Canada Strong?

Reckoning with Harmful Heritage Practices in the Midst of Present Demands

As we move into an era of “Canada Strong” with free park and museum passes available this summer, pushes to travel local, buy local, and unify as a country, I cannot help but think about the cultural heritage implications this will have on individuals living in Canada during these very turbulent times. I would like to use this paper to explore past cultural policies in the Canadian heritage landscape that were used as national tools to establish a distinctly “Canadian Identity” in opposition to an “Other”. This piece will take a critical view on past Canadian heritage policies, demonstrating how using heritage and identity building tactics to accomplish national unity is a political tool and almost always has harmful impacts within the mosaic of the Canadian landscape.

Heritage as a Nationalistic Tool: The Birth of Canadian Museums 

National projects have driven the development and operations of history institutions since their inception. In Canada, the creation of museums were established for the construction of memory and writing history, as well as a mechanism for their institutionalization, crucial to the constitution of a white settler national identity [1].

During the late 1800s, Canadian policies focused on civilizing the Canadian frontier lands through the control and limitation of Indigenous affairs and shifting territories. The Indian Act of 1876 established a colonial system of government for Indigenous groups across Canada, defining what it meant to be an “Indian” and establishing rules for reserves, bands, and local governments. This led to widespread disenfranchisement of Indigenous peoples along with the loss of spiritual, cultural, and economic practices [2]. The Department of Indian Affairs was created in 1880 to further interfere with Indigenous lives. Officials of the department administered policies by placing restrictions on living – i.e. hunting, resource management, forced education and religion – resulting in forceful acts of conversion, assimilation, and a loss of cultural roots. Indigenous land was carved out by small towns and urban development, as well as resource extraction that began to take place in the early 1900s. Indigenous groups continually defied these policies in their daily lives by modifying practices to fit within laws or conducting ceremonies in secret, such as the potlatch, which was forbidden under the Indian Act. The impact was widespread, and while some anthropologists during this time supported religious and cultural freedom for Indigenous peoples, their glaring lack of time spent with communities and invasive research techniques ultimately contributed to the extraction and scattering of Indigenous knowledge and sacred objects [3].

Anthropology developed in Canadian museums during the late 1800s is nearly parallel with the invasive cultural policies placed on Indigenous groups. One of Canada’s national museums, the Canadian Museum of Civilization, began with the Geological Survey in 1842 which charted land for railway development but eventually began photographing and collecting in the areas they explored. By 1875, they employed linguistic and ethnographic research which included more anthropological methods. In 1907, the Geological Survey officially included anthropological research in their methods and created a division at the Victoria Memorial Museum in Ottawa, Ontario [4]. Due to a lack of domestic funding for groups, such as the Geological Society of Canada, they kept strong ties with British museums and collecting practices. British museums and anthropology departments encouraged ethnographic salvaging in Canada based on the argument that First Peoples and the Canadian pre-colonial landscape was “dying out” and had to be documented. They also believed that learning about Indigenous groups would create better means of control at outposts and frontier areas [5]. Collecting, therefore, became a device of colonial power and an exertion of that power. However, due to a lack of funding from federal and provincial governments, many British and American museums collected artifacts in Canada. American and British institutions had the resources to be active in Canada, where Canadian institutions could not. As a result, many First Nations artifacts were either sent overseas for ‘better care’ or sold across the border by amateur collectors. This led to a widespread loss of Indigenous artifacts to expeditions that had no intention of keeping them within Canadian borders. 

A photo of the Victoria Memorial Museum via Library and Archives Canada.

Many expeditions, such as those sponsored or carried out by university departments and frontier trading companies, conducted ethnographic salvaging to document and preserve objects of a supposedly “dying” culture [6]. These expeditions often documented their collecting via photographic evidence, which demonstrated an array of staging, mistrust, and posing as if they were taking a trophy [7]. They became souvenirs in the glorification of extracting from communities to create imaginaries that appealed to the Euro-American public [8]. Canadian expeditions and mass collecting tours using anthropological methods of the twentieth century worked in combination with Canadian Indigenous policies to reinforce the notion of ‘the vanishing First Peoples’. Canadian laws and legislation forced the loss and secrecy of Indigenous religious freedom, languages, and identities. 

