Past in peril: Manitoba heritage agencies say they're being choked by chronic underfunding

One of the most significant archaeological digs in Manitoba's history is exposing a key element of Indigenous history, but the group heading the project says it's also scraping to stay afloat due to chronic under funding by the province.

The Manitoba Archaeological Society has been forced in recent years to cut its only paid staff member and abandon its office. Everything is now stored in the vacant office of a three-bay car wash in the small southwestern Manitoba town of Virden.

"My car wash has a wonderful curated collection of Aboriginal artifacts, but they should be in museums," said Alicia Gooden, the society's president and owner of the car wash.

"They should be displayed properly and stored properly," she said. "Same with our records — I've got 60-year-old amazing records just sitting in boxes."

Gooden's is not an isolated story, said Manitoba Historical Society president Gordon Goldsborough.

"They [government] say they want to support heritage but they really don't put their money where their mouth is."

Goldsborough recently penned a call to action on the state of Manitoba's heritage, published in the journal Prairie History, on behalf of the eight provincial heritage agencies — his historical society, the Association for Manitoba Archives, the Association of Manitoba Museums, Heritage Winnipeg, the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada, La Société historique de Saint-Boniface, the Manitoba Archaeological Society and the Manitoba Genealogical Society.

Provincial grants are an essential part of the annual budgets of those agencies, but there has not been a meaningful increase in 20 years, said Goldsborough, which has slowly choked their ability to do anything.

Most are now run by unpaid volunteers with responsibilities formerly handled by trained professionals in provincial government heritage branches.

Those volunteers are now edging toward burnout, which threatens the caretaking of Manitoba's history and heritage, Goldsborough and Gooden say.

Cutbacks that began in the mid-1990s eliminated many paid heritage jobs in government, and the province leaned on unaffiliated heritage agencies to carry the load.

Then in 2007, the government said the grant money for those agencies could no longer be used for operational needs — only for projects like celebrating Manitoba Day, Gooden said.

"We could no longer use it to pay the phone bill or pay our office manager," she said.

The province also began to dictate which projects to do, she said, asking the agencies to work collaboratively, especially around events for Manitoba's 150th birthday in 2020.