LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: MEANING AND ACTION

 Breaking the Glass Case | Chantelle Perreault

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I have lived in Canada all of my life – in big cities like Toronto and Ottawa, and in suburban towns like Whitby, Ontario – and in all of these instances, I have been culpable of knowing far too little about the Indigenous history of the land I was occupying.

Kanyon Sayers-Roods, a Mutsun Ohlone activist, affirms that "there have always been Indigenous peoples in the spaces we call home, and there always will be". All land in Canada, from coast to coast to coast, has Indigenous connections, and the increasing practice of Land Acknowledgments provides an opportunity for settlers to gain an introductory understanding about past and present Indigenous relationships to this territory. While the practice of acknowledging connections to both the land and the people who reside on it is not new – this has been a tradition amongst many Indigenous cultures long before the arrival of European settlers, and Karyn Recollet, an urban-Cree professor at the University of Toronto, describes it as “an ancient practice that flows into the future” – today, organisations and individuals alike are engaging in the practice of crafting Land Acknowledgements more frequently.

Land Acknowledgments – intentional statements that recognise the relationships between Indigenous people and their traditional land – act to remind settlers of a place’s Indigenous history and the continued presence of Indigenous people in that place today, and encourage settlers to understand how they have come to live on this land, explains Indigenous U of T. You may have heard a Land Acknowledgement spoken aloud at an event, or read one in a syllabus at school. Museums and heritage institutions, in an effort to reconcile their own colonial roots, are also increasingly turning towards the use of Land Acknowledgements.

The process of creating the Land Acknowledgment and the content included in the statement are equally important aspects of the practice. The Native Governance Centre explains that, as a settler, it is essential to begin with self-reflection and an understanding of the goals of Land Acknowledgements — specific goals can differ depending on the institution, but should include the empowerment of Indigenous voices and a commitment to ongoing action. Before beginning, knowledge of the land you are occupying and the Indigenous groups that reside there (historically and presently) is crucial, and this will require research and time. Anishinaabe academic Sheila Cote-Meek also emphasises the importance of connecting with Indigenous people of the territory when possible (and with proper compensation for labour).

The language of Land Acknowledgments is significant: the use of present tense rather than historical references to Indigenous communities reiterates that Indigenous people continue to live on this territory today — colonialism is an ongoing process. 

Land Acknowledgement from the website of the Royal Ontario Museum

Similarly, when Land Acknowledgments are read aloud, accurate pronunciation is required: Emily Riddle of Alexander First Nation in Treaty 6 territory explains that mispronunciation indicates “a lack of effort and consideration” by the organisation. An emphasis on correct pronunciation can be encouraged by including a pronunciation guide, as seen in the City of Toronto’s official Land Acknowledgement.

Pronunciation guide from the City of Toronto's Land Acknowledgment webpage

Land Acknowledgements should also be accompanied by further action – these statements are not made to "check a box", but stem from a commitment to empower Indigenous voices. The Manitoba Museum, following their Land Acknowledgement, lists a series of further commitments towards reconciliation, such as developing collaborative relationships with Indigenous communities and partnering with local communities to share more Indigenous stories. This transparency encourages accountability and makes clear to the museum’s audience that they are committed to specific goals when it comes to reconciliation.

We Are All Treaty People, exhibit at the Manitoba Museum. (Image: manitobamuseum.ca)

Museums often have a colonial past to reckon with, and have a responsibility to understand their connection to the physical land that they occupy. Anishinaabe writer and educator Hayden King reminds us that Land Acknowledgements are not done to validate Canadian presence on the land, but rather to empower and uplift the voices of Indigenous people. At a time where Land Acknowledgements are becoming increasingly common, and can sometimes seem redundant or meaningless, museums have an obligation to reflect on the purposes of these statements, and how they will impact museum practices going forward.

WHAT MAKES A HOUSE HISTORIC?: HISTORIC HOUSES AND HERITAGE LANDSCAPES

 Heritage Moments | Madison Carmichael

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At any given time, regardless of where I live, I have an ever-evolving roster of my favourite old, pretty houses, and I tend to build walking routes around those houses. It’s fun to find such old looking places in increasingly modern cities and towns. What’s more interesting is that on some of those houses, in some places, you’ll sometimes see a small plaque affixed to the front. They look different, from city to city, but they all mean the same thing: this house has been designated as historical.

The plaque on the side of the Maitland house in question. Check out that limestone. Courtesy of Madison Carmichael.

One particular house that I had the pleasure of living in for a bit had such a plaque. I didn’t notice it at first, as the plaque was proportionally quite small to the rest of the two-story building, but both its age (1841) and its original role (Carriage House) intrigued me. At the time, I didn’t know much about the designation process, so I never did find out much more about the house; I’ve since done some digging.

