GET OUTSIDE, STAY HOME: VIRTUAL NATURE AND MENTAL WELLNESS

 GLAM Gets Mindful | Melissa Mertsis 

_______________________________________________________________

Anyone else battling a case of the winter blues these past few weeks? Finding yourself itching to go outside, but wanting to stay safe at home? Missing the glorious rush of serotonin that comes from being immersed in nature? Never fear — virtual nature is here!

Being outside immersed in nature is always fun, but also has proven benefits. Research shows that exposure to nature and the outdoors might help reduce stress, increase attention span, and improve overall emotional wellness. Green, tree-filled spaces are also known to have an impact on blood pressure, lowering it as well as other stress-inducing hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. Even though we're all stuck at home (for good reason, of course) it's still important to get your fix of nature and all the good things that come along with it. Take a look at some of the tours and experiences below to get you outside, while staying home. 

A Clipper butterfly (Parthenos sylvia). Image retrieved from Cambridge Butterfly Conservatory website.

Visit the Cambridge Butterfly Conservatory through a 360-degree YouTube video featuring beautiful greenery, tons of natural light, and, of course, butterflies! If you want to venture a little further than Cambridge, Ontario, the American Museum of Natural History also has a 360-degree tour of their conservatory (complete with classical music, of course). 

Butterflies aren't your thing? No problem! Parks Canada has put together an extensive list of National Parks and Historic Sites to explore, powered by Google Street View. Venture all over the country, from Terra Nova National Park in Newfoundland and Labrador to the S.S. Keno National Historic Site in the Yukon. 

Terra Nova National Park. Image retrieved from Parks Canada. 

If you're less about the trees and more about flowers and foliage, you can also tour botanical gardens from all around the world. Check out the Buffalo and Erie County Botanical Gardens in New York with a virtual tour, or head across the ocean to the National Botanic Gardens of Ireland and take a peek at their herbarium or Palm House. 

If you're more of an animal person, we've got you covered — after all, "nature" can mean a lot of things! Lucky for you, places like The Toronto Zoo are also bringing nature to you. You can watch live streams of gorillas, giraffes, penguins, and meerkats on The Toronto Zoo's Twitch, TorontoZooLife, with zookeeper talks every weekday at 2pm EST. If you want more options to watch your favourite furry (or non-furry) friends, Explore.org offers live videos from all around the world — when else will you be able to watch Brown Bears fish at Katmai National Park in Alaska? 

A Brown Bear from Katmai National Park in Alaska. Image retrieved from National Park Service.

No matter your interests (or the state of our stay-at-home advisory) it's never impossible to enjoy nature. One of the benefits of operating online is that institutions and organizations are getting more and more clever with how to bring their in-person experiences to you at home, so take advantage of these amazing digital experiences.  Let's not forget the benefits that nature (virtual or otherwise) can have on our wellbeing —  get outside, stay home, and take care of yourself!

MELTING DOWN THE MYSTERY: THE FRANKLIN EXPEDITION IN 2018

MUSEUM MYSTERIES

BY: SERENA YPELAAR

For my final Museum Mysteries post, I couldn't resist taking an age-old Victorian mystery out of the freezer for a thaw: the famous Franklin Expedition to the Arctic.

The last time Musings tackled this frigid phantom of a story was with Sadie MacDonald's review of the pop-up exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). Now, the Canadian Museum of History (CMH) has opened their exhibition, Death in the Ice: The Mystery of the Franklin Expedition, after its run at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, UK.

Death in the Ice is a joint effort between the Canadian Museum of History, Inuit Heritage Trust and the UK National Maritime Museum, as well as Parks Canada and the Government of Nunavut.

Promotional image for Death in the Ice: The Mystery of the Franklin Expedition. Photo: Canadian Museum of History.

Having worked at the Museum of Inuit Art and Inuit Art Foundation respectively, northern Canadian history is one of my key focuses. When I interned at the Northern Life Museum and Cultural Centre in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories, I delivered educational programming to high school students alongside the Canada Science and Technology Museum's travelling exhibition Echoes in the Ice: Finding Franklin's Ship. I doubt I'll ever stop being interested in the lost expedition and its mysterious legacy.

Note found in a cairn in 1859 on King
William Island, written by Franklin's
crew and even updated to report
Franklin's death and the desertion of
the ships. Source.

Sir John Franklin was selected in 1845 (though far from the top choice) at age 59 to lead a British Royal Navy expedition in search of the fabled Northwest Passage. In what is now the Canadian Arctic, Franklin and his crew met Inuit who later provided oral testimony of their encounters with the British men. 

