My name is Zachary Gonzalez, I study Anthropology and English here at McGill, and for just under the last three months I have been participating in a non-Academic credit internship with the Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens institute concerned with cataloguing, researching, and describing various artifacts and tools from their collections. During this time, I was responsible for sorting through the abundant rakes, hammers, and saws in search of more unusual items to research and then describe as part of a yet unpublished book which will detail the assemblage and make it available to the public.
The experience has, in all honesty, been one of the most intriguing and absorbing of my time here at university, in large part due to the ability of these items to act as portholes into the lives, attitudes, tastes, and thought processes of the people who helped make the province of Quebec and the nation of Canada what they are today.
In many ways I felt as though I was directly contributing, through my work as an intern, to the mission of the Reford Gardens institute to build and maintain a living historical archive which bridges the origins of contemporary Canadian society and the modern day.
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In fact, what I found to be most enjoyable and engrossing about the internship was the sense of excitement I garnered from drawing tangible but unexpected connections between tools and across time. For instance, the prevalence of pesticides and related chemicals, synthetic or natural, is something that we take for granted in today’s day and age, just as we take for granted that our governments and institutions are involved behind the scenes to ensure their safety and efficacy. However, the pursuit of my research concerning several sets of domestic pesticide pumps dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, lead me to discover that such compounds and products were not regulated in any way, shape, or form in Canada until almost 1930, and that regulations and safety standards of the kind we are used to today did not emerge for another twenty years at least. Although, we do continue to make use of some compounds which were developed in that unregulated era, just as the seeds of today’s chemically impregnated world were developed in that period, and by examining artifacts may we gain a fuller appreciation for how our tools and what we do with them both stem from and discolor or perception of the past.
Indeed, I feel as though the internship has provided me with an augmented perspective on the process of development which has put Canada in the position it occupies today, although this is not to say that at the beginning of the internship, I did not experience my share of issues. Afterall, the vast majority of my work was conducted remotely and under my own supervision, and so I struggled at first to locate the information I required and set meaningful goals through which to track my progress. But, with the help of my internship coordinator, Alexander Reford, I quickly became comfortable with what was expected of me and what I needed to do to make that happen. As such, I remain eternally grateful to all those who made this experience possible, for not only have I gained a better appreciation of Canadian society, but additionally a better perspective of myself; as someone who does not prefer remote work. I’d like to thank especially the donor of the Bryce Internship Award I received, Mrs. Wemp. It is your generous kind donation that made everything possible.
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