DYK Discovery Archives - Page 3 of 4

By Amelia Fay, Curator of Anthropology & HBC Museum Collection

With Orange Shirt Day (National Day for Truth and Reconciliation) on the horizon, folks might be thinking about their role in Truth and Reconciliation. Many Indigenous leaders have argued the need to understand the truth before reconciliation, and this is where museums can step in and play an important role.

Although museums carry a lot of colonial baggage, my colleagues and I at the Manitoba Museum (past and present) have been working hard to make our museum a safe space to learn about history. Not only do we have some great exhibits and programs to help visitors engage with difficult histories, we also have a lot of resources available on both our website and YouTube channel that you can view from home.

Not sure where to begin? Below are a few topics that I think are a great starting place, no matter where you are in your reconciliation learning journey.

The colonial process in Canada started long before Confederation, so I encourage visitors to reconsider the history of the fur trade, including the early beginnings of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Watch the following video to learn more about the Hudson’s Bay Company Royal Charter.

What does the phrase ‘We Are All Treaty People’ mean? Visit our friends at the Treaty Relations Commission of Manitoba’s Agowiidiwinan Centre at the Forks and then come check out the numerous Treaty exhibits throughout the Museum Galleries.
Take time to learn more about Residential Schools in Manitoba, visit the schoolhouse exhibit in the Prairies Gallery and use the digital kiosks embedded in the desks. You can also see the same information on our website when you visit ManitobaMuseum.ca/ResidentialSchools.

For many non-Indigenous readers, learning more about these topics might bring up a lot of feelings and make you uncomfortable, and that’s okay. The important thing is to not dismiss information that challenges what you knew about Canadian history, but instead sit with the discomfort and think about why you might feel this way. Part of our shared journey towards reconciliation involves hard work like this, but it’s important work that we all must undertake.

The digital kiosk in our Prairies Gallery Schoolhouse exhibit provides opportunities for learning and reflection about the truth of residential schools. Image © Manitoba Museum/Ian McCausland

The Orange Shirt Day Reflection Wall encourages you to share
your thoughts and make a commitment to reconciliation. Image © Manitoba Museum

Visit the HBC Gallery to learn about the history of the Fur Trade and the
relationships between Indigenous Peoples and Euro-Canadian fur traders. Image © Manitoba Museum

Join us for a time of learning, reflection, and response at Orange Shirt Days @ the Manitoba Museum. Three days of free admission to all areas September 30 to October 2. No tickets required.

Dr. Amelia Fay

Curator of Anthropology & the HBC Museum Collection

Amelia Fay is Curator of Anthropology and the HBC Museum Collection at the Manitoba Museum. She received her BA in Anthropology from the University of Manitoba (2004), an MA in Archaeology…

Meet Dr. Amelia Fay

By Scott Young, Planetarium Astronomer

Have you ever seen the stars? Like, really SEEN them, from a dark place, far away from the lights of the city. If you have, you’ll know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, you are missing one of the great beauties of the natural world.

The night sky is magical. Take even the most jaded person and put them under the stars, and it gives them a sense of awe and wonder. We can’t help it – we are hard-wired to be amazed by the stars.

I’m sure there is some explanation for why that is. Probably, because our ancient ancestors who *didn’t* like the stars also didn’t figure out the cycles of the heavens and the progression of the seasons, and so didn’t make it through a winter that they couldn’t predict. The sky has given us clock, calendar, and a certainty about our understanding of the universe around us, and civilization was built upon that knowledge. The sky was one of humanity’s greatest discoveries, right up there with fire, the wheel, and chocolate.

Today, with satellite weather and pocket-sized supercomputers, we don’t need the sky for such basic purposes. (It still works, by the way, in case the zombie apocalypse or robot uprising sets us back to the dark ages.) We have telescopes in space and are flying drones on other planets. Yet more than ever, people are looking to the sky with interest. Even with all the things we know about the universe, there’s still a sense of mystery and wonder that makes us want to experience it ourselves.

And you can. You don’t need a telescope to start exploring the sky tonight. All you need is a clear sky, and a place even a little sheltered from nearby lights. Even from downtown Winnipeg you can see the Moon, the brighter planets, and many of the familiar star patterns like the Big Dipper or Summer Triangle. An ordinary pair of binoculars can give you a closer view and expand the number of objects you can track down. Books, apps, and online videos can teach you the sky one piece at a time, and each discovery you make will be yours. It doesn’t matter that Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter four centuries ago – when you discover them for the first time in a pair of binoculars, you will feel the same thrill of excitement he did, and your personal universe will have gotten a little bit larger.