Canadian museums and historic houses were built on the foundations of these policies, expeditions, and collecting practices. The overall effect is the continual subjugation of Indigenous knowledge systems and the constitution of a settler historical memory, which is clearly translated to Canada’s frontier heritage sites, historical societies, and associations that still operate today.  

From the 1920s to 1970s, there was a drastic rise in both Canadian heritage sites and museums. The inception of many provincial museums was tied to a growing sense of pride in the Canadian national identity, created by both government directives and Empire Loyalists [9]. Most historic sites in Canada were chosen by the government to adhere to an authorized heritage discourse, a part of a national narrative, and colonialist views [10]. Commemorating sites, such as the fur trade, that were cornerstones in the founding myths of Canadian assimilation and nation building, were key points in perpetuating an authorized heritage narrative and Canadian colonial iconography. Similar sites such as pioneer villages, forts, and historic houses related to ‘founding fathers’ also reinforced a national image which celebrated European settlement at the expense of Indigenous peoples [11]. Information found at these sites used language like “first” and “founding fathers” which imposed a reordering and construction of authenticity of the Canadian identity. Late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century settlement building quickly became Canadian heritage to support a national paradigm of progress and nation building [12]. Landscapes were “reshaped as colonial topographies where ‘founding father’ narratives defined the land as legacy and patriotic backdrops of cultural communities” [13].

These narratives were further embedded in Canadian historical consciousness through tourism and education, shaping provincial history in the 1930s. During the interwar era, the Canadian government began coupling historic houses and sites with tourism and doubled down on these efforts post-Second World War to create a distinctive brand for Canada [14].  Sites boasted an ‘authentic’ connection to Canadian history, which were a little more than products of their contemporary circumstances and national directives. During the 1950s and 1960s, historic sites appealed to tourism as well as nostalgia and anxiety about the shape of the post-war future. For many heritage activists of the time, nostalgia manifested as a pioneer myth that celebrated the glory of pre-war Canada [15].

Small, local history museums have a similar history, spearheaded by Empire Loyalists and local history societies. This genre of institution did not exist until a surge before the First World War and a further boom after the Second World War. The trajectory of these museums follow a very similar path to larger institutions with scientific collecting paradigms in the 1900s and ethnographic methods. However, many local history museums were products of historical societies hinging on pioneer culture and loyalism to the Crown [16]. An excessive veneration of traditions and ancestors guided much of the membership to these societies, which were based on hereditary and fraternity. Pioneer associations emerged in the late 1800s, tied to intense British-Canadian nationalism and personal connections to founders of small communities scattered throughout Canada. Their visions were to preserve and perpetuate the recollections of early settlement as a reminder of their forefathers’ beginnings to secure the legitimacy of their communities in the present [17]. Post-Second World War worked in favour of the local history museums as they became prime shelters for securing a community identity in a sea of post-war change. The 1950s and 1960s saw more funding from the Canadian government and an increase in museum associations formed from smaller municipal historical societies and a greater need to place Canada’s history on the world stage [18]. From here, intense periods of professionalization occurred in the Canadian museum landscape as more concentration from the government focused efforts on bolstering a national image and tourism. The 1970s and 1980s saw shifts in museum policies with the creation of the Ministry of Culture and Recreation, which internalized the process of policy-making and relegated provincial museum associations to facilitate outcomes [19].

Alongside these sites was intense programming which institutionalized interpretations of the past that privileged national mythologies. Programs and events such as ‘Pioneer Days’ or ‘Victorian Christmases’ performed ritualistic activities that recalled myths and imagined earlier histories within which visitors could participate [20]. However, beyond house museums, many national history sites and institutions are used as civic instruments in the practice and performance of history; they authenticate mythologies through performance and act as foundations for national identity rooted in a state-sanctioned version of history [21]. These work to forge an identity that are impressed upon visitors and bound up with hegemonic processes of national memory. 