With 129 men on board, the ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror got locked in the ice and were rendered immobile. Franklin was dead by 1847, and the surviving men were forced to desert the ships and travel south on foot. In the harsh Arctic conditions, none would survive. Rumours swirled that some men, in sheer desperation, had resorted to cannibalism, a sensational element of this story that both repulses and fascinates. (Charles Dickens published articles weighing in on the cannibalism debate, despite Victorians' indignation at the thought.) 

On the MMSt Ottawa trip last year, CMH staff spoke to us about their efforts to represent previously overlooked Inuit perspectives in Death in the Ice. The exhibition is said to focus heavily on Inuit voices and experiences - though that's not to say that it hasn't had its fair share of controversy regarding objects taken from the shipwrecks of the Erebus and Terror after their respective discoveries by Parks Canada in 2014 and 2016.

The reason for this is simple: Inuit were the last to see the ships and their crews. And those encounters, preserved in oral histories and shared with Parks Canada and its partners, contributed directly to the discovery of HMS Erebus and Terror. - Canadian Museum of History, "Inuit Knowledge and the Franklin Expedition Exhibition"

Peter Taptuna (Nunavut's Premier at the time) claimed in a letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in fall 2016 that Parks Canada wrongfully removed artifacts belonging to Nunavut and Inuit Heritage Trust since the wrecks are in their territory. Parks Canada alleges that the wrecks are still British property, citing a 1997 agreement in which the British consented to transfer the contents of the wrecks to Canada once found. 

Memorial to Sir John Franklin and the lost expedition outside the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, UK. Source.

I haven't managed to pop back to Ottawa to visit the Death in the Ice exhibition (as well as my alma mater) yet, but I suppose that just adds to this column's air of mystery. I've instead outlined a few questions I would like to see answered or at least discussed in the exhibition: 

• How can we give oral traditions more weight as a way of knowing in exhibitions like these, where Indigenous narratives are integral? 
• What does our obsession with the men's purported cannibalism tell us about sensationalism as it relates to museum audiences? 
• Some of the men's bodies were preserved in the ice and found intact over a century later - but will we ever find Sir John Franklin's body? Would it teach us anything new?
• When will the ownership dispute be resolved between Inuit and Parks Canada? Is there a way to interpret history in museums without displaying artifacts with questionable provenance?

Most of my questions are more museological than factual. I accept that some mysteries will forever remain unsolved, but that doesn't mean we can't explore and learn from them in the absence of concrete answers. Instead, these unknowns can be an excellent prompt toward critical thinking and dialogue.

Plus, we have great historical interpretation on television to satiate our curiosity. I can't wait to see how the Franklin Expedition is adapted in AMC's newest drama, The Terror, which premieres this Monday. Time will tell whether Inuit are satisfactorily represented in the series, but I'm eager to start taking it in. (And before you ask, I haven't been paid off by AMC - it's not my fault they make so many historical dramas!)

The Terror actors Ciarán Hinds (as Sir John Franklin), Jared Harris, and Tobias Menzies discuss their characters - both historically and as interpreted in the series.

So how can we keep dwelling on the same mysteries time and again without stifling them? By offering different vantage points. It's an issue I've been focusing a lot on in my Musings articles this year: tell the story that hasn't been told, and people will listen. Promise visitors more, and they will want to keep learning. Answer questions, but focus just as much on what we don't know. 

With that, my readers, I'll close the door on Museum Mysteries for now. I hope you've enjoyed embracing the unknown and that you'll continue to do so!

FRANKLIN IN THE DARK: THE FRANKLIN EXPLORATION POP-UP

EXHIBITION REVIEWS

BY: SADIE MACDONALD


Last weekend I paid a visit to the ROM, and there I came across the Franklin Exploration exhibition. This pop-up display is tucked away in the corner of the entrance of the ROM's Canadian gallery.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Franklin story, here’s some history. In 1845, Sir John Franklin, a member of the British Royal Navy and an experienced global explorer, was tasked with charting the Northwest Passage. At this time, British officials were keen to discover an ocean route to the Pacific via the North American Arctic. Franklin's ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror set sail but never returned. At the encouragement of Lady Franklin, other explorers such as Francis Leopold McClintock and Charles Francis Hall searched for the lost expedition, but had little success. In 2014, the HMS Erebus was finally discovered, and in September 2016 the Terror was found. While there are still questions about what actually happened in the crews’ final days, we can begin to construct some answers. The pop-up display discusses both the past and present explorations of the Franklin expedition.

