Bringing Our Stories Forward: Modern Immigration in Manitoba

Guest blog by Rachel Erickson, Assistant Curator

For the past four months, I’ve been working at the Manitoba Museum on a project about contemporary migration, just one part of the large capital renewal project Bringing Our Stories Forward. My project involves researching all aspects of migration to Manitoba; why do people come to Manitoba, and from where, what sort of policies have existed over the years that encourage (or discourage) migration, how have people settled in, and what sort of challenges might they face upon arrival. One of the aims of the project is to collect oral histories about modern migration to Manitoba, and potentially collect new objects that can be added to the museum’s collection, in order to paint a more inclusive picture of the diverse communities that now live in the province.

In August, I hosted a series of “pop-up museums” at three shopping centres in Winnipeg: Garden City, Polo Park, and Portage Place. I took out five museum objects (some with their own interesting migration histories), and set up a mini exhibition. We brought along an interactive activity that asked the public, “Do you have a migration story in your family?” and asked visitors to share stories about their decision to come to Manitoba, their journey here, and what it’s been like settling in.

Usually geese migrate from North to South and back again. Some goose decoys, however, migrated from Manitoba to British Columbia a hundred years ago, and have now come home to Manitoba again.

The more closely I looked at the items with my colleagues Dr. Randy Mooi (Curator of Zoology) and Dr. Diana Bizecki Robson (Curator of Botany), the more we learned. Six of the goose heads were Canada Geese, while six were White-Fronted, the latter species being common in western Manitoba. All the heads seem to have been treated with arsenic and some included glass eyes, both common taxidermy methods in the 1880s. The cane frame was made with common cattail. The bag itself is a thick canvas, with a zipper that is of 1930s or 1940s vintage. From this physical examination we can surmise that although the goose decoys themselves may date to 1880s Manitoba, the bag and cane frame probably date to about the 1940s.

Despite all of this rich historical background and physical examination by experts, we are still not entirely certain where these decoys were made or how old they are. Our best guess is built on stories married with facts. G. Fitzpatrick Dunn’s claim that the decoys were made in Manitoba in the 1880s is given weight because he was a good friend of the man who owned them and who would have provided this information. Another issue is that Canada Geese and White-fronted Geese are found throughout the western provinces, including the Pacific Coast region, so they could have been made in either of the places where the Sutherlands lived.

This is how curatorial investigation sometimes works – a lot of study, revision, and discussion, followed by a plausible but not quite definite explanation. Whatever the case, no one with whom we’ve spoken has ever seen goose decoys like these before. They are unique and look like they were custom made for an avid hunter with financial means. Contact us if you’ve ever seen anything resembling this!

By Kelly Burwash, Practicum student, Master of Arts in Cultural Studies/Curatorial Practices, University of Winnipeg

One of the great things about museums is that they can help foster relationships with (so-called) distant historical events. My placement at the Manitoba Museum involves doing research for an upcoming exhibition on the 150th anniversary of Confederation.

As a new resident of Manitoba, it has been especially interesting for me to research what Confederation means to the province’s unique context. Manitoba was, of course, not part of the original four provinces that became Canada on July 1, 1867. At the time, Canada consisted of Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Quebec. This does not mean that Manitoba was unaffected by actions in the East. During the discussions of the Quebec Conference leading up to Confederation, the politicians did not forget about this area. They decided future seats in the House of Commons would be set aside for the North West when it was brought in to Confederation. The politicians in the East thought that this would be an easy unification. Although this was not the case, the West was a part of Confederation in 1867 in conversation if not in result.

Charles Tupper himself came to Winnipeg in 1869 to secure the release of luggage belonging to his daughter Anna and son-in-law Donald Cameron, which had been seized by the Red River Resistance. In order to get the luggage back, he met with Louis Riel who agreed to return their belongings. The pair parted on good terms. These are just some of the stories that are found on the crazy quilt. Each of the many symbols tells a different story. It has been fascinating to research and amazing to find all these local connections to Confederation.

The Tupper Quilt is on loan from a Private Collection. Contributing research done by Anne Dawson.

By Jessica Adam, Practicum student, Master of Arts in Cultural Studies/Curatorial Practices, University of Winnipeg

In 2019, it will be the one hundredth anniversary of the Winnipeg General Strike, a movement that had major social and political repercussions across Canada. To commemorate this dramatic episode in Winnipeg’s history, The Manitoba Museum is researching a potential exhibition about the strike, and specifically, the experience of what it was like to be there – on the streets, in the crowds, part of the events. My role in this, as a student researcher working towards my MA in Curatorial Practices, has focused on first-hand accounts, archival photographs and materials from the Archives of Manitoba, as well as The Manitoba Museum’s collection of recorded oral histories. The recollections of people who personally witnessed these events add an extra dimension to the colourful history of Winnipeg, as they create a tangible link to the past. As I have worked my way through this research, I have become acutely aware of how connected we are to the past, overall. In many ways, this is part of what museums do –facilitate this connection for everyone through exhibitions and education.

Finally, I’ll end with an example. While there are many compelling stories in The Manitoba Museum’s oral history collection, I found Mr. Leslie Paulley’s description of the infamous Bloody Saturday very thrilling. In this brief segment, he discusses the violence that erupted on the streets of Winnipeg between the strikers and the Mounted Police:

They turned around and they recharged the crowd, this time with revolvers drawn. Previously, as I recall, they were only swinging batons. They swept down upon the crowd, and as they approached the gathering in front of the City Hall, they fired shots at it. One man dropped dead with a bullet through the heart on William Avenue, quite close to Main Street. Another man was shot through the head. And a third man died later in hospital of wounds to the chest. There were scores of people injured, some of them, of course, being the mounted men engaged in the charge. (Paulley, Leslie 110 – 38:45-39:34)

The Grasslands Gallery was developed as one of the first galleries at The Manitoba Museum when it opened 45 years ago. The Log Cabin exhibit in this gallery has been used intensively by our school programs ever since, and hundreds of thousands of visitors have enjoyed its pioneer flavour.

