THUNDER BAY - While the Thunder Bay Museum is closed to the public that doesn’t mean the past is and now it might be more important than ever to look at where we came from and how the region has overcome past hardships.
The Thunder Bay Museum is partnering with the Lakehead University Department of History to provide weekly webinars on various topics relating to Northwestern Ontario history.
Michel Beaulieu, a history professor at Lakehead University, will be moderating the webinars with Thunder Bay Museum executive director Scott Bradley.
Beaulieu said because the museum is now closed to the public, staff wanted to find a way to still achieve its mandate of educating the public on the history of the region in an interactive and informative way.
“In short order, we managed to get together everything ranging from sport, women’s history, political and economic, and military history,” he said. “What we also thought would be fun is to augment it every other week with behind the scenes at the museum. The curator will have some artifacts and showing different parts of the museum that individuals don’t normally see.”
With all non-essential services and businesses forced to close to help limit the spread of COVID-19, many cultural organizations are turning to online interactions to continue to engage the public.
“In some ways, a lot of organizations have been doing this for quite some time,” Beaulieu said. “Part of the mandate for all these organizations is essentially bringing to and interacting with the public with what their mandate might be.”
The free live webinars will be held every Wednesday at 7 p.m. and feature local historians discussing various topics relating to the history of the region. In addition, there will also be a bi-weekly behind the scenes look at some of the museum’s collections and artifacts.
“What essentially we are doing is using that expertise and that knowledge,” Beaulieu said. “In some ways, this is actually going to provide a little bit more because typically when you go in, you see what we have set up for the exhibit at that time. This will allow us to highlight some of the things the public doesn’t normally see.”
And with the country and the world experiencing what many are calling an unprecedented crisis with the COVID-19 pandemic, it is even more important to turn to the past to see how societies have been shaped by events, both good and bad.
“Although you can never know everything about the past, there are lessons to be learned,” Beaulieu said. “The experience individuals have gone through, we can learn something. We have things that have occurred regionally, nationally, internationally that have been altering to our societies. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. Not everything in the past is progressive.”
Beaulieu used the example of sacrifices made in Canada during the First and Second World Wars, the misrepresentations in language of the 1918 influenza pandemic, and even the concept of social distancing, which is not new.
“If you don’t have an appreciation for the past, it’s not even not learning from it, you might be unaware,” he said.
More information on upcoming webinars can be found on the Thunder Bay Museum website.
