The BICS Youth Curator program was very popular this year with all 12 spots in the program filled by students in grades 4-7. These students wanted to learn more about local history and contribute to the celebration the BC Heritage Week. This year, the theme is, Oh Canada 150, with an exhibit about Bowen Island.
Over the last few months students have gone on lunchtime field trips to visit the Bowen Museum & Archives to learn about local history, research techniques, how the archives work, and share their artifacts and information through special exhibits. Youth curators have selected topics of interest to them and are creating displays that will share what they have learned about Bowen’s history. These are weird, wacky, wild and wonderful stories.
An exhibit about the history of Bowen’s schools was created by Nora, Makena and Lua. It features a school bell that may have been from the original one-room schoolhouse built in the late 1800s. Rose researched Bowfest and has some great old photos, ribbons and a hat created for the 1978 Bicentennial Bowfest, which was a special two-day event. Nicola researched the old Bowen Island Salmon Derby tradition that ended in the 1980s when there were no longer enough salmon to catch. Rowan researched the history of the beaver on Bowen Island and its return to the streams of Bowen. Early Bowen Island ferries were investigated by Ewan and Sasha who found some great pictures of the first car ferry and the ferry line-up in the 1960s. Congratulations to all the youth curators for creating a wonderful exhibit by youth, for youth. Special thanks to the Museum & Archives as well as Bowen Heritage for their ongoing support of this program connecting youth to local history.
The exhibit will be on display in the upper foyer of BICS from until March 30.