Silhouettes of an adult and child. The adult points up into the night sky full of stars, as the child looks up through binoculars.

Exploring the sky has another important benefit: it’s fun and relaxing, and it gives you a broader sense of perspective. When contemplating the three hundred billion suns that make up our own Milky Way or if any of their trillions of worlds are inhabited, our smaller earthly concerns fade into the background. The pale blue dot we live on is just a speck in the vast universe, and the things that divide us are outnumbered by the things that unite us. We all live under the same sky, and the stars belong to everyone. Get to know our sky, and you get to know yourself and your place in the grand scheme of things.

Explore Manitoba’s Skies!

Visit the Planetarium this summer to venture to far-off galaxies, witness spectacular solar systems, and get to know the stars in our very own skies.

Buy your tickets today to reserve your seat under the stars!

Scott Young

Planetarium Astronomer

Scott is the Planetarium Astronomer at the Manitoba Museum, developing astronomy and science programs. He has been an informal science educator for thirty years, working in the planetarium and science centre field both at The Manitoba Museum and also at the Alice G. Wallace Planetarium in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. Scott is an active amateur astronomer and a past-President of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.

By Dr. Graham Young
Past Curator of Paleontology & Geology

Walking into the Manitoba Museum’s Earth History Gallery, you see an enticing undersea scene in the middle distance. Passing through an opening, you find yourself in a small room that feels like an underwater observatory.

Here in the Ancient Seas exhibit, a giant curved screen wraps around two walls, and on that screen you see projected a coral-lined boulder shore, with strange and wonderful sea creatures: large cephalopods similar to a “squid in a shell” swim in the water, flower-like crinoids wave in the dappled sunlight, and giant trilobites related to crabs and spiders plough through seafloor sediment. This submarine world represents our best understanding of what the Churchill area looked like about 450 million years ago during the Ordovician Period, long before polar bears or mosquitoes appeared on this planet.

Organisms depicted in the Ancient Seas exhibit include the swimming coiled nautiloids, flower-like sea lilies, sponges, corals, and seaweeds.

All of the Ancient Seas animations are based on fossils found in Manitoba, such as these coiled nautiloid cephalopods from Churchill and Garson.

In this beautiful exhibit, one of the things visitors find most remarkable is the statement that Churchill was tropical, that “Manitoba straddled the equator and had a warm climate.” How can Manitoba have moved so much? The simple answer is that Manitoba has moved as part of a much bigger land mass. In the Ordovician Period, the heart of North America was already a distinct continent, called Laurentia by geologists.

Just like continents do today, the ancient continents were moving by the process of plate tectonics. Land masses move toward or away from one another at about the same rate your toenails grow, an average of about 1.5 cm per year. If you move a continent at that speed over 450 million years, it can travel a very long way! Ordovician Laurentia was moving toward ancient parts of Europe and Africa, and more than 100 million years later this resulted in the formation of Pangaea (the “world supercontinent”) about 335 million years ago. After Pangaea pulled apart 200 million years ago, North America moved northwestward, eventually arriving where we are now!

Map graphic of the globe with ancient continents as seen during the Ordovician Period. A red arrow points to the location of Manitoba on the continent labelled “LA” for Laurentia.

During the Ordovician Period, 450 million years ago, what is now the “heart of North America” formed the ancient continent of Laurentia (LA), and Manitoba was near the equator. As time passed, Laurentia would move toward the other ancient continents such as Baltica (BA) and Siberia (SI), closing the Iapetus Ocean (IA). These land masses would eventually join with Gondwana to form the “world supercontinent” called Pangaea.

Exhibits like Ancient Seas tell us about this place in very different past times. Many of the people in Manitoba came here from distant places, and now we also know that the land itself has travelled, and changed almost beyond recognition. At the Museum you can see some of that distant past, and appreciate our former worlds.

By Roland Sawatzky, Curator of History, the Manitoba Museum & Ashley Smith, Director of Advocacy, Rainbow Resource Centre

Two-spirited, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (2SLGBTQ+) people have always lived in Winnipeg, and were and are an essential part of the fabric of our urban society. 2SLGBTQ+ communities have a rich history. The Manitoba Museum is proud to partner with Rainbow Resource Centre to help tell this important community story through this temporary exhibition of posters, which opened on May 26.

