September 2011 - Manitoba Museum

Posted on: Friday September 30, 2011

The Manitoba Museum is home to over 2.6 million artifacts and specimens. One role of the Collections and Conservation staff is to maintain records for each item from the time it is offered to the museum, accepted into the collection and then accessed for research and exhibits or loaned to other institutions. While the numbers may be smaller, the same Collections Management practices are used in community museums throughout the province.

Recently, Nancy Anderson, Collections Assistant-Human History, instructed a training course on Collections Management in Shilo, MB. The aim of the course is to give participants the tools to properly manage a museum collection. The course is part of the Association of Manitoba Museum’s Certificate Program in Museum Practice. The thirteen participants represented ten museums throughout the province, including three new museums in Argyle, Brandon, and Richer.

Four individuals sitting around a table in discussion with each other over papers and notebooks.

Participants take on the role of a Collecting Committee at a fictional museum and debate whether a list of objects fits the museum’s Collections Policy.

Following the path of a new artifact through a collections procedures flow chart.

In order to be good stewards of our heritage, museums need to be selective in what they accept into their collection. Participants frequently want to know how to fairly represent the various families, businesses, and organizations within their community without alienating community supporters or overwhelming the museum’s volunteers and resources. In other words, how do you say no? The answer to that question is to develop a Collections Policy that lets people know what you do collect. A strong policy builds on the museum’s Statement of Purpose (why do we exist?) and describes how and what the museum will collect and how the collection will be used.

Sometimes it seems like the motto for Collections Management could be “Paperwork is my life”. The course stressed the importance of establishing procedures for record keeping for museum collections. Good records insure the museums are meeting their legal and professional responsibilities. The accumulated information about an item enhances its value. Proper catalogue records link that item with its story so that the knowledge can be shared with others.

Museum Stories: Collections & Conservation

Collections & Conservation

Tuesday May 27, 2025

Posted on: Monday September 26, 2011

By Kevin Brownlee, past Curator of Archaeology

I woke up at 6:00 am to get a good start on the day. Grant was already up and we decided to get out to the spruce bog early to gather roots. We needed to gather 250 feet of roots to make 500 feet of finished split roots. The estimate was 5 feet of roots for each rib, 40 ribs require 200 feet and the seams to be sewn would require the other 50 feet.

The bog was relatively dry and the moss was like a thick mattress over the spruce roots. Digging spruce roots does not hurt the trees. The bog where we gathered the roots has been used by Grant for many years and the trees are very healthy. After a few hours we gathered 250 feet of roots and we headed back to Grant and Christy’s place to prepare the roots.

All photographs from this entry are the property of Kevin Brownlee (personal collection)

Grant digging roots.

Grant Jim and Kevin rolling up 250 feet of roots.

Grant with full roll of roots 250 feet in length.

The roots were boiled to speed up the peeling process, once they boiled for an hour Myra and I began to peal and split the roots.

Kevin with pot of boiling spruce roots.

Kevin and Myra pealing spruce roots.

Jim and Grant made the building frame and started to prepare the bark. Only two sheets of birch bark were used to make the canoe. Once the sheets were cut to match each other and the building frame was placed over top weighted down with cinder blocks. The bark was cut from the outer edge to the building frame (called gores) to allow the bark to form fit the canoe shape. The bark was then folded up and held in place by wooden stakes.

Grant with canoe building frame on top of bark.

Pealed and split spruce roots ready for sewing.

We finished pealing the roots and splitting them before the end of the day and Grant started making the inner gunwales, outer gunwales and gunwale caps. While we made great progress on the canoe in one day of work it was far from looking like a canoe.

Museum Stories: Archaeology

Archaeology

Tuesday July 30, 2024

A Criddle Riddle

Sometimes objects come in to the Archaeology lab that aren’t really artifacts, but are still interesting in their own right.

Archaeology

Thursday February 19, 2015

Public Archaeology Press

Archaeology

Tuesday February 17, 2015

Public Archaeology – What Should have been in The News

Posted on: Monday September 12, 2011

A lot of conservation initiatives around the world involve fencing off areas to “protect” the wild species contained within. Although that strategy can work well in ecosystems that are rarely disturbed, like tropical rainforests, it doesn’t work as well in ecosystems that evolved with natural disturbances. North American prairies used to contain migratory herbivores (e.g. bison, antelope) that consumed large quantities of the vegetation. Bison are unique in that they also engaged in extensive wallowing activities, creating permanent bowl-shaped depressions on the landscape. Old journal entries from some of the first European explorers describe bison herds as taking days to pass and leaving huge swaths of trampled and disturbed soil in their wake. Wild fires following drought and lightning strikes were also common. Native annual plants like ragweed, goosefoot, and bugseeds were likely adapted to colonize these disturbed areas.

Some human activities mimic those of bison.

Buffalograss benefits from heavy grazing.

