In January, staff at the Royal Alberta Museum gave Alberta Views a behind-the-scenes tour. We visited the museum’s subterranean storerooms and research labs to take photographs of the objects you see on p 35, none of which are on display. The curators we met—Chris Jass, Cathy Roy, Linda Tzang and Sean Moir—were fantastic, trotting out one priceless object after another and fielding our barrage of questions (“That’s amazing…! What else have you got?”) with good humour. As the key repository of Alberta’s natural and material history, the RAM actually employs a dozen curators, who not only collect everything from side arms to woolly mammoth molars and iron lungs to one-room school desks, but date, catalogue and preserve these items, research their provenance and write about them.

Wearing white curatorial gloves, our hosts explained that the artifacts in their care are more than just rare, however, and that their jobs are about more than just collecting. In their hands were the keys to a richer understanding of Alberta and of all who’ve lived in this extraordinary place. In these objects, in other words, are contained countless stories about Alberta’s origins, our collective struggles and triumphs, our mistakes, our vanities, our values—and, because we’re Albertans after all—our sometimes crazy, often inspired political notions.

After each artifact was photographed, it went back into its box, back onto a shelf. Objects in storage don’t have anyone around to hear their stories, of course—and over 99 per cent of the 10 million artifacts in the RAM’s collection are in storage. The fact that so many treasures languish in the museum’s basement suggests that we Albertans don’t pay enough attention to our past. It means that a visit to the exhibits upstairs is a little like reading just a few pages of a fascinating book.

Take Alberta’s political history, for example. This province was the first part of the British Empire to elect a woman to its legislature and to appoint a woman judge. Ours was the first government in North America to have an ombudsman. Alberta is the birthplace of the Reform movement and the ancestral home of the NDP. There are dozens more inspiring examples; stories suggesting a forward-thinking people. But nowhere in the RAM is our “Hall of Firsts.” Our leaders were also at times especially shortsighted. All of this should be on display; a great province can handle a full reckoning of its past.

A feature about how Alberta’s most important museum has kept so many stories locked up (through no fault of its curators) starts on p 30. Paula Simons’s “Stories in Storage” is about who we are as Albertans and what we’re yet capable of. It’s about cultural amnesia—about how forgetting our past denies the sacrifices of our forebears and dooms us to repeat mistakes. (“Stories are memory,” writes Alberto Manguel. “Please, God, let there be another boom and I promise not to piss it away this time” goes the local bumper sticker.) It’s also a story about the prospects of expansion and renewal at the RAM. Let’s make this a provincial election issue.

“With our imperfections comes the possibility of redemption,” writes Theresa Shea. She isn’t referring to the RAM (though she could be) but to the lessons taught by another Alberta cultural institution, Gloria Sawai. Sawai, an author beloved by writers and readers across the country for her interpretation of the prairie landscape and its people, died last summer. She won the 2002 Governor General’s Award for fiction for her one and only book, A Song For Nettie Johnson. A previously unpublished short story by Sawai follows Shea’s tribute, which starts on p 38.

Alberta is fortunate to have so many stories and storytellers in our midst. All we need do is have the wisdom to listen.