Guest Blog - The Tupper Quilt and Canadian Confederation

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: