YOUR MUSEUM AT130
A great success evolves, true to its original vision
When the Royal British Columbia Museum was born on Oct. 25, 1886 – exactly 130 years ago – the nation was just emerging. Canada’s political landscape was a fraction of its size today and the population was less than 20 per cent of what it would be a century later.
The museum’s original purpose was guided by a founding petition, a copy of which hangs in my office to remind me to look after collections for the province and, through their careful stewardship, shape ideas about British Columbia to better understand its natural and cultural heritage.
The museum’s early collections included a Haida totem pole, object number one in a catalogue of seven million artifacts and specimens, pressed flowers and a caribou, which periodically made an appearance at Christmas.
Over the past 130 years, the museum has grown in many ways, with the province and the nation. The generation that rebuilt the museum in the 1970s achieved a new model for museums across North America, which was less intimidating and in which grand dioramas made learning easier.
The museum’s distinctive character was its ability to put on significant exhibitions on the one hand while generating new knowledge on the other.
We have recently discovered the original vision from 1886 and are now trying to revive it in a way that makes sense today. This is as much about affirming the contemporaneity of First Nations and their cultures, as well as putting the natural world of B.C. into the background and foreground of our stories. We have long been partners in efforts to repatriate negotiated cultural artifacts and ancestral remains to their rightful owners. This contemporary relevance is a vital tool for reconciliation and learning.
Success depends on the scholarship we bring to our collections, the care that sustains them, the relationships we build and the ability to think creatively.
We all know museums are about education and learning, and an essential part of everyone’s life. Over the years our approach has developed and grown to provide teaching and learning experiences at many different life stages.
In an increasingly fast-paced world, we plan to do more to create more educational spaces within the museum and more digital platforms to increase access to the collection.
Nothing has given me greater pleasure these past four years than taking original artifacts — such as the precious Vancouver Island Treaties to the Songhees Nation — out to schools and clubs, and seeing the pleasure of young people experiencing and connecting with their history.
Access to significant artifacts or to a masterpiece opens a new world, which cannot be experienced in the same way through a mobile phone or television.
I took one of our most precious Emily Carr paintings to Reynolds Secondary School this year. Curator Dr. Richard Hebda joined me with a mammoth molar. Unpacking these in front of young people was like Christmas morning, as many gasped at what they saw. This is a new type of vision for our museum, where collections work much harder for us all.
The Royal B.C. Museum and Archives has always been and is a great success. It has been voted Canada’s top museum by TripAdvisor two years running. Over the years, as a vibrant, internationally respected civic institution it has served local, provincial and national audiences simultaneously.
With our international outreach programs, we are now on the threshold of taking our B.C. stories out to the world. On Oct. 25, 1886 the Provincial Museum of Natural History and Anthropology (now the Royal British Columbia Museum) opened following a petition to the provincial government asking for a museum. In 1951 a young Fenwick Lansdowne was given a summer job at the museum as an assistant to Clifford Carl, who saw his talent for illustrating birds. Lansdowne went on to become a renowned wildlife artist. In 1966 the Queen Mother dedicated the cornerstone of the museum’s new home on Belleville Street.
Between 1850 and 1854, Vancouver Island Governor James Douglas negotiated 14 treaties with local First Nations, the only formal land title agreements made between First Nations and settler communities during the colonial era. The list of the signatories represents one of the earliest efforts to record in detail the nature and composition of First Nations societies on the West Coast of North America. It includes communities from ethnological groups we now know as Coast Salish and Kwakwaka’wakw. In 1862, 25-year-old John Fannin was lured out west by the temptation of gold. He spent eight years seeking his fortune mining and prospecting. He became the first curator of what is now the Royal British Columbia Museum. The museum’s first home was the original Legislative Buildings, affectionately called “The Birdcages.” In 1898 John Fannin, the first curator of the museum, moved the collections into the newly built Legislature’s East Wing. In 1891 the museum’s first publication — Check List of British Columbia Birds — was published by John Fannin. The B.C. Archives began in 1894 thanks to the work of the first legislative librarian, R.E. Gosnell. In 1894 the “new” provincial Legislative Buildings were under construction and Gosnell, an avid historian, took the opportunity to begin to collect and preserve the new province’s documentary records. Gosnell was afraid that records of the early days of the province would be lost, and mounted an advertising campaign asking for “reminiscences of pioneer settlement . . . old letters, journals, files of newspapers, books, pamphlets, reports, charts, maps, photographs, sketches and so on.”
Today, the Internet makes the knowledge and resources of the Royal British Columbia Museum and Archives accessible to the entire province and beyond. What did the museum do for British Columbia beyond Victoria before the Internet? The short answer: More than one might think. From their foundings in 1886 and 1908 respectively, the museum and archives collected flora, fauna, ethnographic material, artifacts and manuscripts around the province to display or study in Victoria. In return, they shared knowledge and resources with the province.
