Pow Wow Celebration

Pulsating drums, multi-coloured regalia and the rhythmic steps of the dancers are the trademark of the pow-wow. Today, these special gatherings are held by Indigenous peoples across North America. As an inter-tribal celebration pow-wows take the form of either a competition in which dancers and drum groups compete for prizes, or as a traditional pow-wow. The traditional pow-wow is a ceremony for the purpose of honouring the Creator, Mother Earth, or phases in the seasons. Read more

Collection Storage Project

This summer, MOA’s curatorial team began its next big project to repack ethnographic artefacts and maps in our collection storage area. Thanks to a grant from the London Community Foundation, MOA was able to purchase archival quality storage materials which will allow us to preserve our remarkable collection for many more generations to come. While it sounds like an easy project, repacking artifacts isn’t as simple as taking things out of one box and putting them in another. So how are we going about this?

MOA’s ethnographic and map collection consists of more than 3000 objects. Due to the size of this project, the curatorial team used this opportunity to inventory the entire collection by going through each box one by one. For every object found in a box, the curatorial team updated its catalogue record, location, condition report, and took digital pictures. After a box was complete, all objects were re-wrapped in acid free tissue with a new object barcode placed on the tissue surrounding each object. Read more

Miggs Morris’s Return to the Drum honoured in Deline NWT

Miggs Morris, acclaimed author, who has been part of the Museum of Ontario Archaeology for 15 years, had her book honoured at the UNESCO Biosphere Conference in Deline NWT the last week of July. At this conference Morris’s Return to the Drum was presented to keynote speaker David Suzuki and other delegates by Leonard Kenny, the Chief of Deline.

The Tudze, or Water Heart Conference, is named after a Dene legend about a living, breathing heart at the bottom of Great Bear Lake, on whose shores Deline is located. David Suzuki mentioned that he was “blown away” by the community’s connection to their natural environment and their commitment to its preservation.

Here, Miggs shares her experiences that led to her writing Return to the Drum (RTTD) Read more