Arctic and Antarctic
Gimli's Historical Connections
to the Arctic and Antarctic
Our project looks into the history of our area to discover the connections with the Arctic and Antarctic regions of planet Earth. Called New Iceland before Manitoba was extended north, we are close, geographically, to the Arctic. However, some thought we would have a problem finding a connection to the Antarctic. Not so. We learned that sled dogs from the west shore of Lake Winnipeg went with two Antarctic explorers, Shackleton and Byrd. The research project was on. We hope to educate our patrons, our school kids, and our summer visitors, as we have educated ourselves. We have two display windows at NIHM with artefacts and displays and two looseleaf binders full of information and pictures gathered from local families, books, newspapers, the internet and the Archives of Manitoba.
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The Gimli Connection to the Arctic
(1) An overview of the travelling exhibit, Portraits of the North, by Gerald Kuehl, is in our Traveling Exhibit Gallery. The exhibit is made up of many graphite pencil drawings and biographies of Inuit and Native Canadians. This clip is from the Interlake Spectator. The man featured is William Cochrane, a local resident.
Shelley Narfason with a pencil drawing of William Cochrane.
(2) A Mayberry Art Gallery catalogue and information about A.A. Ruben, an Inuit sculptor whose latest collection is a meld of Inuit and Norse styles titled "Iceland 900 A.D".
(3) A Vilhjalmur Stefansson section, highlighted by a family tree of his Inuit family, which he never acknowledged outside the North. Stefansson was born just a little north of Gimli and proudly wore his Icelandic ancestry - as we do here in Gimli.
Fannie Pannigabluk and son, Alex Stefansson, c. 1915 (left)
(4) The close connection of our sled dogs and their drivers with the Canadian Arctic and Northern Manitoba.