For decades, communication was mainly through the post office or express companies.
When public libraries were rare, the Provincial Library, from which the archives evolved, loaned boxes of books to small communities and individual volumes to students. The library continued to circulate books from its Open Shelf, but the archives stopped the practice in 1927.
A Revelstoke resident complained of discrimination but then conceded the danger of losing irreplaceable volumes. The archives, however, continued to answer mail order inquiries.
The museum received plants and animals for identification and advised people like a man in Rossland who feared losing his wife if he did not eliminate an infestation of garden snakes. The museum director suggested ways to reduce the snake population but warned him to prepare to lose his wife; snakes could not be completely eradicated.
For many years the archivist, the museum director and their staff gave public lectures in Victoria. In 1936, W. Kaye Lamb, the new archivist and librarian made a speaking tour of the Okanagan. Willard Ireland, his successor, travelled extensively giving lectures to arouse “interest in the preservation of the records of the past and in giving the people of the province a broader conception of our history.”
In the 1950s, the museum adopted this practice when Wilson Duff, its first professional anthropologist, gave public lectures and advised local museums while touring the province to salvage totem poles.
The poles were moved to Victoria, where Mungo Martin and others carved replacements for the home villages. The museum appointed a full-time adviser to visit and assist local museums in 1966. Three decades later, the museum, reversing past practice, was repatriating culturally significant artifacts to the First Nations and offering training on their care.
The museum, always interested in research around the province, launched the ambitious Living Landscapes projects in 1994, cooperating with communities to research their natural and human history; to preserve information, artifacts and endangered species; and to offer “exciting opportunities for learning.”
Studies of the Columbia River Basin and the Peace River followed a pilot project on the Thompson-Okanagan region.
From its early days, the museum hosted school tours but children beyond commuting distance of Victoria rarely benefitted. In the 1970s it experimented with “travelling kits” on marine biology, early British Columbia history, the Interior Salish and the Kootenay people for distant schools.
A teacher from the museum often accompanied the kits, which included artifacts, documents or facsimiles, photographs, films and a teachers’ guide. The response was generally favourable, but the budget could not sustain it.
The Museum Train was popular with people of all ages between 1975 and 1979. It toured most of the province accessible by rail, carrying exhibits prepared by museum curators and display specialists. Alas, repair bills for the aged steam locomotive and ancient rail cars almost exhausted the museum’s budget.
Yet, the museum remained committed to outreach through more cost-efficient exhibits such as Dragonflies, The Legacy (a collection of contemporary First Nations art work) and Echoes of the Past, which travelled to smaller museums.
After operating on an ad hoc basis, the museum formally organized a speakers’ program in 1983 that visited both larger communities and those without suitable space for exhibits. In one of the first talks, Nancy Turner, an ethnobotanist, showed slides and artifacts and provided edible samples of “wild Harvests.” In the 1990s, museum experts contributed to televised science programs produced by the Knowledge Network.
The long tradition of publishing handbooks and scientific works by museum staff and others continues. In addition, often in conjunction with major exhibitions and drawing on its own resources, the Royal B.C. Museum publishes lavishly illustrated scholarly volumes.
New Perspectives on the Gold Rush, for example, accompanied the 2015 exhibit, Gold Rush! El Dorado in British Columbia. Such books preserve research, are souvenirs for visitors, and provide knowledge and vicarious pleasure for those who did not see the exhibit. In a business plan submitted in 1991, museum director Bill Barkley observed that the public wanted more programs in more places and ones that are “technologically sophisticated [and] interactive.”
Technology has certainly enlarged the scope of travelling exhibits. In 2008, for example, the museum commemorated British Columbia’s sesquicentennial with the Free Spirit project. A museum exhibition on provincial history was only a part. Other exhibits went by rail through southern British Columbia and by van elsewhere.
People could purchase an illustrated book with DVDs of archival travelogues. A website inviting people to contribute their stories through The People’s History Project drew 3.5 million visitors.
The Royal B.C. Museum was one of the first Canadian museums to establish a website, allowing it to share treasures and knowledge beyond Victoria. By 2010, it was getting about five million hits a year. The museum has also built a presence on social media.
The archives has posted many historic photographs, some paintings of Emily Carr and other provincial artists and, to the delight of genealogists, the Vital Statistics records of births, deaths and marriages. Anyone with access to the Internet can interact with the museum. After being shown at the museum in 2010, for example, Aliens Among Us, a study of invasive species, made a two-year tour to nine smaller museums. Through an interactive website, residents could report local examples of “aliens” via smartphone or tablet.
Modern technology continues a process that dates back to the museum and archives’ beginnings — encouraging British Columbians to submit examples of natural and human history. Today, more than ever, they are institutions for all of British Columbia. Patricia E. Roy is the author of several books on the history of British Columbia, and is working on a history of the Royal British Columbia Museum and Archives.