A news crew from Portland recently checked out some of the more than 45,000 artifacts in the 50-year-old Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum — admiring the stuffed polar bears, seal-intestine clothing, fur-lined jackets, and other items on display.
In the feature, “Journey to the North Pole begins in Brunswick,” reporter Amanda Hill interviews museum curator Genevieve LeMoine and director Susan Kaplan, learning about Robert Peary’s contested 1909 discovery of the North Pole and explorer Donald MacMillan’s career. LeMoine and Kaplan also emphasize Bowdoin’s continuing relationship with the Arctic and its communities.
“People from Bowdoin started to go to the Arctic in the 1860s. At the museum, we have 130 years of photographic history of individual communities,” Kaplan says. “You can watch people grow up in these communities, and we have relationships with those communities today. And so, while we’re studying their past, we also have relationships with them today, and we work with them.”
