From The Ground Up: Cortes Island Dwellings

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - A new exhibition in the Cortes Island Museum looks at the island’s housing from pre-colonial times up until the present. ‘From the Ground Up: Cortes Island Dwellings And Their Histories’ combines photographs and artifacts from the museum’s collections, stories and images from the community and a display from the Cortes Housing Society. Melanie Boyle, Managing Director of the Museum, took Cortes Currents on a tour of the exhibit.  
 “Welcome to the Cortes Museum and Archives. We are standing just inside the museum store, but as you know, the museum once was the Cortes Lodge store, down at Manson's Lagoon. We have a new exhibition which just opened on May 5th and runs throughout the year. I curated the show with Monica Hoffman,” she began.  
“This exhibition looks at dwellings and communities from a historic perspective, not only just the dwellings, but the process behind a lot of them. On Cortes we face a lot of challenges, whether economic, terrain, or just accessing material. Our idea was to look at dwellings from that perspective: how people overcome the challenges; elusive solutions they find, and the connections they make to the land, to one another and the way they build community.”