The Indigenous Sports Gallery at the BC Sports Hall of Fame in Vancouver can now be experienced by fans throughout the Province and around the world without ever having to leave their homes.
Earlier this month they opened the door to the world’s first fully immersive digital Indigenous Sports Gallery.
Project Lead Shelby McCannel said they really wanted people to learn more about Indigenous sport and to see the amazing contributions Indigenous athletes have made.
“Over the last two to three years we’ve been in the process of figuring out what the digital Indigenous Sport Gallery looks like and within the last year it’s been our fully development process. Going through our physical gallery and coming up with the ideas of what we wanted to include in this space and how best to make this as accessible as possible. Not everyone has the same learning styles or access to high speed internet so we wanted to make sure that every Canadian could be able to interact with this content online.”
A key feature includes a 360-degree virtual tour of the gallery with additional content not found in the physical gallery like video profiles of 14 featured athletes and honoured members as well as 3D interactive artifacts.
McCannel said more than 40 past and active Indigenous are featured in the Gallery including Anahim Lake’s Carey Price.
“Carey is one of our featured athletes in our hockey section of our gallery so we do talk about him growing up and learning how to skate on a frozen lake behind his home and how he ended up making it to the NHL playing with the Montreal Canadiens.” McCannel said, “ We do have a few artifacts on display from him, a jersey, sticks and pads, but through the digital Indigenous Sport Gallery, we actually digitized one of his items, his goalie mask so fans on the site will be able to fully interact with that behind the glass feeling and interact digitally with the item. Turn it around, see the back, see the top, and get a different view than what you would typically be able to see in our physical space.”
The Indigenous Sports Gallery opened in 2018 at the BC Sports Hall Hall of Fame and is the largest known permanent gallery in the world containing more 1,500 square feet of exhibit space celebrating the rich history and contributions to sport by First Nations and Metis athletes, teams, coaches, builders and volunteers.
In 2019 it won Best New Exhibit in the world by the International Sports Heritage Association.
–Files by Pat Matthews, My Cariboo Now