KNOWLEDGE
Research at the Canadian Museum of Civilization
Fall 2005
Knowledge is a new electronic newsletter on research at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. News briefs may be used by media integrally, or be expanded upon by adding information gathered through interviews with the researchers.
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mailto:sylvain.raymond@civilization.ca
Personal Accounts Breathe Life into Prairie Exhibition
"There is not a better land under the sun," wrote a homesteader in Manitoba to his kin back in Scotland. An immigrant from Russia was less flattering. Canada, he complained in a letter home, "has 13 months of winter in a year." Both letters are quoted in Acres of Dreams: Settling the Canadian Prairies, a new exhibition at the Canadian Museum of Civilization (opening on October 28, 2005). The exhibition draws heavily on such personal accounts to tell the story of Prairie immigration at the turn of the last century. The letters and other writings were mined from anthologies, public archives and old newspapers by curator Sandra Morton Weizman and her colleagues. Over several months, Weizman says, they discovered and reviewed "hundreds and hundreds" of letters, many written in German or Ukrainian. "It was a huge amount of work to pull this material together," she says, "but I knew that it would bring the exhibition to life if we had these personal stories — these human voices." Those voices range from the euphoric to the despairing, and provide a unique insight into the triumphs and travails of Prairie settlers.
Contact: Sandra Morton Weizman, Principal Curator, Canadian Museum of Civilization
New York Barrios Spark Research into Canada's "Urban Aboriginals"
An idea conceived on the streets of Manhattan has given rise to a major research project that should help answer some fundamental questions about Aboriginal communities in urban Canada. The project is headed by Morgan Baillargeon, a curator at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. During a visit to New York in 2003, Baillargeon marvelled at the city's distinct neighbourhoods. "I was just blown away by the fact that on one street, everyone is Portuguese. Cross over a few blocks more and almost everyone — and everything — is Cuban," says Baillargeon. It struck him as a great way to maintain a group's language and culture. And it got him thinking about Aboriginal people in Canada's main cities, where distinctly Aboriginal neighbourhoods "simply don't exist." Without those neighbourhoods, he wondered, how do urban Aboriginals preserve their traditional knowledge, language, spiritual beliefs and art forms — in other words, their Aboriginal identity? That question is now at the core of a multi-year research project that Baillargeon hopes will lead to the Museum's first exhibition focussing on urban Aboriginals.
Contact: Morgan Baillargeon, Curator of Ethnology, Canadian Museum of Civilization
The Extraordinary Collection of a Lover of Quebec Culture
When Nettie Covey Sharpe died in 2002 at the age of 95, Quebec lost an exceptional collector, but the Canadian Museum of Civilization inherited an enormous collection of more than 3,000 Quebec heritage objects dating from the sixteenth century to the present. Jean-François Blanchette, Curator of Canadian Material Culture, is in charge of researching these artifacts of incomparable ethnological value. "Mrs. Sharpe had incredible intuition, and she has assembled some of the best examples of early French-Canadian furnishings, ornamental objects, religious art and more." The curator, who knew Nettie Sharpe well, notes that from her childhood, this anglophone was fascinated by French-Canadian culture. "She started collecting heritage objects in the ‘30s, at a time when only a few initiates were interested in them." This allowed her to acquire magnificent pieces, which the general public will be able to admire in an exhibition on Quebec traditional art, scheduled for 2008.
Contact: Jean-François Blanchette, Curator of Canadian Material Culture, Canadian Museum of Civilization
Val-Morin: Post Office Under the Historian's Magnifying Glass
The history of the Val-Morin Station post office is undergoing meticulous scrutiny. This post office, which closed its doors in 1983, had remained in the same family during its nearly 70 years of operation. At one time, it was even the site of an unusual, but very agreeable, "ménage à quatre" in which two sisters, married to two brothers, worked there. Of greatest interest to Canadian Postal Museum Historian John Willis, however, is the fact that Val-Morin epitomizes "the central role played by the rural postal system in Canada over the last 150 years." The entire contents of the post office were acquired by the Museum several years after its closure. Dr. Willis is now poring over the considerable daily work of its postmasters, and researching the socio-economic context in which this popular Laurentian resort evolved. His research will be used in an upcoming exhibition on the history of rural mail service in Canada.
Contact: John Willis, Historian, Canadian Postal Museum, Canadian Museum of Civilization
To interview CMC researchers, media may contact:
Rachael Duplisea
rachael.duplisea@civilization.ca
(819) 776-7167 or
Gabrielle Tassé
gabrielle.tasse@civilization.ca
819) 776-7169
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