Enter: Community Engagement and Social Inclusion

There were growing shifts in museum studies literature recognizing that colonial, imperialist, and nation-building agendas were foundational to museum operations. Scholars sought to exemplify how museums were, in fact, not neutral spaces (shocker!) and were a part of a broader complex of power and the governmentalization of culture [22].  In response to these epiphanies, museum scholarships focused on the social responsibility of museums and broader government-driven inclusion policies. Where the modern museum was seen as supporting nation-building and colonialist endeavours, the post-modern museum would strive to serve the public good through community building and social justice [23].  Subsequently, the 1990s and early 2000s influences of social inclusion and policy changes in the United Kingdom and North America were linking heritage with government social inclusion agendas [24]. Museum mandates shifted to address identified barriers for historically marginalized and under-represented groups in accessing museums, calling on them to tackle social exclusion at a broader societal level by linking their services with remedial social exclusion [25]. Community engagement became frequently used alongside discussions of social inclusion. At the center of these cultural policy changes was the understanding that museum exhibitions, programs, and collections could provide visitors with a collective membership of communal objects and stories [26]. Through these stories and objects, others could define themselves within this network, introducing identity building within the museum space via shared experiences, dialogues, and capacity building [27].

In 1988, Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal government passed the world’s first multicultural policy. The policy was a by-product of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (1963–1969) and was intended as a solution to manage both rising francophone nationalism in Quebec and increasing cultural diversity across the country. While the Canadian Multiculturalism Act, 1988, appears to fit well with much of the museum literature discussed above, I want to take this section to tease out the incompatibility it held with the Canadian heritage landscape. I argue here that the Act, while recognizing that there was no official culture of Canada and that Canadians were to find unity in diversity and plurality, still acted as another form of nation building, which was then directed to museums. This section will explore how museums grappled with an intense period of challenge and change in the face of Indigenous activism and new government directives that directly impacted museum display and collecting methods. 

Many of the practices that Canadian museums and heritage sites had performed since their inception were in opposition to Indigenous self-determination, ownership, and freedom of expression. Since the 1960s, however, micro-contestations and negotiations at the museum level led to a slow process of decolonization in Canadian museums [28]. These micro-contestations have been leveraged against a backdrop of widespread Indigenous-led activism in Canada throughout the 1970s. For example, the 1967 International and Universal Exposition, a world's fair held in Montreal, Canada, was one of the first times that Indigenous groups successfully contested colonial representations of their history on a world stage. They argued for a separate pavilion not folded into a master narrative of a single Canadian pavilion and broke with many conventional colonial display practices by highlighting the negative aspects of contact and interactions [29].

In 1988, at the Calgary Olympics, the Lubicon Lake Cree of Northern Alberta gathered to voice their opposition against an exhibition entitled “The Spirit Sings” at the Glenbow Museum. The Lubicon Lake Cree had land claim disputes with the Government of Canada for decades preceding this initiative, arguing against the extremely poor living conditions they were subjected to and the oil companies in the 1980s that surrounded their communities at their expense. “The Spirit Sings” was an exhibition of Indigenous art and artifacts, including approximately 650 pieces on loan from international museums originally taken from Canada without permission. The exhibition sought to represent the cultural diversity of Canada in the forum of the Olympics [30]. It was funded by Shell Canada – the same corporation that had been making millions extracting oil from the Lubicon Cree’s land, which was now polluting the area and creating poor living environments. The Lubicon felt the exhibition to be blatant hypocrisy and an insult to their people. The Glenbow received harsh criticism from the academic community as well as the Canadian Ethnology Society, which passed a resolution in support of the Lubicon, rephrasing a resolution originally passed in 1987 by the General Assembly of the International Council of Museums [31].

Photo of Rebecca Belmore, an Anishinaabe artist pictured here participating a piece of performance art dedicated to the protests of The Spirit Sings exhibition. This photo is taken from Rebecca’s artist website. Photo credit: Bill Lindsay, J. David Galway / The Chronicle Journal, January 13, 1988

A Task Force was created to consult on key issues concerning the treatment, involvement, and representation of Indigenous peoples in museums and develop policy recommendations. This Task Force Report on Museums and First Peoples was published in 1992, jointly sponsored by the Assembly of First Nations and the Canadian Museums Association. The report sought to identify and work towards “increased involvement of Aboriginal peoples in the interpretation of their culture and history cultural institutions; improved access to museum collections by Aboriginal peoples; and the repatriation of artifacts and human remains” [32]. This pivotal moment of addressing the concerns, access, and ownership issues between historically marginalized voices in Canadian museums, and more broadly, Canada, marked the beginning of new inclusion and engagement goals to democratize the museum space. Canadian museums were put on trial on the world stage, and they needed to adapt and change to move beyond their deeply entrenched colonialism.

