Anishinaabe

• Today, Environment and Climate Change Canada and Health Canada announced the draft regulations to further reduce emissions from the petroleum sector of harmful volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which are airborne pollutants that contribute to smog.
• These changes would improve air quality in neighbourhoods and communities across the country that are close to oil and gas facilities.
• The draft regulations reflect an on-going commitment to environmental justice and the need to address disproportionate environmental harms on communities near industrial sites.
• Exposure levels are higher in communities near large emission sources, including Indigenous and low-income communities already facing increased health burdens.

• Today, Alterra Mountain Company further celebrates the unique character and culture of its mountain destinations by unveiling Forward Stance Studio , which began with an investment of more than $1 million to support diverse, local, and sustainability-conscious artists to develop public art installations that capture the essence of each destination, creating the Forward Stance Studio.
• Each destination was asked to identify conversations they wanted to facilitate within their community through an on-site public art installation.
• For more information on each art installation and future projects from Forward Stance Studio, please visit https://www.alterramtn.co/forward-stance-studio .
• Guests headed to Blue Mountain this winter will encounter a captivating public art installation that encapsulates a deep appreciation and celebration of Indigenous cultures and communities.

• "We are beyond thrilled to reach over 2 million students through our Open OutDoors for Kids program," said Lise Aangeenbrug, chief program officer at the National Park Foundation.
• This year's investment reaches an all-time high in funding impact and contributes to the celebratory milestone of the Foundation connecting more than 2 million students to national parks since Open OutDoors for Kids' inception in 2011.
• "America's 425 national parks provide incredible opportunities for growth and meaningful connection with the country's cultural heritage," said National Parks Service Director Chuck Sams.
• Everglades National Park (Florida) – Over 15,000 students in the Miami area will take their first step towards becoming lifelong national park stewards by visiting Everglades and Biscayne National Parks to learn about the region's rich biodiversity.

• In Dr. Hamilton’s darkened seance chamber, as Doyle would later write, he experienced a luminous table fly into the air.
• Today, Hamilton’s legacy includes an uncanny trove of photographs related to his investigations of paranormal materializations.
• A new scholarly collection of essays and an art exhibit, The Undead Archive: 100 Years of Photographing Ghosts, at the University of Winnipeg use an art historical lens to contextualize these uncanny photographs.

The ‘psychic force’

• Doyle recounted how the table clattered again and again entirely on its own, with no sitter touching it.
• One moment, it was quiet.
• Psychic force, as some scientists believed, would extrude from the body of the medium and manifest as a organic plasm known as ectoplasm, through which spirits could communicate.

Expression of bereavement

• It was not uncommon after the losses of the First World War and the 1919 influenza pandemic for North Americans to participate in seances and dabble in spiritualism as an expression of bereavement, as historians Felicity Hamer and Esyllt Jones have outlined.
• Read more:
  Spirit photography captured love, loss and longing

  Interestingly, Hamilton rejected the popular religion of spiritualism, critiquing it as a cult.

Inspired ‘Ghostbusters’

• They were also praised by researchers, including two who got into a famous public argument with the magician Houdini after claiming to debunk his magic, and Samuel Aykroyd, actor Dan Aykroyd’s great-grandfather.
• The younger Aykroyd’s 1984 blockbuster Ghostbusters brought ectoplasm into popular culture.

‘Undead Archive’ exhibit

• The exhibit, The Undead Archive: 100 Years of Photographing Ghosts, at the University of Winnipeg’s Gallery 1C03, and the University of Manitoba’s School of Art and Archives and Special Collections, similarly focuses on artistic interpretations of this mysterious substance.
• Works include stop-motion videos of ectoplasm morphing into recognizable shapes: one by Shannon Taggart and one by Grace Williams.

Unseen, suppressed spiritual work

• Erika DeFreitas uses crocheted doilies instead of ectoplasm, calling attention to unseen labour mediums carried out to support psychical researchers.
• KC Adams, an Anishinaabe, Ininew and British artist living in Manitoba researched and created a virtual reality artwork for the exhibition that examines Ininew burial rituals suppressed under the Indian Act.

Pandemics and forgetting

• In Burrows’s image, Tam looks upwards, as if in a trance, and is surrounded by green beads imitating the COVID-19 virus.
• In the early days of the pandemic, Dr. Tam was constantly on national TV and social media, like a diviner laying out warnings.

Winnipeg as ‘psychic centre’

• After sitting with the Hamiltons in their seance laboratory, in a July 5, 1923 letter to Lillian Hamilton, Doyle described Winnipeg as a “psychic centre,” in many ways divining Winnipeg’s loss of status as “Chicago of the North,” offering an alternative moniker.
• The idea of Winnipeg as a supernatural place has been taken up by artists and authors, exemplified by filmmaker Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, as well as the exhibition art, much of it created during COVID-19 lockdowns.

Serena Keshavjee receives funding from SSHRC.