Shell Road Map — Alberta & British Columbia

Transformation masks work by having an outer carved form — here, a killer whale (orca), rendered in blue, grey, and ochre — whose hinged panels are pulled apart by strings during ceremony to expose a different carved face within. This one has a human face inside and an eagle head with a hinged jaw mounted on top, making it capable of presenting three distinct faces in sequence. The Haida, a First Nation from Haida Gwaii (called the Queen Charlotte Islands in 1972) off the northern coast of British Columbia and from parts of Alaska, used these objects in potlatches and clan ceremonies. The back panel attributes the mask to the National Museum of Man — Ethnology Division, catalogue number VII-B-23ab.

The back panel repeats the same explanatory text in English ("Opening Mask") and French ("Masque à Transformation"), with a pen-and-ink drawing of ceremonial dancers below. Bilingual presentation had become standard across Canadian federal institutions after the Official Languages Act of 1969 gave English and French co-equal standing. In 1972 the National Museum of Man occupied the Victoria Memorial Building in Ottawa. It was renamed the Canadian Museum of Civilization in 1986, moved to its current building in Gatineau, Quebec, across the Ottawa River, in 1989, and became the Canadian Museum of History in 2013. The back-panel text uses the phrase "Noble Haida Indians" — a romanticized, dated descriptor that museum practice has long since retired.

Shell and its competitors — Gulf, Esso, Imperial — had distributed free road maps at Canadian service stations since the 1920s. By the early 1970s, specialist cartographic firms like H.M. Gousha and General Drafting produced millions annually under oil-company branding; a 1969 Shell edition of this same Alberta-BC route is known to have been a Gousha product. The 1973 oil crisis effectively closed out the free give-away era: stations cut attendant staff, self-serve pumps reduced customer contact, and cost pressure made the maps untenable. This 1972 edition was printed right at the end of that half-century habit.