When broader democratization policies were implemented in the form of multicultural nationalism in 1988, the slow and steady work that was just beginning in museums was sacrificed for expediency to achieve the outcomes of a public policy. The plurality and multivocality of peoples and histories were not celebrated equally, but further obscured and stagnated for the sake of fulfilling a government policy directive [33].

Museums offer ideal platforms to negotiate the politics of recognition as they are inherently dialogic spaces. However, the multicultural nationalism policy imposed on the Canadian heritage landscape in the late 1980s created a static, cohesive, and hierarchical order by mandating the representation of diverse cultural communities [34]. The multicultural nationalism policy established an unequal relationship between those privileged in the multicultural nation and those commonly identified on the basis of their minority culture. This authorized the former subjects to be the ones to give recognition, wherein the latter was only capable of receiving recognition [35]. By placing participants in the position of beneficiary, the institution exercises invisible power historically rooted in systemic issues of power, authority, control, and neocolonialism. 

In the face of urgent top-down policy changes and bottom-up calls for representation and change, Canadian museums had to reckon with their legacies. This, however, translated poorly in many spaces when the initial call to action came through. In many instances, cultural diversity appeared ‘grafted on’ to permanent exhibitions and display changes rarely challenged the national narrative. 1980s and 1990s administrative cultural strategies from the Canadian government aimed to incorporate or officially recognize Indigenous places of significance into the traditional interpretive models, but the process was ill-defined and still set within a colonial settler context [36]. Indigenous themes were more or less ‘grafted on’ to the interpretation of existing historic sites such as fur trade forts, historic houses, and permanent exhibitions [37]. 

The lack of tools, resources, loosely defined outcomes, and high-level government directives impacted museums during this time resulting in obvious missteps. While I do not excuse them for overlooking and blatantly misrepresenting experiences that should have been thoroughly consulted on before displaying and collecting diverse cultures, I do recognize that the Canadian heritage landscape was in a time of intense transition and had very little room to reflect – they had to act and react to the challenges and changes coming at them. It has only been within the last thirty years that Canadian museums have dedicated time and resources to reconciling government community engagement directives, calls to democratize the museum space, and reframe their operations to own up to their own heritage.

So, Where Does This Leave Us Now?

Staying connected and united in mutual respect is certainly something to strive for right now. However, my greatest fear is that, much like it always does, Canada’s cultural policies and nationalist heritage propaganda will inevitably repeat themselves. This can end up perpetuating even more harmful dialogues and interpretations. I do believe that the museum field has come a long way in better understanding the broader impacts of their actions; however, I also understand that great change is often dictated by funding, staffing, and operational limitations that are far too often guided by what government support is available. Canadian museology has been moving towards multivocality instead of re-capturing diverse communities into a grand narrative of national unity. The last fifteen years have demonstrated more self-reflectivity in professionals and changing museum systems through everyday acts of care and reciprocity. My personal museum scholar hero, Nuala Morse, has advocated to think about museums as spaces of social care, with care being defined as a set of practices drawn together by an interest in the welfare of others, shaped by wider social, political, and cultural contexts in the setting of a museum [38]. Morse’s work re-frames the museum as a “peopled” institution, understanding that the museum is not faceless but rather operated on a daily basis through practices and “everydayness” by individuals [39].

Furthermore, Canadian museums have been working to expand the community engagement framework provided by the national government and museum associations by including more Indigenous practices and collaborative methods [40]. Unfortunately, while participation and community engagement are honourable in their intentions, there remains a tendency “to present inclusion as a solution rather than the start of a new form of relationship between museums and communities” [41]. There are many scholars who focus on reframing engagement models to centre dialogue and consensual power; privileging multiple knowledges and communities of practice; and highlighting the innovations of small rural museums in Canada as centres of meaning, linking them to the future of their locale [42].

The growing body of research dedicated to empowering the museum professional and focusing on reciprocity could be a step in the right direction. Perhaps in another 10 years, I will find myself writing on the outcome of this topic, but for now, I will stick to historicizing and spouting potentially prophetic warnings about the Canadian museum and heritage landscape.

Endnotes

Bibliography