By Cheryl Jahn

Exploration Place wants to hear from you

Apr 3, 2023 | 4:05 PM

PRINCE GEORGE – The foyer to Exploration Place looks vastly different than the pre-COVID days. Today, it looks like a jungle with the paleo-botanical garden as the first thing you see. But what will it look like next year or the year after or in five years?

“Everything in this building is a prop for the people that are in it and for the community to come and fill with their own hopes and dreams and ideas and debates,” explains Tracey Calogheros. “So we need to now go about getting a strategic plan that will look at what we do with this fabulous new museum that we’ve built. And you’re right, it’s backward. We should have done the strategic plan first. But Kobe didn’t give any of us an opportunity to get our poop in a group, so to speak.”

While the survey may be after fact, the Exploration Place really wants public input and it is gaining national attention.

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“The museum industry itself is in flux right now. We’re writing a new museum policy for the country. We are trying to grapple with the treaty calls to action. And there’s also all of the work that needs to be done around other equity-seeking groups, the many communities that are post-contact settlement groups that really aren’t being listened to or heard in our cultural institutions.”

Traditionally museums have been the keepers of history, but as Calogheros says, the curatorial role of museums is morphing.

“We were invented, idealized as places that white guys that were traveling around the world can bring back the things they stole and show them to their other white friends. That’s where museums originated. But that is not what anyone in this world wants from us these days. And I think sometimes that the North here in B.C. doesn’t recognize just how different and special the exploration place really is.”

The Exploration Place has been a part of the community since 1981 and has worn many different looks. In 2017 it won the Governor General’s award for it display of local First Nations traditions. In fact, the museum sits on the original lands of the Leidhli T’enneh.

“Traditionally done, I think, a very good job around reconciliation and work. And that has to do entirely with the bravery of the quiet today and the willingness of this board of trustees over a period of decades to open themselves up to the truth. And what really did happen, and to learn about things like residential schools and the expulsion from the park here. To take the survey, simply go to www.surveymonkey.com/r/ExplorationPlace.