Sneak peek: aboriginal stories get their due in museum's budding History Hall
Don Butler, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: January 19, 2016 | Last Updated: January 19, 2016 8:54 PM EST
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Critics who predicted the Canadian Museum of History would focus on the military and the monarchy in its new $30-million History Hall may have to eat their words.
Royalty and armaments were conspicuous by their absence during the Citizen’s exclusive look this week at the Gatineau museum’s 40,000-square-foot future centrepiece, billed as the largest and most ambitious exhibition on Canadian history ever undertaken.
On the other hand, the history of the country’s indigenous peoples will occupy a lot of real estate in the three galleries of the History Hall, the replacement for the museum’s now-demolished Canada Hall.
The first three “content chunks” that visitors will encounter in the Early Canada gallery, covering the period from the ice age to the British conquest, deal with Canada before the arrival of Europeans, said David Morrison, the museum’s research director.
Stories about indigenous history also show up in the other two galleries, including sections on the 19th Century treaties with the Crown, the malign impact of the Indian Act and residential schools, the rise of native activism and First Nations art.
“What we’re doing in this hall is integrating aboriginal history into mainstream, ordinary Canadian history,” said Morrison. “Aboriginal people have been a vital part of Canadian history since the beginning. Getting them into the narrative is, I think, crucial.”
The second gallery, Colonial Canada, covers the period up to the First World War, while the third gallery, Modern Canada — positioned on a wide mezzanine overlooking the other two galleries — brings the narrative to the present day. (It will even include something about the current arrival of Syrian refugees.)
Unlike the Canada Hall, which relied heavily on reproductions, the new History Hall will focus on authentic objects, said president and CEO Mark O’Neill. “We really want to rely on the power of the artifact.”
Among them is a cloak worn by Gen. James Wolfe, who died in the pivotal Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1763. The cloak is currently in Buckingham Palace’s Royal Collection, but officials there have agreed to provide it to the museum.
Visitors will also see the handcuffs worn by Métis rebellion leader Louis Riel as he ascended the scaffold in 1885. The cuffs have been in the Canadian War Museum’s collection for years but have never been displayed publicly.
The only piece of architecture from the old Canada Hall to survive the transition was its sole authentic building — St. Onuphrius Church, a Ukrainian church from Smoky Lake, Alberta, dating from 1907.
Movers raised it and set it onto steel beams, greased with Dove soap, to shift it to its new location, where it will help tell the story of the immigrants who flooded into Canada’s empty spaces in the late-19th and early-20th centuries.
The Modern Canada gallery “has proved to be the most difficult space to conceptualize,” Morrison said, “because there are so many potential stories and because so much of it is in living memory. But we finally got there in the last three or four months.”
The new hall is on schedule and on budget. Construction began last July and is now nearly 60 per cent complete, said Chantal Amyot, the project’s director. It’s expected to be finished by the end of June, after which the museum will begin installing the content.
Though the History Hall will open officially on July 1, 2017, “the objective is to be ready by the end of March 2017, so we have a bit of time with specialized groups to test,” Amyot said.
At present, much of the new hall still resembles a construction site, with a tangle of overhead pipes and heating ducts and unpainted walls on its lower level.
Work on the mezzanine is more advanced. Its wooden floors are in place and the preparation of architect Douglas Cardinal’s signature domed ceiling is nearly finished.
A circular central hub, meant by Cardinal to represent the sacred Chaudière Falls, connects the three galleries, offering access to the mezzanine level along a gradually ascending ramp. The ramp’s steel frame has already been assembled and is awaiting installation.
When he designed the museum in the 1980s, Cardinal’s vision was that the History Hall space would represent the immensity of Canada. But the inspiring vistas he imagined were obscured by the Canada Hall’s rather cluttered installations, Amyot said. The new hall, with its curvilinear lines, should finally rectify that, she said.
Morrison wants the stories in the hall to speak to Canadians at a personal level.
“This history is everything, literally,” he said. “It isn’t just a bunch of bloody dates. It’s everybody’s family story, it’s all around us, it shapes us and we shape it.”
dbutler@postmedia.com
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