Who takes care of thousands of aging artifacts at N.W.T.’s largest museum? | CBC News

Most of the artifacts in the N.W.T.’s 70,000-piece museum collection are in one place, with a five-person team responsible for its preservation.

As the collection grows, those managing it say they have had to expand storage. Most of it is still stored at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre in Yellowknife while less delicate items, like the first car to ever drive in Fort Resolution and old snow machines, are at a warehouse on the other side of town.

But Rose Scott, the senior conservator at the museum, said pieces behind closed doors are still accessible to the public. She said showing them to people is one of the most wonderful parts of her job.

“It’s the stories around the object, what it brings up for the people looking at it,” said Scott. “There’s a lot of shared storytelling and connection and there are these beautiful moments that people have and we are fortunate enough to be in the room.”

Some items never make it out to the general display simply due to how sensitive they are. A moosehide map that commemorates a canoe trip in 1970 down the Mackenzie River is rolled up among similar pieces in the storage room. 

While the room is temperature controlled the map needs protection from light, Scott said.

“There are rugs, there are flags, there are tapestries,” she said. “The most efficient and safest way to store them is rolled [up] in the restrictive amount of space that we have. They’re protected from light and easier to handle and there’s imagery attached.”

Imagery and information about all pieces is stored in a database. The bundled part of the collection is a fairly small part. Most things are easily viewable, but curators have needed to get creative in a few instances to make it possible.

Small soapstone and wood carvings can pose a challenge when the walls in the room are on a rolling track. Scott makes use of ethafoam, a safe plastic for the pieces, in a deeper tray to make its display arrangement. 

To the right of the miniature items, a larger sculpture by Wayne Nataway is displayed in a standalone fashion. Nataway was from the N.W.T. but spent some time working in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

“We think that’s how this piece was in the States and came to us many years later. That was in the 1990s. So this is my little storage system to keep it from moving while we have it in the units,” said Scott.

Susan Irving, manager of museum collections, said there are also materials stored lying down, covered up or covered with ethafoam, but that they wanted this one assembled to show it to people.

“That’s just a choice I made in conversation with Rose,” Irving said. “How we can make material in storage as visually accessible as possible and true to what it really looks like?”

When the museum received Nataway’s piece, Scott said it was “in a kind of a condition that was a bit concerning and wasn’t very good for interpretation, it was missing some of the hair, it was quite soiled and the marble was quite dirty.”

Scott says they don’t do total restoration work but instead try to honour the artist and not go too far. In this case it required finding a listing for the piece on a website for antiques and trying to return it to that condition. 

A large part of conserving pieces is also framing paintings, said Scott. She works with a local framer to put together a unique type of frame with UV filtering glass that will protect art from all sorts of elements. 

“The painting is framed up away from the glass and then is put in a frame with a buffering and a backing board,” Scott said. “So those are things like something on that board or a foam core that buffers the changes in the environment.”

Before leaving the main storage room and walking past canoes on the wall, Irving emphasized public availability of the museum collection for families, researchers and members of the community. 

She said it was important to make artifacts available to those who want to see them, pointing out that for some — it’s like visiting a family member.