Paths Of History

My second of two museum visits on Canada Day was in Gatineau at the Canadian Museum of History, formerly the Museum of Civilization. This is the only one of the national museums in the National Capital Region to be on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River, lying on the shore across from Parliament Hill. The current building was designed by the Canadian First Nations architect Douglas Cardinal, and this is an unusual approach for me, from the west, as I was coming from the Portage Bridge area.

I headed for the main entrance to the exhibition wing, here on the right, while the curatorial wing is in the background. The curves are a signature style for Cardinal.

I've seen this before on Canada Day. A canoe has been fitted over with drumskin, and people were playing. It was a sound that carried a long way off.

This view looks towards the street, closed off that day. Normally outside activities including a concert stage are held down along the shore, but the high waters of the spring required the concert stage to be set up out on the street instead this year.

This view between the two wings looks across the river towards Parliament Hill. A fountain and water feature spills down terraces towards the bottom.

Here we have a view across from the top of the stairs, with the landmarks of the Ottawa shore on display.

Inside, I passed among the temporary exhibits. The big current one on Neanderthals had a big line, so I decided to leave that for another day. Photographing this was appropriate. This is the first Canadian maple leaf flag to be flown over Parliament Hill after the flag was redesigned, with the inauguration ceremony held on February 15th, 1965. It is part of the museum's collection, and displayed in this corridor.

There were however two other temporary exhibits that I stopped in to have a look at. The first looked at Jewish immigration into Canada, and included Hebrew texts.

The second concerned itself with archaeology in Quebec, and among the items examined was the story of the Empress Of Ireland, a passenger liner that collided with a Norwegian freighter in the St. Lawrence River in 1914, sinking inside fourteen minutes, killing over a thousand of the 1477 passengers on board- in proportion of dead to survivors, a bigger disaster than Titanic. A porthole was among the artifacts in the exhibit.