Musée Lac-Brome Museum is launching a new exhibition dedicated to the history and traditions of the W8banaki (Abenaki) titled Present and Past: The W8banaki presence in Brome County.

Jeremy Reeves, former curator for the museum, started working on the exhibition in 2019 but it faced delays due to the pandemic. Following his departure, Rachel Lambie took on the project as her first major exhibition since being appointed curator in 2021. The museum collaborated with the Musée des Abenakis in Odanak, Ndakina, the archeological bureau in Odanak and W8banaki artist Christine Sioui-Wawanoloath to bring the exhibition to life.

“The idea was to help create connections and really to form strong bonds between both institutions, the two museums. We are also highlighting the art of Christine Sioui-Wawanoloath. She’s a local W8banaki artist as well,” said Lambie. “We are highlighting her art and helping create connections between the W8banaki presence of the past and the W8banaki presence of the present.”

Lambie emphasized that her first step after taking over the exhibition involved having a land acknowledgment for the museum.

“For me, it was important to know how we were going to talk about this important community and this important part of our story. Not just our history, but our active story,” she said.

The museum then proceeded to send its Indigenous collection to Odanak to be assessed.

“As part of that, it really gave me a sense of what our collection is like. Not all of it is local, some of it is souvenirs that people picked up in British Columbia or Manitoba, or what have you, which don’t really fit our theme, but are still really interesting pieces,” explained Lambie. “But there are some pieces that are local and lots of those are stone tools that were found at farms in the midst of doing that work.”

The museum will be showcasing some of these tools, but they have also borrowed pieces from the Musée des Abenakis.

“Then I consulted with Christine Sioui, who has worked for the museum in Odanak as well, and she just knows so much. She has some great ideas about how to connect our pieces with the pieces in Odanak, and also how to present them in ways that connect to traditional history and traditional stories,” said Lambie. “She has created some art pieces that go along with our collection.”

Lambie said that the exhibition was a challenge, with very little archeological work about the presence of the W8banaki in the former Brome County.

“To some extent, we’re in a bit of a black hole. At least that’s what I learned from the bureau Ndakina. There hasn’t been a lot of archeological work for that particular view done in this area. (…) One of the other things is that many of the pieces that would have been used here, might have been acquired through trade,” noted Lambie. “So, we might have things that aren’t local, but would have been used locally. They were quite nomadic so there weren’t any communities that settled here.”

She also noted that the museum has very little in its archives about the W8banaki.

“We do know that there were rivers, like the Missisquoi River, which is in Potton I believe. It runs through Potton and was used as a trade route. So, there were canoes that went up and down there that would have travelled from here right through to Vermont,” said Lambie. “There were lots of W8banaki presence documentations in Massachusetts, Vermont, and I think New Hampshire, as well as up into Quebec.”

Lambie said that she hopes people realize that there is more to the area than its loyalist history and that people begin to ask their questions.

“I hope we get a sense of more than just the loyalist history here or more than just the history of Paul Holland Knowlton, that there’s more than that,” she said. “That there are questions we haven’t asked and pieces we haven’t explored. It’s my hope really that it’s a first step of finding out more about the history and really learning things. I hope that people leave curious.”

The Present and Past: The W8banaki presence in Brome County exhibition will kick off on May 21.

Listen to the full interview with Lambie below: