E&N Railway Land Grants – a travelling exhibit for hard conversations
The challenge
The Esquimalt & Nanaimo (E&N) Railway was financed with one of the sweetest land deals in B.C. history—nearly two million acres taken from First Nations and granted to private interests in the 1880s. A century and a half later, most of that land is still private, shaping access, industry, and treaty realities up and down Vancouver Island.
Our job was to turn a complicated, still-live story into a travelling exhibit that could function in libraries, schools, and community centres—free, bilingual, and built for curious drop-in audiences. This was a team effort: Double Dare Design took the physical/visual design; I led the interpretive strategy and writing alongside historian Dr. Kelly Black and the Nanaimo Museum/Vancouver Island Local History Society partnership.
My approach
We started by being clear about who we were designing for: everyday local visitors who may know the place names but not the land-grant backstory. That set the tone—plain language (about Grade 8 level), strong visuals, and a format that works in tight spaces. From there, we built an interpretive spine: a big idea, clear storylines, measurable outcomes, and products that invite participation—not just reading. Think graphic-novel panels to pull people in; open-close reveals that surface Indigenous place names; puzzles and maps that show how “private property” was made; and quotes that bring First Nations voices forward. The goal was active discovery: shorter labels, sharper choices, and interactives that make people feel the timeline in their hands.
We framed the content around a few simple storylines—The Land, The Land Grab, Dispossession, Building the Railway, Economy/Forestry → Recreation → Real Estate, and Today & Tomorrow—so every component ladders back to the big idea. When it came to “so what?”, we added a final zone that looks forward: wealth flows, who benefits today, and what renewed rail service could mean if planned with First Nations’ consent and participation.
Lessons learned
If you want visitors to invest in a hard topic, make the first step easy and intentional. For us, that meant three commitments:
- Specificity beats broad appeals. “The great land grab” isn’t a general idea—it’s a map you can touch, a deed you can read, and a gate you can see. When visitors encounter the evidence themselves, the penny drops: it’s local, it’s real, and it’s all still happening.
- Design for drop-ins. In non-traditional venues, you get about ten seconds to earn attention. Graphic-novel panels, short videos, and quick-hit interactives are on-ramps to the content.
- Measure what matters. We tied the exhibit to outcomes we can actually check: new partnerships, increased understanding of impacts, critical questioning of “property,” Indigenous collaboration, and overall visitor satisfaction. If we can’t point to movement on those, we haven’t done our job.
See the online version of the exhibit here.
