Research Ramblings: UPDATE – Tracking the Buffalo Exhibit at the Canadian Museum of Nature

It has been a few weeks since I posted the original story, and since that time I have been able to do a little more digging – or rather, enlisted the help of professionals in the collection!

I got in touch with the Canadian Museum of Nature Library staff to try and find out the answers to the questions I still had at the end of the first installment of this story. I still don’t have all of the answers, but I think I’m getting a little closer. I was put in touch with the Archivist, the Curator of the Vertebrate Collection, and an Assistant in Collections Services, who kindly and enthusiastically put their skills and knowledge to work for me.

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Exploring Exhibits: “Standing Tall: The Curious History of Men in Heels” at the BATA Shoe Museum.

When I visited Toronto for the first time this spring, one of the places that I spent some time exploring in was the BATA Shoe Museum. For those who have never been, it is about an 8 minute walk down the street from the Royal Ontario Museum, and a convenient skip over from the Museum subway stop. For someone completely uninitiated in the city, the fact that it was so easy to find was definitely a deciding factor in my decision to check it out.

Boy am I ever glad I did! Before going, I really didn’t know anything about the museum or what its exhibits would be about, but from the first exhibit to the last, the BATA is now my favourite museum that I have ever visited. Even if you aren’t interested in shoes or fashion history, don’t let that stop you from going. What I love about the BATA is that shoes are actually just the vehicle through which they explore a wide variety of important and interesting moments in history and the people carrying out their lives from all walks of life in all different types of footwear.

Exploring Exhibits: Science by Night at the Canadian Museum of Nature.

This past Thursday my history/museum friends and I checked out the special event Science by Night that took place at the Canadian Museum of Nature. This was a free event that included a variety of fun activities that encouraged visitors to get up close and personal with science and the science experts that normally spend their time behind the scenes at the museum.

Exploring Exhibits: Playing Tourist in My Own Backyard.

The last couple weeks have been a blur. I finished my internship in Fort St. John, and as a way of concluding my time there, I wrote a blog post on the museum’s blog with my final thoughts on the experience. If you want to read that, you can check it out here: https://fortstjohnmuseum.wordpress.com/2017/03/21/final-thoughts-from-the-intern/

Exploring Exhibits: Napoleon and Paris

This post is very late in coming. The only excuses I can offer is that it is apparently much more difficult than I thought to get yourself into a productive writing routine after you have graduated and are no longer receiving grades for your work/crippling criticism/are now much more invested in your netflix schedule. But I digress.

Exploring Exhibits: Gold Rush! El Dorado in British Columbia

Part two of our adventures at the Canadian Museum of History involved exploring the exhibit ‘Gold Rush! – El Dorado in British Columbia.’ Central to this exhibit was the notion that although the idea of El Dorado was a myth, it was one powerful enough to inspire thousands of people around the world to migrate in the pursuit of gold, changing the economy, relationships, cultures, and landscapes of the West dramatically and irrevocably. The exhibit asks, immediately upon entry, what happens to a world driven by myth?

Exploring Exhibits: Horse Power – The Paul Bienvenu Carriage Collection

This past weekend myself and my wonderful historian boyfriend Chris, decided to take advantage of the beautiful weather and cross the river to the Canadian Museum of History, to take in the new temporary exhibits that we haven’t had a chance to see yet. The museum hosts three temporary exhibits at any given time, and we explored all three. The first one that we explored showcased the Paul Bienvenu collection of horse-drawn carriages, which was donated to the museum in its entirety in 2010. This collection, according to the exhibit, is particularly special because the vehicles can be traced back to owners, many of which were people who greatly influenced the history of Quebec and Canada.