The house in question sits on Maitland Street in Kingston, Ontario, which is within the bounds of Old Sydenham – a heritage district in the city. The limestone building – limestone being highly characteristic of older buildings in Kingston – was built for the Honourable John Hamilton. It was originally used, as previously mentioned, as a carriage house, as well as stables and as servants’ quarters. It is complimented by another similar former stable building that sits on the adjacent lot, and it sits behind a stone wall that spans several houses and marks the driveway for this house in particular. This wall, along with the two limestone buildings, helps to define the distinctly mid-19th century historic character of Maitland Street.

Here you can see the house as well as an equally historic stone wall on the left side of the photograph. (Source)

So: “is it historic or is it just old?” asks Shannon Dauphin Lee, contributing writer for “old house web,” an idea and advice website for old house enthusiasts. That’s the question du jour when it comes to heritage designations. Luckily for such enthusiasts, and heritage professionals everywhere, there’s legislation to help.

Lee explains that in the United States, the National Register of Historic Places goes by a set of rules to determine whether or not an old house is historic. In order to make the Register, a house must be associated with significant events in history or with the lives of people significant to the past; it must embody some distinctive characteristic or construction technique that makes it a unique structure; or it must yield important information about a certain time period.

Canadian designation criteria runs along a very similar vein. The Ontario Heritage Act confers the power to make designations and preserve heritage in Ontario to municipalities and to the province more broadly. Such parties can designate either individual properties as heritage sites or entire neighbourhoods as heritage districts. Under the OHA, a prospective property must have either: design or physical value, historical or associative value, or contextual value.

Toronto has many Heritage Conservation Districts, but Fort York was the first. This district includes Historic Fort York as well as the Garrison Common to the west of it. (Source)

So, how does our Maitland house shape up? Our Maitland house has classic limestone walls and distinctive windows, which mark the property as having design value. Such features also highlight its contextual value, a criteria which states that the property must be important in supporting the character of an era. As previously noted, the house evokes 19th-century Kingston and helps to define the overall historic character of the street. That’s two criteria satisfied. Next, let’s look at John Hamilton. According to the City of Kingston’s Property Inventory, much of the block upon which this house sits was purchased by Hamilton in 1841, who owned a steamboat line that operated on the St. Lawrence River and on Lake Ontario as well. Beyond his business, which contributed to Kingston’s early prominence as an important harbour, he was involved in local Kingston boards and the Legislative Council of the Province of Canada from 1841 to 1867. Thereafter, he sat on that same council as a senator. Hamilton’s involvement with the building imbues it with historic, associative value.

Another angle on the Maitland house. (Source)

A public survey in Vancouver found that the vast majority of residents thought that heritage buildings contributed to their sense of place – a special meaning or character that a geographic location has that gives a community its identity. In their report on that survey, the Vancouver Heritage Foundation put forth that “heritage buildings contribute to the physical and social fabric of the city.” Their value is not limited to their role as landmarks and icons; they also function as places that people can identify and interact with.

I think this can be said of almost anywhere. More locally, Toronto boasts thousands of properties that fall under the City’s Inventory of Heritage Properties. In this Inventory, properties are either “listed” or “designated,” the difference being that a listed property has only been recommended to the Inventory, implying that the City would like to see it preserved. However, a listed property has no legal protection. Conversely, a designated property requires the approval of City Council for any alterations or demolition. In a city like Toronto, which seems to be constantly under construction or considering new developments, heritage buildings play a critical role in representing the ever-transforming “physical and social fabric” of the city by memorializing older, enduring places that remain places that Torontonians interact and identify with.

But it’s not just 19th-century stone buildings. Toronto’s Heritage Preservation Services is in the process of expanding its scope in order to better value and include buildings from a variety of eras as well as the more recent past, like the 1960s and 1970s.

So, think of some of your favourite local landmarks! Do they have a designation? If so, what about them makes them historic, and what place do they have in your heritage landscape?

RE-LENSING THE CITY: ALUMNI CHECK-IN WITH BRUCE BEATON

 Alumni Check-In | Elizabeth Cytko

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Bruce Beaton.
Photo courtesy of Bruce Beaton.

Bruce Beaton is an Acting Museum Program Officer with the City of Toronto. Beaton is a theatre professional who graduated from the Master of Museum studies in 2013. He is a co-creator and presenter of Hands On Inquiry, where he visits high school classrooms with a suitcase of artefacts, and builds a narrative with students about The Great War. Beaton volunteers on the Board of Directors for the Kensington Market Historical Society.