Whenever you hear someone say “pioneer flavour”, you know it’s time for a change.

The Log Cabin just didn’t seem as engaging as it could be, so we put in new spotlights and removed a plex-glass wall that was meant to protect the artifacts, but really just created a visual barrier. But most of all, I wanted our visitors to learn about the amazing artifacts in the cabin. Some of them had been there for almost half a century, but had never had their stories shared with the public.

The Log Cabin represents the lifestyle of people in the Red River Settlement between 1812 and the 1860s. This included people of various backgrounds, including Métis, Scottish settlers brought by Lord Selkirk to start an agricultural colony, First Nations, HBC workers, French Canadians, and more. While there were certainly some distinct cultural traditions among these different groups, there was also a good amount of blending, and this can be seen in some of the artifacts. In fact, by the 1860s you could say the Red River Settlement was as much a blended society as it was multi-cultural colony.

Some of these artifacts include the Alexander Sutherland Violin, which is more than 200 years old; the Catherine McPherson Spinning Wheel, made for her in the 1830s and based on a French model provided by the Bishop at St. Boniface; and the Rupert Franks chair, which was made for little Rupert when he was one year old in 1837.

When I started researching the objects in some depth, I was reminded again that the small details were important, and actually quite fascinating. How could we show folks the wear and tear produced by tiny feet on the footrest of the Rupert Franks chair? Also, how would our visitors be able to see the label inside the violin, a label which tells its own interesting story?

We decided that a high-definition touch screen with high resolution, beautiful images, would let visitors explore and see what the curators were seeing. I always remind myself that the museum and its stories belong to all Manitobans. So come to the museum and explore your artifacts! As you do so, you’ll learn about the amazing stories of people who lived hundreds of years ago and in their own way helped make the province that we live in today.

The Manitoba Museum would like to acknowledge the financial support provided for this project by the Province of Manitoba through the Heritage Grants Program.

One of the goals for our new exhibit “Nice Women Don’t Want the Vote”, about the 100^th anniversary of the right to vote for women in Manitoba, was to elicit visitors’ opinions about the vote for women and women’s rights today, and display these opinions in the exhibit itself. In just over three weeks we’ve put up over 150 comment cards on the exhibit wall. We asked visitors to respond to their choice of three statements and here are some results:

Most Manitobans would consider Jonathon Toews and the Chicago Blackhawks the crowning cultural exchange between the windy cities. But many are also aware that Winnipeg has often been referred to as the Chicago of the North. To understand why, we need to look back more than 100 years.

Both cities were rapidly expanding prairie metropolises built as much on optimism and corruption as a real economy. Their economies were both based on real estate, transportation hubs, and warehousing sites for the growing populations of the rural west. Chicago did grow much larger and earlier than Winnipeg, but our fair city expected to do the same thing, just a bit later. Our fantastic Legislative Building, the Shoal Lake aqueduct, and an architectural building boom all held out the promise of bigger and better (but mostly bigger) things to come. Huge numbers of immigrants flooded the city.

That was over 5 generations ago, almost too remote to recall, and Winnipeg has since the mid-1910s meandered down its own path.

On a recent trip to Chicago I was faced with concrete reminders of that early boom period in many ways, mostly in the form of historic architecture. Architect John Danley Atchison worked in Winnipeg from 1905-1923, and he was responsible for a number of buildings that still stand in Winnipeg. An American educated at the newly founded Chicago Institute of Art in the early 1890s, Atchison was a student of some of the key figures in the so-called “Chicago School of Architecture”, and worked in the famous firm of Jenney and Mundie before coming to Winnipeg. On a walking tour of the early skyscrapers of Chicago, I noticed a number of parallels between that work and Atchison’s buildings in Winnipeg.

The Manitoba Museum is planning an exhibit called “Nice Women Don’t Want the Vote”, opening in November, 2015, commemorating the Suffragist movement in Manitoba.  The exhibit will also discuss some of the ways Manitoba and Canada have struggled to provide full voting rights for all its citizens.

History is never neat and tidy, and the history of the franchise (the right to vote) in Canada is about as messy as it comes. While 1916 was a big year for voting rights, Manitoba being the first province in the country to extend the right to vote to women, we do need to remember that this was only for some women.

Enfranchisement, the right to vote in a democratic society, has only in the last 50 years been seen as a general right of all adults in Canada. Before this, it was a slow crawl to full suffrage. In 1867, only 11% of the population could vote, and these were almost exclusively white males that owned a certain amount of property or cash. Even before this, Catholics, non-British immigrants, Jacobites (!), Jews and First Nations were excluded in one way or another from voting in different parts of Canada. The vote was also denied to Asians in British Columbia until 1948, and to women in Quebec until 1940. The geographical isolation of some groups in the north until the second half of the 20^th century also hindered them from exercising their right to vote.

As we work to create this exhibit, we hope that Manitobans continue to contact us with artefacts, stories and opinions about the right to vote for women in Manitoban history.

The Manitoba Museum is currently working on an exhibit that will open in November 2015. “Nice Women Don’t Want the Vote”, named after a statement by former Manitoba Premier Sir Rodmond Roblin, commemorates the 100^th anniversary of the right to vote for women in the province in 2016.

Felt pennant, circa 1910-1916. Black and yellow were the colours of the Suffragist movement in North America. Donated by Warren West. H9-38-198. Copyright the Manitoba Museum.