Human Rights, The Forks and Native Prairie in Winnipeg

Friday, August 14th, was our first in Winnipeg, we travelled into the center of the city to visit The Forks National Historic Site and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.  On our way over to visit the Serbian Pavilian for the local Folkorama Festival (see next blog entry), we stopped by the Living Prairie Museum.  It made for a long day.

The Canadian Museum for Human Rights is architecturally impressive:

It was designed by  Antoine Predock, an architect from Albuquerque, New Mexico.  He describes the museum's design in the following way:

"The Canadian Museum for Human Rights is rooted in humanity, 

making visible in the architecture the fundamental commonality of humankind

-- a symbolic apparition of ice, clouds and stone set in a field of sweet grass. 

Carved into the earth and dissolving into the sky on the Winnipeg horizon, 

the abstract ephemeral wings of a white dove embrace

 a mythic stone mountain of 450 million year old Tyndall limestone 

in the creation of a unifying and timeless landmark 

for all nations and cultures of the world."

The purpose of the museum is to "explore the subject of human rights with a special but not exclusive reference to Canada, in order to enhance the public's understanding of human rights, to promote respect for others and to encourage reflection and dialogue."  It opened in September 2014.  The interior offers vast open spaces, which include the museum administrative offices:

From the Tower of Hope on the top of the museum, panoramas of Winnipeg and the surrounding countryside spread out below.  This is a view looking northwest toward the Exchange District --

-- and this looks southwest across the Provencher Bridge toward the French Quarter in St. Boniface:

Each level of the museum examines a separate aspect of issues of human rights, with an emphasis on a Canadian perspective.  Here, on Level 7, the museum explores issues relating to taking action for change to promote human rights:

On Level 4 is an exhibit on the Holocaust, which is compelling both in substance and design:

One theme of the museum is that there can be no protection of human rights without peace.  Another is that an effective means of advancing human rights is to educate people about the struggle for human rights.  The museum chooses to emphasize education.

If the museum's message can be summed up in one statement, it might be the quotation from Primo Levi's book, "Survival in Auschwitz":

"You who live safe

In your warm houses, 

You who find warm food

And friendly faces when you return home. 

Consider if this is a man

Who works in mud, 

Who knows no peace, 

Who fights for a crust of bread, 

Who dies by a yes or no.

Consider if this is a woman

Without hair, without name,

Without the strength to remember,

Empty are her eyes, cold her womb,

Like a frog in winter. 

Never forget that this has happened.

Remember these words.

Engrave them in your hearts, 

When at home or in the street, 

When lying down, when getting up. 

Repeat them to your children.

Or may your houses be destroyed, 

May illness strike you down, 

May your offspring turn their faces from you.”

The bitterness of his experience in the Nazi camps is unmistakable in Levi's words.  But out of it comes a passion that communicates the urgency of human empathy and mutual support.

After spending some extended time in the museum, we walked over to The Forks Market, which reminded us strongly of Faneuil Hall in Boston, both on the outside --

-- and on the inside:

The building is an historic structure originally used by teamsters and longshoremen to store their equipment and cargo awaiting loading or transport.

The Forks sits at the confluence of the Red River, which flows north from the Dakotas and empties into Lake Winnipeg, and one of its tributaries, the Assiniboine River.  It was originally the site of water commerce for Winnipeg, which was the Gateway to the West in Canada.  Today, the waterfront has been developed into a human-centric, attractive park:

It includes the Orientation Node, which acts as a functional and visual connection to various outdoor venues at the site:

One very interesting feature was the Citizen Garden, a collection of 2015 blue flags planted to remind one of Canada's prairie grasses.  Each flag contains a photo of one of Canada's diverse citizens and a word the individual wished to memorialize:

We walked across the Provencher Bridge to the French Quarter, and, as we headed south along the river, we saw this image of the Museum and the Bridge together:

Our destination in the French Quarter was the Cathedral of St. Boniface.  The original church in this location was built in 1818.  It and successive structures were destroyed by fire until the facade that now stands was built in 1905.  When that cathedral, too, was destroyed by fire in 1968, a new, more modern church was built within and preserving the 1905 stone facade:

The afternoon was getting late, and we needed to head west toward the Serbian Pavilion at the St. James Community Center.  On our way, we stopped at the Living Prairie Museum, which preserves 32 acres of native tall grass prairie.  Although tall grass prairie once extended from Manitoba to Texas, less than 1% of the original prairie remains in North America.

Here, Kathy stands with the prairie preserve spreading out behind her:

An interesting feature on the land are two large boulders, which are known as "bison rubbing stones."  Brought here from the Morden area in Manitoba, their smooth surfaces were polished over thousands of years by huge herds of bison scratching themselves on the boulder's rough surfaces:

The tall grass prairie exists partly because it is underlay by limestone bedrock, the result of deposition of shellfish and other materials under an immense inland sea that spread across North America.  In one place, some limestone boulders are strewn where the former owner of the land had evidently piled them:

We had a chance to see milkweed, which is the rare food of the rarer Monarch butterflies, known for migrating thousands of miles from areas in Canada in the summer, to Mexico for the winter.

We came away from visiting this little prairie with a greater appreciation of the diversity of plant and animal life that once thrived across the middle of North America - which now has virtually no native habitat left.  It gives us a greater appreciation of institutions and people - such as the Canadian Museum of Human Rights in the plantings on its grounds - that attempt to restore native grasses and other plants to their natural environments.