What inspired you to move from theatre to museums?

My work in theatre was becoming more heritage-based. One of the prime drivers that I was running into again and again was the moment where you go, “Wow, that happened here” and this is not a theatrical conceit. It's an immediate response to something that happened. Theatre can do this, but it does it through sort of a make-believe lens. I just found it more interesting to go onto Spadina with a bunch of people rather than to write a play about it and perform it in the theatre.

There's an immediacy of experience that museums can wonderfully offer visitors. There's a kind of a jolt that occurs when you're there where something actually happened. That's one of the reasons that I crossed over. My museum work is basic storytelling where place is the “artefact” that helps tell a story rather than the way a script scaffolds and tells a story.

Everyone's got their own little sort of historical mental map. What is interesting is when you can take a group of people through a re-lensing experience where they have maybe a few ideas about something but you re-lense an urban landscape in a way that maybe they didn't know. That's part of the fun thing about what we do. We facilitate discovery.

How is heritage presentation incorporated into your work with the Kensington Market Historical Society?

There's kind of a continual movement in Toronto to just knock stuff down and try and start again. I live in Kensington Market. There was a big report that happened in the 1960s that suggested that city council should just knock it all down and start again, but luckily that didn't happen.

I think people come to Kensington because it doesn't work by design. You couldn't design a Kensington Market today. It works by accident and I think that people are hungry for that. People want to be in landscapes that aren't designed by people who want them to shop. Compare Kensington Market to the Eaton Centre, for instance. The Eaton Centre is designed for a very specific reason. Kensington Market has a ramshackle, anarchic quality that is something people hunger for. And sharing or revealing the history of the site directly relates to the experience of the contemporary street-scape.

How do you measure the success of a place like Kensington? Well, you can measure it by the amount of money that goes into somebody's pocket after they built a new multi-storied building here; or you can measure it by people's experience. I think that often the actual measurement of someone's visceral responsive experience is something that doesn't have a lot of swing when it comes to moving big wheels in a big city.

Cities are complex terrains, and urban memory is short. I'm interested in expanding and sharing urban memory, the memory of a city, the memory of a house, the memory of an urban landscape.

What inspired you to fit graffiti into a heritage interpretation of Evergreen Brickworks?

This was my final exhibition project while I was doing the MMSt program. I was familiar with the site from working with MOVE Expo and doing my internship there. Graffiti is curious. It's ephemeral. It's unknown to outsiders. And the graffiti at the Brickworks is the only artifact for about 20 years of this history of that site. If you're going to tell the whole history of the site, you can tell the brick making portion of its history, you can tell the current environmental charity chapter of the site but there's 20 years there when the site was abandoned, and without an artifact to share, how do you tell that story?

My co-creator Shannon Todd and myself, thought this might be an interesting way to share that chapter of the history of the site. It's vibrant and it’s everywhere down there. Our exhibit included an introduction to graffiti, a basic Graffiti 101 - what is a tag? What is the difference between graffiti and street art? Who worked the walls here? We included information about how the site changed and how it was used by graffiti artists as a blank canvas and why it's now preserved. There's heritage designation of that graffiti, the abandoned buildings there provided a safe space for graffiti artists to do their stuff. The place is sheltered, there aren't a lot of police around, and they could do what they wanted. There were also a lot of parties down there and there was a pig roast at one point. It was sort of like an abandoned urban playground, a dangerous but blank canvas.

What have been some of the greatest challenges in your career?

At Mackenzie House Museum we present a variety of programs about the lives of Black Victorians. I am an older white male, and it is challenging, rightfully so, for me to speak of black history within the city. How do I speak about black lives in 1840 here? The only way that that I believe this can work for me is to do my homework. When you're talking about what it was like here for a particular community in the 1840s even though you're not part of that community, even though you’re not from the 1840s, even though I have no way to experience the systemic oppression that has been foisted upon the community, being able to speak of that, in front of the community, is a challenge and an honour. There are risks associated with the telling difficult history and challenging history within a museum setting. Those risks I think are worth it. I think we have to speak about those difficult histories. I also have to be prepared to get it wrong. I am continually learning and I am grateful to have the opportunity to share what I have learnt with the curious publics that visit the museums where I work.

What advice can you give to museum professionals entering the field?

I would say that any involvement in any community organization is something that you should seriously consider. This can't just be about what you will get for your résumé from being involved. It has to be something that you are truly devoted to and something that you will commit some time to. Community involvement is something that will serve you very well, in terms of your own curiosity and your own sense of giving something back to whatever organization you volunteer with. There are certain skills that you have coming out of the MMSt program that community organizations can certainly benefit from.