the beginning of the 20th century, hydroelectric, mining and forestry projects are undertaken on the ancestral lands of the Innus. Many of these projects were carried out without their consent. However, since the late seventies, strategies for successful negotiations with government and private developers include discussions with the Innus to ensure a constructive dialogue with the province's economic development partners. Innu Elders play a critical role in these exercises by providing traditional ecological knowledge, e.g. about waterways, and documenting where people hunt, fish, trap, gather and camp. The outcome of these surveys constitutes precious information about the Innu culture, traditions, as well as language, since many of the Elders were monolinguals. As an illustration, in the early eighties, the Attikamek-Innu Council led a major investigation on territorial use and occupancy. The collected material comprises the testimony of more than 400 Innus and over one thousand hours of recordings. This documentation and all other existing analog records are precious for the collective memory and history of the Innu communities, and need to be located, retrieved, digitalised, and archived for the long-term sustainability of the language. We undertook this enterprise in partnership with the Innu Cultural Institute. With the constitution of an archive comprising old records and original materials, the Innu language documentation project aims to make an important contribution to the ongoing developments in language documentation research and a major step in building a valuable tool for language maintenance and revitalization
