Carnaval is fast approaching, set to occur February 6th to 12th, and Anne Brûlé, who alongside her colleagues at Les Compagnons des Francs Loisirs in North Bay, is planning an exhibition highlighting local Francophone history to coincide with the event.
She needs your help.
Brûlé is looking for submissions from the Francophone community to use in the exhibit. The North Bay Museum has given her a wall to use for the big day, and she plans to fill it with photographs, brief stories, and historical documents.
“We’re excited about it,” she said, adding the project was partly inspired by digging through her own family albums, as revisiting the pictures “completely changed my vision of how I saw them.”
Her family had a store on O’Brien Street near where the Comfort Inn is now. “Just beside that was my family land,” she explained.
Hardworking people, her grandmother raised nine kids and ran a store, rented cabins, sold some hot batches of beans, and hosted dances on the weekends.
“My grandmother was an entrepreneur,” while her grandfather spent his days working for the railroad.
Brûlé admitted “I had an image of people who never had fun,” her family “worked hard on the farm” and her mind conjured a life of toil, images of hardscrabble folk preserved in sepia, characters relatable to the world depicted in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
But the reality was much brighter.
“I found pictures of my grandfather standing on a horse, and another one where they had a barnyard orchestra.”
“Oh yeah, these guys knew how to have fun,” she realized, and the photos gave her a better “appreciation for the spirit they had.”
That sense of discovery is what Brûlé hopes to foster with this new exhibit, which will launch at the opening day of Carnaval on February 6th.
This year’s event marks the 59th anniversary of Carnaval, and Brûlé has plans to use this exhibit as a springboard to launch another project to commemorate the upcoming 60th anniversary.
Perhaps a book containing items from this exhibit will be printed she mentioned, although plans are not yet finalized for North Bay Carnival’s diamond anniversary.
She encourages submissions from Callander, Bonfield, East Ferris—all regions within Nipissing District, including North Bay, of course.
“We want to be inclusive of everyone in Nipissing,” she said, “inclusive of the communities our members are from.”
Brûlé emphasized that digital copies of photographs are preferred as “we don’t want to risk anything, these are precious pieces of history.”
Also, a few lines or brief paragraph would be appreciated to provide some context for the photo, to “help us understand what reality was like for them.”
Very short stories or brief anecdotes highlighting local history are also welcome, as are historical documents such as old telegrams, local flyers from the Francophone community, advertising bills, and similar ephemera.
As for the timeline, Brûlé prefers submissions to highlight the decades before 1980.
Since this is a new project for the organization, Brûlé acknowledged she “may get three submissions or I may get three hundred,” but either way, she’s curious “to see what’s out there.”
She is excited to “see the journeys of those who came here” and showcase “different relationships and perspectives within the community.”
The exhibit provides “a way to visualize in a tangible way our past and to celebrate our histories,” she said, and “reconnect with families who have Francophone roots” in the region.
“If someone does decide to explore their heritage as part of this, that’s a win for me.”
To submit to the exhibit, you can e-mail Anne Brûlé at [email protected], or e-mail Les Compagnons des Francs Loisirs’ office at [email protected].
David Briggs is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter who works out of BayToday, a publication of Village Media. The Local Journalism Initiative is funded by the Government of Canada.
