Mae's Real Stories

In the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, we saw a big room full of art works, clothing, and other things, like canoes, made by the native people of Canada. The exhibit is called "First People" because these were the first people to live in Canada. (Many other people have come here from Europe, Africa, and Asia, just like in the United States.)

The native people often made beautiful dolls, and we took some photos. Making doll clothes was very hard work, and could take a woman a few days of sewing, said the museum notes.

One woman named Evelyn Johnson, especially, gave the museum her family's doll collection. The dolls in the fur parkas are and the dolls in red dresses are not from Evelyn Johnson's family. The others are from her family.

Here's an interesting thing: the words parka and anorak, which we use to mean these kinds of jackets, are words that the English language borrowed from the Eskimo languages. We also saw a lot of fur clothing that the Eskimos used to keep warm in the very cold north winters.