Arctic Voices offers new northern perspectives at Ottawa museum

Which is vulnerable and which is powerful? The Canadian Museum of Nature is letting you decide. (PHOTO BY LISA GREGOIRE)

Catherine and Rick Andrews play the Arctic Animal Adaptations game at the Arctic Voices exhibit. (PHOTO BY LISA GREGOIRE)

Caroline Lanthier, project manager, who helped put together the exhibit with Science North in Sudbury, Ont. (PHOTO BY LISA GREGOIRE)

Scenes of urban Iqaluit are set against caribou on the tundra and the aurora borealis at the Arctic Voices exhibit at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, an example of contrasting realities in the North. (PHOTO BY LISA GREGOIRE)

OTTAWA — Rick and Catherine Andrews sit down to play the Arctic Animal Adaptations game at the Canadian Museum of Nature.

The question — “Why are these barren-ground caribou travelling in a line?” — pops up next to a video of caribou fording a river in single file. The couple are manning two of four consoles with buttons in front of each console labelled A, B, C, and D corresponding to the multiple choice answers on the screen in front of them.

Four possible answers appear. Does it make it easier for the animals to walk through difficult terrain? Is it because they can’t see well? Is it to ensure the same path is followed annually? Is it to help facilitate animal communication?

If you chose the first one — A — you were right.

The national museum in downtown Ottawa is hosting a travelling exhibit called Arctic Voices and this interactive display is a crowd-pleaser, according to feedback they have received since the exhibit opened Dec. 9.

There are two of these “game-show” displays plus a host of other hands-on displays, films, interpretive materials and even a booth to learn how to throat sing — all of which the museum hopes will spur visitors to challenge stereotypes and their own pre-conceived notions about the North and its peoples.

“The Arctic is very much in the news right now,” said Caroline Lanthier, the project manager who helped develop the exhibit with partners at Science North in Sudbury, Ont.

“But there’s not one Arctic. There are different Arctics. The geography is different from place to place, there are different landscapes and different cultures.”

The first thing you see when you enter the exhibition, for instance, is not a polar bear. The big white beast is tucked away inside.

Instead, you first see a huge mural of the tundra in spring bloom, awash in red, orange and yellow.

“I love the bright colours,” Catherine Andrews said, when asked what she thought of the exhibit. “And it moves, it keeps your interest. And there’s not too much reading,” she laughed.

“Yes,” said Rick Andrews, “it’s far more colourful and less dreary than I thought.”

Originally from Nova Scotia, as is Rick Andrews, Catherine Andrews told a story about watching commercial whalers carving up a large whale on the beach when she was a child in the 1960s.

She then pointed to a photo of a whale harvest in Nunavut and talked about how people from Nunavut and Nova Scotia share that common maritime culture; how they both enjoy fishing, the outdoors, and the sea.

So, if the goal of the exhibit is to teach people things they might not know about the Arctic, and maybe even find similarities with their own cultures and experiences, then curators are succeeding.

You can learn about polar bears, of course, once inside. You can compare skull sizes to other bears and then click on a video console to hear Arctic researcher Andrew Derocher of the University of Alberta and Nunatsiavut wildlife manager James Goudie talk about the impact climate change is having on the North’s iconic species.

Or you can learn to throat sing with Lynda Brown and Heidi Langille and then record the results. (Note to beginners: it’s harder than it looks.)

On the day we visited, there was a wide variety of visitors from families with young children to groups of adults and couples, both francophone and anglophone.

One of the most evocative portions of the exhibit is a booth which shows Becky Qilavvaq’s short film “To That Place.”

Anguti Johnston, dressed head to toe in traditional sealskin clothing, walks through Iqaluit to the words of Sheila Watt-Cloutier and of Charlie Keelan’s hauntingly beautiful song, “A Place.” He sounds like Eddy Vedder of Pearl Jam.

The film suggests viewers take time to think about how climate change and globalization are impacting northern peoples.

“We are now trying to recognize what has happened to us in our world and we are trying to address this issue for our children in the future of what they will hold for them,” says Watt-Cloutier’s voice in the film.

“So when you talk about climate change, when you hear about it in the Arctic, don’t just think ice. Don’t just think polar bears. Think about the young people.”

Lanthier admits the exhibit posed some challenges, especially since it was made in partnership with a science centre which doesn’t have the same mandate as a natural museum.

But it was a good exercise for the museum since curators are in the process of putting together a permanent Arctic gallery.

No other permanent exhibit at the Museum of Nature is curated around a geographical place, she said: there are minerals, mammals, birds and dinosaurs, for instance.

But this gallery will pull together a host of elements related to the Arctic.

“It’s a bigger challenge,” Lanthier said. “We want to make sure we get it right. You want to have a complete and true picture of what’s happening now.”

But the Arctic is constantly changing, she added. And the issues are complex: climate, culture, people, politics.

“Hopefully, if we do talk about touchy issues, we will get the same amount of comments for and against. Then we’ll know we got the balance right,” she said.

Museum curators are currently in the consultation phase of project design. They’ve talked to local scientists and experts and now hope to turn their attention to Inuit and other northern peoples to gather their input on what should be put in the gallery, and what should be left out.

Normally, a permanent gallery of this magnitude would take five years or so to create, design and set up, she said, but this has to be done in half that time in order to be completed for Canada’s 150th anniversary in 2017.

Arctic Voices is on until May 3.