New Canadian hall at history museum spans 15,000 years
Inside the soon-to-open Canadian History Hall are potent national symbols like an astrolabe said to have belonged to explorer Samuel de Champlain, the last spike of the Canadian Pacific Railroad and a T-shirt worn by Terry Fox.
Visitors can shelter under a symbolic family tree that represents the more than 600 descendants of one of the brave “king ’s daughters” who helped people New France or walk into a century-old Ukrainian Catholic church plucked from Alberta.
But throughout the immersive story of a nation at the Canadian Museum of History, there are sobering objects — like the handcuffs Métis leader Louis Riel wore to the gallows, a barbed-wire cross from a First World War internment camp for “enemy aliens” and artwork by children forced into Indian residential schools.
“The exhibition endeavours to present a balanced and candid view of our history, exploring both the good and the bad,” said the director of research for the project, David Morrison.
“Many stories in the hall will make Canadians proud, but others will leave them feeling uncomfortable, at least.”
The new hall, which opens to the public July 1, marking Canada’s sesquicentennial, tells 15,000 years of history using more than 1,500 tangible artifacts displayed across 40,000 square feet.
The first gallery, covering the earliest history to early contact with Europeans, begins with an arresting animation of the creation story of the Anishinabe people, on whose traditional territory the museum is built.
Highlights include a tiny ivory mask of a woman from the Dorset people that’s the oldest known depiction of a human face in Canada.
The museum’s president and CEO, Mark O’Neill, said that one of the key features of the new hall is that indigenous history is incorporated in every part of what he described as the most comprehensive version of the Canadian story ever told.
“When visitors arrive at the first gallery, they will encounter a creation story,” O’Neill said.
“It doesn’t stop there. Indigenous history is integrated and woven throughout the three galleries, in context, as it should be.”
The second gallery, covering Canada from the British conquest to 1914, explores the “uneasy accommodation” between the British, French and indigenous people, the expansion of Canada from sea to sea and the creation of the Dominion of Canada.
A highlight is a portrait of Thomas D’Arcy McGee, which the Father of Confederation wouldn’t live to see, hanging above the revolver found in the pocket of the man who would be convicted of gunning him down on Sparks Street.
The final gallery explores modern Canada with themes including growing independence after the Second World War, the nationalist movement in Quebec and the resistance of indigenous people.
The artifacts include iconic objects like Maurice “Rocket” Richard’s hockey jersey and the table Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau sat at to sign the 1982 Proclamation of the Constitution Act.
But new to many visitors may be the vivid stained glass window made by a Métis artist to commemorate the families scarred by residential schools and the government’s historic apology. It’s a twin of one now hanging in Parliament’s Centre Block.
Many individual stories make up Canada’s history, the museum’s director of creative development, Lisa Leblanc, said before the media tour of the new hall.
“They’re about conflict, struggle, loss but they’re also about accomplishment, success, and hope,” she said.