REM shares Regina’s stories, past, present and hopefully future

City | Gregory Beatty

As Saskatchewan’s capital, Regina is blessed with some fine provincial, and even national, museums. The Royal Saskatchewan Museum, RCMP Heritage Centre and Saskatchewan Science Centre are probably the three best known. But there’s also Government House and the Saskatchewan Sports Hall of Fame, to name two more.

So when the Civic Museum of Regina closed its doors in 2015, its loss probably wasn’t as keenly felt as a similar museum in another city would have been. Still, the Civic Museum filled an important niche in Regina’s museum ecosystem by collecting and exhibiting artifacts and other archival material covering Regina’s colonial/settlement history from the 1880s onward.

Founded by the Regina Exhibition and Regina and District Old Timers’ Association in 1958, the museum (as Regina Plains Museum) spent time in the Old City Hall and nearby Laird building on Scarth St. Mall in the 1990s and 2000s before moving to its final home at 1375 Broad St. in 2013.

Faced with longstanding budget problems, the board made the difficult decision to close the museum in 2015, and the collection was put in storage.

But it turns out the museum wasn’t history after all. Well, it is history. It’s just being presented in a different way.

That comes in the form of the recently “opened” REM, which bills itself as “your museum without walls”.

REM stands for “Regina Ecomuseum”. Kelsey Longmoore is REM’s executive director, and in a recent phone interview she recounted how REM emerged from the ashes of the Civic Museum.

“A whole bunch of the collection was deaccessioned, so things were returned to donors or sold through an antique store when they weren’t of great significance,” says Longmoore.

“While that was going on, the board went through a visioning and strategic planning stage where we moved to an ecomuseum model. When people hear that term they think ecology, but it’s more focused on intangible heritage as opposed to physical objects that we can’t touch or feel,” she says.

Satellites & Stops

To fulfill its mandate as an ecomuseum, REM has adopted a multi-pronged approach. On the more traditional prong, it’s set up several satellite spaces to display prized artifacts still in the collection.

“Our Glass Wheat Sheaves (by glass artist Jacqueline Berting) are in the Brownstone building on Broad St. in the Warehouse District,” says Longmoore. “It’s publicly accessible. And since it’s also the old John Deere building, we have a plough there, too.”

Other satellite spaces include Casino Regina and Centennial Market. REM is developing an artifact strategy to create more displays — which are meant to be semi-permanent.

“My favourite artifact is a beautiful stained glass window from the old Knox Presbyterian Church that survived the 1912 tornado,” says Longmoore. “What we want to do is find partners — be they businesses or public spaces — who will act as mini-museums for the artifacts.”

Smaller artifacts will be displayed in specially built Story Stop benches, says Longmoore.

“There’s one outside Lakeview Fine Foods in Hillsdale that tells the story of local general stores and how that’s changed over the years,” she says. “Then there’s one near T+A Vinyl in the Heritage neighbourhood that’s on the history of women’s craft. They’ll have rotating exhibits that are curated, and my vision is to have two or three in every neighbourhood.”

To enhance the museum experience for “visitors”, REM has partnered with local start-up memoryKPR, says Longmoore.

“The exhibits will have a QR code that takes you to an online platform where you’ll find pictures, videos and stories by people familiar with the artifact,” says Longmore. “The cool thing is it’s a living story. If the artifact has significance for someone, they can record their own story. It becomes a community story, and we’re the catalyst for it.”

In addition to the more traditional museum programming, REM project coordinator Tenille Bryan has curated online “exhibits” at theremregina.com.

The series kicked off last Halloween with six blog posts on buildings in Regina that are reputed to be haunted — including Darke Hall, the Assiniboia Club and the Hotel Saskatchewan. Bryan has also done features to mark Black History Month (February) and Women’s History Month (March).

“We did interviews with groups such as Saskatchewan African Canadian Heritage Museum, the YWCA and SOFIA House,” says Longmoore. “Then for Earth Day in April, we interviewed Harold Orr, who was one of the leaders of the Passive House Movement.”

May is Mental Health Awareness month and Longmoore says REM plans to reach out to Invisible Mental Health (which hosts events in the old Weston Bakery on 13 block Hamilton), along with the Schizophrenia Society of Saskatchewan and Canadian Mental Health Association. Then in June, REM plans to do a Pride feature.

The diversity of REM’s exhibits and projects so far highlights another important distinction between it and its predecessor museum, says Longmoore.

“While local museums like ours have traditionally focused on settler culture, we’re interested in telling all sides of history. That includes the impact of Indigenous people on the settlement of Regina, as well as newcomers,” she says.

“We want to engage with people whose story it is to tell, and try to be facilitators of that. We also want to tell stories of our present, because what’s happening today is tomorrow’s history,” she says.

Unfortunately, one thing REM does have in common with its predecessor is money troubles.

“The city has typically been our major funder and our last grant was based on 2022,” says Longmoore. “But we were only starting up then, so it was mostly planning. Then our funding was cut in half.”

SaskCulture is another important REM supporter, and the museum currently has enough funding to run until August.

“My jam is meeting with community groups to see how we can work together but right now we’re focused on figuring out how we can keep going,” says Longmoore. “Now that we have some tangible exhibits that people can see, we’re hoping to find sponsors to develop more of them.”

Longmoore thinks backing REM is an investment worth making.

“I’m a huge mental health advocate,” says Longmoore. “There’s a book I read called Lost Connections that identifies nine lost connections that lead to anxiety and depression. One was lost connection to community.

“By putting stories out by people who are community champions, and starting conversations, we hope to help people get to know their neighbourhoods,” she says. ■