Since 1983, the big event of the year for the Africville Museum has been the annual weekend-long reunion in mid-summer of former Africville residents, family and friends.
But in 2020, the pandemic forced a pause. There would be no coming together to honour and to celebrate one of Canada’s first Black communities, the village on the south shore of Bedford Basin first settled in the early 1800s, but razed by the Halifax City Council in the late 1960s.
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But the Africville Museum would not be deterred. Looking for ways to bring the community together the way that the annual reunion did, it settled on the idea of publishing an Africville cookbook, a collection of recipes contributed by former residents of the breakfasts that would fuel the day’s labour; of the lunches that be eaten on the fly; and of dinners that workers would come home to find on their tables.
“What is the thing that often brings us together? Food. It was such a great challenge,” Juanita Peters, Africville Museum’s executive director, told Global News.
In West Kelowna, B.C., last February, the West Bank First Nation had just moved its Sncewips Heritage Museum to a new location at the Okanagan Lake Shopping Centre and its four staff were preparing for a busy spring hosting school tours and visitors.
The pandemic put a stop to those plans.
And so, Coralee Miller, one of the museum’s staff, got to work putting together video messages from inside the museum, videos which quickly proved popular throughout the Okanagan.
“Coralee’s videos were the shining light in such a dark period for our community, for our nation, for the world. When the pandemic struck, there was such fear, anxiety, concern,” said West Bank First Nation councillor Jordan Coble, who is also one of the driving forces behind the museum’s creation.
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“There’s too much doom and gloom on the news already,” Miller herself said. “At least with this, we can get people to forget about their problems, at least just for a little bit.”
If visitors could not come to the Sncewips museum, the museum would reach out, via the web, to those visitors.
And in Swift Current, where the municipal museum documents life in southwest Saskatchewan, museum staff responded to the pandemic by doing what historians and archivists do with any major event: they organized an exhibition to document the experience.
That exhibition, dubbed “Pandemic Past-times,” documented, through photographs and other artifacts contributed by residents, the effect of the pandemic on daily life in Swift Current.
“So 100 years from now, people are going to be able to actually do an exhibition and have local information,” said Stephanie Kaduk, exhibition curator and education and public programs coordinator at the museum.
Across the country, hundreds of “small museums” that are the cultural hub of many small cities, towns, and villages responded in a similar fashion. They found a way to make their institutions relevant and meaningful through what will arguably be the most impactful historical event of their generation. And yet, the purpose of these cultural hubs has, in some respects, never been more important — communicating a community’s purpose and meaning across and between generations.
“It’s important for our children to understand who they are, their family members, their relationships to the community, the relationships of the land that surrounds us, but more importantly, the responsibilities,” said West Bank’s Coble.
“Having gone through this experience,” said Swift Current Museum director Lloyd Begley, “it’s opened our minds to different methods of communication rather than traditional interpretation of historical method or telling a story.”
But it takes money and people to do the work of the country’s small museums.
The pandemic deprived small museums of revenue from admissions and gift shops, and it made annual appeals to provincial and federal grant programs pointless.
“Our revenues are really based off of people coming through these doors and buying product at the door, having conversations. You know, it was it was just devastating,” Africville’s Peters said of the pandemic.
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Museums large and small would normally see about 30 million visitors in any given year, according to the Canadian Museum Association. For context: paid attendance at all of the NHL games in both Canada and the U.S. for the 2018-2019 season was about 22 million.
The pandemic has also all but dried up the volunteer labour that small museums and art galleries depend on to get their work done.
Consider this. A 2017 federal government survey of cultural institutions found that while there were 7,336 Canadians employed full-time by a museum or gallery, there were 11,677 employed part-time and a whopping 64,949 Canadians who provided a combined 4.3 million hours of volunteer labour to the country’s museums. Art galleries benefitted from 700,000 hours of free labour from 18,165 volunteers.
Some of those volunteers have been able to complete their labours of love online but for many, particularly those involved in handling or maintaining a museum’s collection, those labours of love will have to wait.
As for the money, even before the pandemic, funds were tight for the country’s small museum and galleries. A two-year study by the House of Commons Heritage Committee recommended in 2018 that the federal Department of Canadian Heritage overhaul its museum funding programs, write up a new national museum policy, and provide more support for those organizations charged with documenting the past and preserving that past for future audiences.
A new national museum policy and new funding programs remain on the to-do list for the Trudeau government but Ottawa did respond rapidly last year with a one-of-its-kind emergency assistance program to help keep the lights on and maintain some basic programming. Just over $33 million was provided to 1,234 heritage institutions.
The Africville Museum received an emergency grant of $31,725, Sncewips got $28,077, and the Swift Current Museum got $56,507.
But those funds were quickly put to use last year. More help will be needed if museums must stay shut for a second summer in a row.
And, as the Canadian Museums Association has pointed out to officials at Heritage Canada, the funding challenge may put the very collections of many institutions at risk. Special environmental controls to maintain a collection require funding and often special operators — both of which are in short supply. The CMA has received reports that some museums have been vandalized or been broken into because security arrangements have had to be reduced because of a lack of funds.
In other cases, collections have had to be transferred or left in conditions that put the condition of papers, artifacts, and other objects at risk.
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