Nowadays certain human-related disturbances mimic those of the bison. Cattle grazing is somewhat similar to bison grazing and is likely responsible for the continued persistent of the rare Buffalograss (Buchloe dactyloides) in the Souris River valley. Without grazing, Buffalograss would likely be outcompeted by taller grasses and exotic weeds.

In sand dune habitats, where I was doing field work last week, I found rare plants like Bugseeds (Corispermum sp.), Hairy Prairie Clover (Dalea villosa), Winged Pigweed (Cycloloma atriplicifolium) and Bearded Nut-sedge (Cyperus squarrosus) growing on the sandy edges of gravel roads, on fire guards, in sand pits, and on beach dunes where the feet of many a bikini-clad pedestrian had trodden. Clearly certain human activities can help provide habitat for these rare annuals, acting if you will as substitutes for wild bison.

Image: Trampling by humans may help create habitat for rare bugseed plants at Grand Beach.

Although a moderate amount of disturbance is necessary to create the habitat these rare plants need, too much disturbance is a bad thing. I was unable to relocate some of the historical populations of bugseeds because the areas where they had grown in the past were now heavily impacted by humans and our machinery, being dominated by weeds introduced to Canada from Europe and Asia. Clearly, finding the right balance of disturbance, not too much and not too little, is important for the conservation of certain rare plants.

Dune cutaways along roadsides in sandy areas provide habitat for rare bugseed plants.

Bearded nutsedge grows on bare sand.

The observation that disturbances are sometimes beneficial has led many scientists to conclude that both controlled burns and the re-introduction of bison (or the tolerance of cattle grazing) is essential for the conservation of prairie habitats. Sand dunes are in particular need of disturbance as nearly a quarter of the rare species on Canada’s endangered species list are restricted to open or lightly vegetated sand dunes. Less than 1% of the sand dune ecosystems in the prairies consist of open dunes. So ironically, protecting a species may mean tolerating and even facilitating a little bit of what appears to be destruction.

Image: Winged pigweed grows on natural sand dunes and on fireguards at CFB Shilo.

Dr. Diana Bizecki Robson

Curator of Botany

Dr. Bizecki Robson obtained a Master’s Degree in Plant Ecology at the University of Saskatchewan studying rare plants of the mixed grass prairies. After working as an environmental consultant and sessional lecturer…

Meet Dr. Bizecki Robson

Museum Stories: Botany

Botany

Wednesday September 25, 2024

Pawing for Prairie Plants

Manitoba’s native prairies are endangered because most of them have been cultivated for annual crop production. As a result, some of the rarest species of plants…

Botany

Monday December 4, 2023

Roots, Shoots, Flowers, & Fruits: The Anatomy of a Gingerbread Cookie

December is the time of year when people tend to eat desserts with lots of spices in them, including…

Botany

Monday April 3, 2023

The Fungus Among Us

Fungi grow just about everywhere and yet we are usually ignorant of their presence until they produce mushrooms in our lawns…

Posted on: Friday September 9, 2011

It’s a simple tool: a rolling pin made from a single piece of wood, fashioned into a two-foot long rod tapered at both ends. Sometimes these are called French rolling pins, but this one was made in Latvia over one hundred years ago and made its way to Winnipeg in 1909. A young woman named Rytze (1885-1962) followed her married sister to Canada, and the rolling pin was part of Rytze’s trousseau (items gathered together for a woman to bring into her household once she was married). And in fact Rytze did marry a man named Schmul Aron in Winnipeg on January 10, 1910. It was an outdoor wedding (strange for January) held in the yard of their Rabbi’s house. Rytze and Schmul knew each other from their childhood in Latvia, where they grew up in neighbouring villages.

Schmul (Simon) Aron was avoiding military conscription in Latvia when he decided to leave his homeland in 1909. He travelled through France, Spain, Germany, Argentina and Boston before deciding on Winnipeg as a final destination, where friends and family awaited him. According to family legend, Mr. Aron had earned over $500 tailoring and selling bananas on the ship from Argentina to Boston, but it was all stolen by the captain! By the 1920s, Mr. Aron had set up a tailor shop on Main St. which served the people of Winnipeg for decades.

The Arons’ daughter Sophie Shinewald, who is now 98 years old, donated the rolling pin to the Museum this summer, and with it the memories of her life and her parents. Artifacts, no matter how humble or seemingly commonplace, often act as a touchstone of stories and forgotten journeys. Together, the artifacts at the Manitoba Museum tell our shared history through the charming, strange, and sometimes heartbreaking stories of our ancestors.

A special thanks to Sophie Shinewald for the donation of the rolling pin and her family stories.

Dr. Roland Sawatzky

Curator of History

Roland Sawatzky joined The Manitoba Museum in 2011. He received his B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Winnipeg, M.A. in Anthropology from the University of South Carolina, and Ph.D. in Archaeology…

Meet Dr. Roland Sawatzky