Hayley Gray

Who is missing in our history? Hayashi Studio investigates the hidden history of BC, as documented by a Japanese photographer, Senjiro Hayashi.

After losing his sight during the First World War, Edwin A. Baker co-founded the Canadian National Institute for the Blind. His determination and resilience carried forward to other blinded Canadians, empowering them to live independently.

This Heritage Minute introduces the mill town of Paldi, BC, through the eyes of a Sikh woman, Bishan Kaur.

Mary Riter Hamilton painted the battlefields after the First World War as a testament to its devastating cost. She would suffer mental and physical illnesses as a result of documenting the experiences of Canadian soldiers.

In community archives across British Columbia, local knowledge keepers are hand-fashioning a more inclusive history. Through a collage of personal interviews, archival footage and deeply rooted memories, the past, present and future come together, fighting for a space where everyone is seen and everyone belongs. History is what we all make of it.

Heritage Minutes, also known officially as Historica Minutes: History by the Minute, are a series of sixty-second short films, each illustrating an important moment in Canadian history. They appear frequently on Canadian television and in cinemas before movies and are now also sold on DVD. The Minutes were first introduced on March 31, 1991 as part of a one-off heavily-promoted history quiz show hosted by Rex Murphy. The thirteen original short films were broken up and run between shows on CBC Television and CTV Network. The continued broadcast of the Minutes and the production of new ones was pioneered by Charles Bronfman's CRB Foundation, Canada Post Power Broadcasting, and the National Film Board. They were devised, developed and largely narrated by noted Canadian broadcaster Patrick Watson, while the producer of the series was Robert Guy Scully. In 2009 Historica merged with The Dominion Institute to become The Historica-Dominion Institute. While the foundations have not paid networks to air Minutes, they have made them freely available, and in the early years paid to have them run in cinemas across the country. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has ruled that Heritage Minutes are an "on-going dramatic series" thus each minute counts as ninety-seconds of a station's Canadian content requirements.