Harry McGrath and Graeme Murdoch give us an update on This is Who We Are

The aim of the “This is who we are” photography project is to connect communities in Canada and Scotland through the medium of digital photography with a particular, though not exclusive, emphasis on towns and cities that have the same name. In May we travelled to Nova Scotia to launch the project there and were immediately impressed by the enthusiasm that the N.S. people and media had for Homecoming in general and for out own contribution to it. CTV interviewed us as Pier 21 in Halifax where immigrants, including Scots, once entered Canada and we had feature pieces in the Chronicle Herald, the New Glasgow News, the Pictou Advocate and, later, on the blog of the editor of the Digby Advertiser.

We returned to Scotland to find that the gallery on our website was already receiving photographs. The trip also resulted in a follow-up piece in the Observer and a subsequent interview on BBC World across America.  

At the end of August, we will be travelling to Alberta and then British Columbia, working first of all with the cluster of communities in Southern Alberta that have Scottish names – Calgary, Banff and Airdrie. The Banff Crag and Canyon and Airdrie Echo newspapers have already been in touch with us. We will be going to the Calgary and then the Canmore/Banff Highland Games as guests of the St. Andrews Society of Calgary and First Minister Alex Salmond has provided us with letters of greeting to the 18,000 affinity Scots who attend each day of these games.

From Alberta we head into British Columbia and the Vancouver based newspaper, 24hrs (the equivalent of the Metro in Scotland) had already said they will feature our project. We then head north from Vancouver to the Mount Currie First Nation’s community where teacher Shawn Wallace has her students exploring the connection to Scotland of the surname Wallace which many in the community share, and is encouraging her charges to tell the story of their community through photographs. We end the trip in Victoria, British Columbia which, though it doesn’t have a Scottish name has deep historical and contemporary connections to Scotland.

Our final trip will be to Ontario and Quebec in the autumn. While all this is going on, we are making connections in Scotland. A group of students at Hamilton Grammar School is already working on the project and we will be in Banff, Scotland before we go to Banff, Canada. 

Several exhibitions of the best of the photographs from the project are planned for Homecoming Scotland 2009 and the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, the Word Festival at Aberdeen University, the Mitchell Library in Glasgow and Glasgow University’s Crichton Campus in Dumfries are all prospective hosts.