By Erin Isaac and Cady Berardi The thoughts and sentiments shared in this essay are our own and do not represent the Nova Scotia Museum or Shelburne Historical Society. As part of the significant cuts set out in the 2026-2027 Nova Scotia provincial budget, the Department of Communities, Culture, Tourism and Heritage announced last week that they needed “to focus… Read more »
By Andrew Nurse On November 15, a media release announced that Pope Leo XIV, following an audience with members of the Canadian Roman Catholic hierarchy, “gifted sixty-two artefacts belonging to the ethnological collections of Vatican Museums.” This meant that the Vatican would begin a process of repatriating some aspects of Indigenous culture currently held in its museums to First Nations,… Read more »
by Krista Barclay This International Museum Day (May 18th) is an opportune moment to reflect on the essential community-building, research, and education work that happens at local museums. A closer look at Ontario’s Community Museum Operating Grant (CMOG) program can tell us a lot about how the provincial government approaches the many kinds of communities that make up Ontario. Community… Read more »
Julia Stanski I discovered Lillian Rose Adkins on September 27, 2023. Although I hadn’t known her name, I’d been searching for this woman for at least five years. Others had been looking for much longer. She’s been dead for more than half a century, but Lillian might be the key to a representational puzzle that has obscured her—and women like… Read more »
by Carly Ciufo “Do museum workers do human rights work?” I ask ChatGPT. The artificial intelligence’s (AI) answer is longer and, honestly, more robust than I expect:
By Juliana Springer Enerals Griffin was about 41 years old when he arrived in Ancaster Township (present-day Hamilton, ON) where he purchased a house set upon 50 acres of land. With land and water routes along the Niagara Peninsula and Lake Ontario, Ancaster was a prime location for those fleeing slavery and persecution in the United States in the mid-19th… Read more »
By Samuel Pratt Betty and Melvin Simpson of Amherstburg, ON opened a small history museum in 1975. They “had a dream to illuminate the history of Black people in a dignified manner,” wanting to promote their town’s extensive involvement in the history of Black Canadians. Known as the North American Black Historical Museum, the museum was built in the former… Read more »
Sean Campbell When I was a kid, my family would sometimes visit the model train exhibit at our local tourist office in North Bay, Ontario. When I stepped into the four train boxcars, welded together and crafted into four distinct rooms, it felt like shifting into a different world. But this large layout spread over four boxcars made me feel… Read more »
By Laura Oland and Erin Isaac When Ministers Island (known to the Passamaquoddy for centuries as Consquamcook, before the “Minister,” Reverend Samuel Andrews, took up residence there in the 1790s) became a National Historic Site in 1996, the designating body’s main interest was in the island’s association with Sir William Van Horne. Van Horne, the Canadian Pacific Railway president who… Read more »
by Carly Ciufo Thomas is right: Community is a tricky concept. I want to talk about finding community at the national level. It’s neither quite as small as a family unit nor as large as some broader cosmopolitan imagining of shared humanity, but it is nevertheless a crucial element of museum building in the twenty-first century. Community is an especially… Read more »