Museums are a place of artifacts and stories. Some artifacts, such as posters, seem ephemeral when they are first printed and put up on a wall. They are meant for immediate effect – they “talk” to casual passersby, but only for a few weeks before they disappear. Posters that are actually preserved make excellent artifacts for capturing a single moment in time.

The 20 posters showcased in the new exhibit If These Walls Could Talk: 50 Years of 2SLGBTQ+ Activism in Winnipeg capture the issues and concerns of the community from the early 1970s to the present. They are calls to action to advance and protect the rights of individuals in the community.

Winnipeg hosted the 2nd National Gay Conference in 1974. It was a small start – dozens of people marched down Portage Avenue with flags and banners.

In 1987 Mayor William Norrie’s Proclamation of AIDS Awareness Week set a tone of tolerance and inclusion amid a global crisis.

From the first simple sign – Gays for Equality, from 1973 – a call went out for gathering and representation at the University of Manitoba. In 1978 a poster called for gays and lesbians to “COME OUT” and speak up for human rights and to end discrimination, and protest the anti-gay rights activist Anita Bryant who was speaking in Winnipeg. In 1980 a poster protested the banning of gay books – an issue that still resonates today. During the HIV/AIDS pandemic of the mid-1980s-1990s, 2SLGBTQ+ communities suffered devastation, and rights became a matter of life and death. Posters were used to spread useful information and support for those at risk. Into the 2000s, posters promoted equality of marriage, anti-bullying measures, and transgender rights.

In 1987, Manitoba became Canada’s third province to include sexual orientation in its Charter of Rights and Freedoms – later celebrated as the first Pride on August 2 of that year. 2SLGBTQ+ activism was central to this and many other freedoms for Manitobans, and these posters tell the story of the fight for those rights, of how far the community has come, and also how much is at risk of being lost today.

The community celebrated its first official Pride Day on August 2, 1987, two weeks after Manitoba included sexual orientation in its Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

This ad for a dance party for Queer People of Colour and allies was part of a larger movement of Queer Trans Black and Indigenous People of Colour to tell their stories and fight for a shift in narrative in the larger 2SLGBTQ+ community.

Fun Fact!

The Rainbow Flag was first created in 1978 by Gilbert Baker, a gay man and drag queen from California. Harvey Milk, an openly gay city supervisor in San Francisco, had urged Gilbert to make a symbol of pride for the larger gay community. Over the years it has evolved to include more colours, representing diversity within the 2SLGBTQ+ community!

If These Walls Could Talk is produced in partnership with the Rainbow Resource Centre, and funded in part by the Manitoba Government, Department of Sport, Culture, and Heritage.

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

Food

The most nutritious nectar and pollen is produced by native plants. Native plants also have the correct flower shape to fit the local pollinators’ mouthparts. Although cultivars of native plants, like bee balm (Monarda fistulosa), may produce good forage, those that are highly modified (e.g., double-bloomed species), or lack nectar and pollen (e.g., sterile hybrids) are often useless for pollinators.

To provide a regular food supply, ensure you grow at least some native species that flower in spring, summer and fall. Good choices for southern Manitoba include:

Spring (May-June)
Cherries and plums (Prunus), wild roses (Rosa acicularis), raspberries (Rubus), meadowsweet (Spirea alba), Western Canada violet (Viola canadensis), and Alexanders (Zizia).

Summer (July-August)
Giant hyssop (Agastache foeniculum), milkweeds (Asclepias), prairie-clover (Dalea), Western red lily (Lilium philadelphicum), wild mint (Mentha arvensis), obedient plant (Physostegia virginiana), and blackeyed Susan (Rudbeckia).

Fall (September-October)
Coneflower (Echinacea), blazingstar (Liatris), white aster (Oligoneuron album), goldenrods (Solidago), and asters (Symphyotrichum).

Nesting and Sheltering Habitat

Pollinators need places to build their nests, and shelter over winter. However, all pollinators have different needs. Some bees prefer bare, sandy soil to nest in, others under leaf piles or clumps of grass, and yet others in plant stem cavities. To attract butterflies to breed, you must provide them with their larval host plants, often native flowers or grasses.

You can create potential nesting and sheltering habitat by leaving small leaf and wood piles in your yard, perhaps in an area that you don’t use regularly. By not mulching all your bare soil, especially in sunny spots, you can also provide breeding habitat for ground-nesting bees. Another thing you can do is delay your yard clean up until late May. The layer of dead vegetation will help to insulate overwintering pollinators from the cold.

Happy gardening!