The Pulse: June 30, 2021

Fireworks, parades, and other Canada Day activities will be taking place in most Edmonton-area municipalities on July 1, despite a national movement to cancel the festivities.

In light of the discovery of unmarked burial sites near former residential schools in Kamloops and southeast Saskatchewan, 20 rallies are being organized across the country under the banner Cancel Canada Day.

Michelle Wells, an Indigenous woman helping to organize the rally in Edmonton, said the day should be reserved for honouring the lives lost to residential schools — not for celebrating.

"Everyone needs to take a step back and acknowledge that this happened in order to move forward as people," she told CityNews earlier this month.

Bob Smallboy, a residential school survivor, is organizing a convoy to honour those who died, which will make its way from Enoch Cree Nation to Ermineskin Cree Nation.

Victoria, Penticton, and a number of communities in the Yukon and New Brunswick have cancelled their Canada Day programming out of respect to Indigenous communities. Some events have also been cancelled in Kelowna and Toronto, though officials in both municipalities have suggested this is more to do with health precautions related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the Edmonton-area, St. Albert is the only municipality to cancel or postpone its annual fireworks display. In previous years, the city's display was held at Mission Hill, the site of the former Youville Residential School.

• Local not-for-profits are shifting their services to assist Edmonton's most vulnerable through the current heat wave. Boyle Street Community Services is asking for water bottle donations, while Hope Mission has hit capacity thanks to Edmontonians' generosity.
• The St. Albert RCMP has released a sketch of a suspect in the hate-motivated assault against two Muslim sisters wearing hijabs in a park last week.
• The city is encouraging Edmontonians to wear orange this Canada Day and to "demonstrate their commitment to reconciliation" by reflecting on the legacy of residential schools. It will be lighting the Walterdale and High Level bridges orange.
• The Edmonton Police Service is ready to implement several changes to the way it operates, after spending nearly a year engaging with various communities, including people of colour. The outreach was prompted by the death of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer in Minnesota last summer.
• As part of its Zoning Bylaw Renewal Initiative, the city has developed a GBA+ and Equity Toolkit "to ensure planners consider equity and diversity when drafting zoning rules for the city." It is the first of its kind in Canada, according to deputy city manager Stephanie McCabe.
• The victim dubbed 'Septic Tank Sam' has been identified using DNA 44 years after being found on an rural property southeast of Edmonton, reports CBC News. Police are expected to released the man's name on Wednesday.
• The World Health Organization (WHO) is urging fully vaccinated people to continue to wear masks and follow social distancing measures, as the highly infectious Delta variant causes outbreaks around the world. Edmonton's mask bylaw will be lifted on July 1.

Edmonton-based startup company Ruth recently launched its environmentally-friendly menstrual pads made of plant-based materials.

Co-founder Nicole Sanchez told Taproot that the company's menstrual pads don't contain harmful plastic and can biodegrade safely into the environment.

"Menstrual pads that are on the shelves normally take up to 800 years to biodegrade. With us not using plastic, that speeds up the process," she said.

Ruth's pads are made from natural materials including kenaf fibre, wood pulp, and a corn-based waterproof backing layer.

The company, previously known as Hempact, started as a University of Alberta project by Sanchez and Anka Chan in 2018. Last week, the product officially launched alongside a Kickstarter campaign. The company raised more than $10,000 in one week, surpassing its campaign goal of $7,000.

The campaign runs until July 22.

On this day in 1931, the Edmonton Museum of Arts was closing due to major renovations.

The renovations aimed to enlarge the exhibition galleries, creating more space. Although the museum was shut down during the renovations, locals could still take a peek at the museum's exhibition — old French peasant costumes — by calling up the museum's director. The newspaper even helpfully printed her phone number.

The Edmonton Museum of Arts came from humble beginnings. It began in 1920 with the founding of the Edmonton Art Club, which worked on establishing a permanent collection for the city. Within five years, the museum was established. However, it would be a while before the museum had a permanent home. Instead, it bounced around: first in a room at the Hotel MacDonald, then held within existing civic buildings, and a late spell in Secord House.

Eventually, it was decided that the museum (now called the Edmonton Art Gallery) needed a proper home. In 1964, the city donated land near Churchill Square for a modern gallery. A significant part of the construction price was donated by Dr. William Newton and Abigail Edith Condell in memory of their son. The new gallery, designed by architect Don Bittorf, was created in the brutalist style that was popular for civic buildings at the time and was meant to be just as much a work of art as the exhibits it contained. The new building finally had all of the specialized equipment needed for a true art gallery, including temperature control and vaults.

By the early 2000s, there was a call to renovate the gallery. A bold, and at the time controversial, design by Los Angeles-based Randall Stout was chosen in 2005, which featured steel ribbons that wrapped around the exterior of the building, meant to invoke both the North Saskatchewan River and an aurora. On the same day that the new design was announced, the gallery received a new name: Art Gallery of Alberta.

The Art Gallery of Alberta's permanent collection now sits around 6,000 pieces, most of which focuses on artists from across the province and western Canada. As with many museums, it has been closed to the public during the majority of the pandemic. The AGA began the gradual process of reopening last week with new exhibits focused on Indigenous artists as well as events celebrating Pride Month.

This is based on a clipping found on Vintage Edmonton, a daily look at Edmonton's history from armchair archivist @revRecluse — follow @VintageEdmonton for daily ephemera via Twitter.