Sir John Franklin looking pensive. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.

The exhibit is a double-sided pop-up with two touchscreens and a model of the Erebus shipwreck, and was created in partnership with Parks Canada. Seeing it was a moment of déjà vu for me, as I encountered the same one at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic the last time I was there nearly a year ago. Other museums across Canada are part of the Franklin network, including the Nattilik Heritage Centre in Gjoa Haven, Nunavut, close to where the ships were found. This widespread uniform exhibit emphasizes a carefully told national narrative. The Franklin expedition has been adopted as a Canadian story, and the attempts to recover the lost ships are now a part of that history.

In addition to telling the story of the Franklin expedition, the exhibit also focuses on contemporary efforts to uncover evidence of what happened. Videos on the exhibit's touchscreen describe the modern processes involved in finding and recovering the ships. A designated space on the pop-up wall emphasizes that unlocking this story is an ongoing endeavour. The Terror was found only last September, and now holds a space on the pop-up display; when I visited the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic’s display in January of last year, the Terror was yet to be discovered. I hope that the additional space still left on the display will be filled someday, but some stories will always have gaps.

A space on the pop-up. Photo credit: Sadie MacDonald

One aspect of this exhibition that I appreciated was the emphasis on Inuit perspectives. Inuit involvement in the Franklin story runs deep, as Inuit guides accompanied explorers in search of the lost expedition and provided valuable testimony on the ships’ whereabouts. In 1927, a report by the British Admiralty dismissed Inuit evidence on the Franklin expedition's fate as “not altogether trustworthy.” As the exhibit notes, Inuit oral history on the location of the ships has proven correct. In a video interview, Louie Kamookak, an Inuit historian, notes the efforts of Inuit in uncovering the ships and upholds the importance of oral history. The story of the Franklin expedition shows that oral history deserves more mainstream recognition as valid historical evidence. Museums ought to include more of this perspective in exhibitions, especially when discussing stories and cultures in which oral history plays an important role. The place of Inuit is reflected in the press release for the Franklin Exploration exhibition, which is offered in Inuktitut and Inuinnaqtun.

Before the doomed expedition of 1845, Franklin undertook another previous ill-fated Arctic expedition lasting from 1819 to 1822 (it seemed to be a habit for him). During that journey, local Yellowknife leader Akaitcho warned Franklin from attempting to travel during winter, advice which Franklin disregarded. The ensuing expedition ended disastrously, with Franklin’s men resorting to eating their shoe leather and, in one notable case, other humans before being rescued by Akaitcho. Nonetheless, this expedition solidified Franklin’s reputation in British society as a heroic and hardy explorer, “the man who ate his boots”. His final fatal expedition immortalized him for good. While Franklin faces more criticism today, we still seem to find his tragic story of failure romantically captivating.

As I perused the display, other visitors came over in search of the Franklin Exploration exhibit, which they seemed eager to see. I imagine they were not clear as to its being a pop-up display. “That’s it?” a man asked skeptically. “There’s not much here,” said his friend. They didn’t bother to use the touchscreen function. It’s an incident which I think indicates that visitors to a large extent still expect to experience object encounters when in a museum.

A note recovered from the Franklin expedition as shown on the exhibit's touchscreen. Photo credit: Sadie MacDonald

This poses questions regarding the “aura” of objects. People come to a museum and expect to see something real, to bear witness to original objects apparently imbibed with history and meaning. Are pop-up displays like the Franklin Exploration a sufficient alternative? Objects related to the expedition can be viewed and interpreted in the exhibit's interactive touchscreen program. As indicated by my experience, visitors may not have the patience to go through the many pages on the program. While a nerd someone like me who is into museums and the topic of the Franklin expedition was engaged, it wasn’t enough for some visitors. Museums are more than their objects, but encountering those objects is an important part of a museum visit.

The past and present of the Franklin expedition is a Canadian story that continues to captivate and evolve, and we want to interact with that story. I had the opportunity to visit Westminster Abbey in London a couple of years ago, where there is a monument to Franklin. Someone had left a bright red lipstick imprint on the bust. There may not be anything in the pop-up Franklin Exploration exhibit worth kissing, but you can still interact with this story if you give it a shot.

The monument of Sir John Franklin at Westminster Abbey in a lipstick-free moment. Photo Credit: England and London - John L. Stoddard's Lectures