Search Help

How does this work?
There are many ways to search the collections of the Freedom Archives. Below is a brief guide that will help you conduct effective searches. Note, anytime you search for anything in the Freedom Archives, the first results that appear will be our digitized items. Information for items that have yet to be scanned or yet to be digitized can still be viewed, but only by clicking on the show link that will display the hidden (non-digitized) items. If you are interested in accessing these non-digitized materials, please email info@freedomarchives.org.
Exploring the Collections without the Search Bar
Under the heading Browse By Collection, you’ll notice most of the Freedom Archives’ major collections. These collections have an image as well as a short description of what you’ll find in that collection. Click on that image to instantly explore that specific collection.
Basic Searching
You can always type what you’re looking for into the search bar. Certain searches may generate hundreds of results, so sometimes it will help to use quotation marks to help narrow down your results. For instance, searching for the phrase Black Liberation will generate all of our holdings that contain the words Black and Liberation, while searching for “Black Liberation” (in quotation marks) will only generate our records that have those two words next to each other.
Advanced Searching
The Freedom Archives search site also understands Boolean search logic. Click on this link for a brief tutorial on how to use Boolean search logic. Our search function also understands “fuzzy searches.” Fuzzy searches utilize the (*) and will find matches even when users misspell words or enter in only partial words for the search. For example, searching for liber* will produce results for liberation/liberate/liberates/etc.
Keyword Searches
You’ll notice that under the heading KEYWORDS, there are a number of words, phrases or names that describe content. Sometimes these are also called “tags.” Clicking on these words is essentially the same as conducting a basic search.

Search Results

Rivers That Were: Working Water & Beaver Taught Salmon How to Jump Rivers That Were: Working Water & Beaver Taught Salmon How to Jump
Date: 1/1/2002Call Number: CD 199Format: CDProducers: Feather, Fin ProductionsCollection: Compact discs and videos representing digitized copies of analog tapes
The Columbia River, flowing through the Pacific Northwest, is the fourth largest river in North America. The Colorado River, the major river in the desert Southwest, is a tiny stream compared to the Columbia, but it is probably the most litigated river in the world. Both these rivers once flowed with a force that overwhelmed the people who tried to navigate their rapids or control their currents and flood flows. That was until the Hoover, Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dams were built in the 1930s, finally taming these wild rivers and conscripting them into industrial service.Alternative Radio presents Rivers That Were, a two-part documentary by Oregon-based award-winning producer Barbara Bernstein. These two hours explore the long-term consequences of over a century of redesigning nature to suit commercial and industrial needs. The programs contrast these historic mindsets with new approaches that try to design with nature. The programs juxtapose the voices and viewpoints of Native Americans, barge operators, water engineers, environmentalists, policy makers and others who live and work in the watersheds of these two mythic Western rivers.Part One:Ê Working Water compares two environmental crises. On the Colorado River Basin, it's the ongoing effort to restore the Salton Sea. On the Columbia, it's the confounding crisis of how to clean up one of the most toxic sites in the world, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.Part Two:Ê Beaver Taught Salmon How To Jump recreates the once natural and free-flowing tributaries and mainstem of the Columbia River, the Great River of the West and compares what was with a transformed landscape of culverted urban creeks, inundated waterfalls and rapids and industrialized waterways.