CAN THE MUSEUM BE RECONCILED?

Breaking the Glass Case | Megan C. Mahon

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Good morning museum friends, and now it’s time for another issue of Here’s How Hard It Is To Decolonize Museums. Not to depress anyone at this late stage in the semester, but I wanted to talk about a trend I’ve been noticing among Canadian museums recently and ask a vital question: do we, as participants in this program, believe that the museum can be reconciled? Not simply decolonized, but reconciled?

Some might argue it’s an issue of semantics. But I believe that, in most cases, decolonization is something that follows reconciliation. In theory, once Canadian museums have reconciled with the Indigenous peoples on whose land they stand, they can continue, with their input, to decolonize the museum - that is, to reimagine and reorganize their content with justice and restitution in mind. However, I fear that “decolonization” is in danger of simply becoming another museum buzzword – a trend that quickly fizzles, rather than a way of operating that all institutions should be committing to for the future. Many Canadian museums are at risk of putting half an effort into their decolonization practices, by not putting reconciliation first. And that will involve a total re-imagination of what “the museum” actually is and should be.

The Royal BC Museum in Victoria, for example, has recently closed its third floor, citing the need to completely overhaul their exhibitions in the name of decolonization. The galleries prepped to close include the “Becoming BC” exhibition and the extremely popular Old Town (which depicts the city of Victoria as it would have looked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). They’re also going to close their First Peoples gallery, as they want to feature Indigenous stories that are not based in white settler stereotypes from 1886 (when the museum was founded).

 

The outside of the Royal British Columbia Museum. Source: Michael Klajban. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_British_Columbia_Museum

On the surface, this looks great. These galleries definitely need an overhaul - as Geoff Russ, a member of the Haida community and a Victoria resident, put it, the First Peoples gallery in particular “desperately needs input from Indigenous experts” before it can reopen. The other exhibits also need thorough examination to ensure that they explain history from more than one (white) viewpoint. No, I’m not against gallery overhauls. But I’m also not sure that this gets to the very root of the problem.

The reason the RBCM is making these changes is that past staff members have complained about “a culture of racism and discrimination.” The resignation of Lucy Bell, who had been the head of the Indigenous Collections and Repatriation department, sparked a third-party investigation into internal practices - the results of which were, apparently, “not good.” Put simply? It’s not only the galleries that need an overhaul.

Some artifacts of the First Peoples collection at the Royal BC Museum. Source: Wikimedia Commons. 

Museums are made up of people. While art, objects, and artifacts might be the public face of an institution, people make them run – and it’s the people, not the artifacts, that have to do the work of reconciliation. If the RBCM changes their exhibits and didactics, that’s great. But if the people who make those exhibits and didactics continue to participate in making the museum unsafe for Indigenous folks, then only the surface has changed. The colonial wound has not, in fact, healed at all.

It’s a similar story at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. Following their own – oft-repeated and studied by students in this program – blunders, their CEO was fired. They’ve since spent over four thousand hours on employee training (don’t be racist! is it really that difficult?) and instituted Robert Greene as Indigenous Elder-In-Residence. But as new CEO Isha Khan has stated, disrupting the colonial standard in museums “takes really thoughtful and deliberate work and takes a long time.”

She’s right. For once, I have to think the CMHR is taking the right approach. It’s not about changing galleries - although that takes a lot of work, it can happen relatively quickly. Changing people won’t happen overnight.

However, that brings me to the question which is the crux of this article: is the museum too steeped in coloniality to ever be reconciled, no matter how much the people within them may change and grow?

Pondering this question led me to Sumaya Kassim’s famous article “The Museum Will Not Be Decolonized,” which I’m sure most people in this program have read. It details her experiences as a co-curator at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, creating an exhibition that examined the museum’s colonial history. Although her exploration into the history of the museum’s artifacts was fascinating, what’s more relevant to this discussion is her struggle with the overall structure of the museum. As she put it, white supremacy and coloniality are “so embedded in the history and power structures” of cultural institutions that she was doubtful about whether decolonization could ever be achieved. Museums are made by, for, and about white audiences. Before we can think about changing museums, we have to alter their entire structure and purpose.

I’m an eternal optimist: I believe that the museum can be reconciled and, eventually, decolonized. But I think that museums have to change their definition of what that means. For the Royal BC Museum, it means more than simply changing your galleries. For the Canadian Museum for Human rights, it means more than firing your CEO and conducting staff workshops. Of course, these things are all good (especially if your CEO does nothing to combat reports of racism), and they have their place in the reconciliation process. But they also fail to fundamentally disrupt the nature of the museum, which is, I think, the true way to reconcile and decolonize.

This has been a long, deep dive into what museums are doing – and not doing – that works to create safer environments for everyone and to reconcile with communities they have harmed in the past. My final point is that it must happen in layers: change the structure, change the people, change the artifacts. If everything I’ve learned in this program is true, it won’t happen quickly. All of us who work in museums will have to ensure that reconciliation is our primary focus. But, if the end result is safer and anti-colonial museum spaces, it will be worth it. And we aren't averse to hard work, are we?

TO BREATHE LIFE INTO THIS SPACE: OBJECTS WITH LIVES AND AGENCY

Breaking the Glass Case | Megan C. Mahon
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CW: This article contains mention of Canadian residential schools.

If you’re a Museum Studies student, it’s likely you’ve talked a lot about the ways that museums can better serve Indigenous communities, given that so many examples of traditional Indigenous art and cultural materials reside in Canadian institutions. Repatriation of these items – while one of this author’s favourite topics to expound on at length – will wait for another article. With this piece, I’d like to bring your attention to a novel agreement that’s been struck between an Indigenous artist and a certain (rather infamous, but that’s another story we all know) Canadian museum.

The Witness Blanket is a large-scale art installation made from hundreds of items reclaimed from churches, government buildings, and residential schools. The artist, master carver Carey Newman, is Kwakwak’awakw from the Kukwekum, Giiksam, and WaWalaby’ie clans of northern Vancouver Island, and Coast Salish from Cheam of the Sto:lo Nation along the upper Fraser Valley. The Blanket he and his team created stands as a national monument to the atrocities committed in residential schools, and symbolizes the work of ongoing reconciliation. It’s an incredibly moving piece: in addition to pieces from buildings which ran and operated residential schools, it contains personal items from survivors and weaves it all into a giant tapestry of tragedy, resilience, and hope.

The Witness Blanket. Source: The Canadian Museum for Human Rights. https://droitsdelapersonne.ca/histoire/picking-up-the-pieces-the-making-of-the-witness-blanket

The Blanket itself is marvel enough, but what deserves special attention – especially to us Museum Studies students – is the agreement behind its exhibition at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. I see you twitching at the mention of that museum’s name, but I promise we won’t get into that whole sorry debacle here. The story is thus: after the Witness Blanket completed its cross-Canada tour, its creators knew that it needed a permanent home to rest and undergo conservation. However, they did not want to give the Blanket to the CMHR in a way that would imply the piece had one owner. So too, in order to reflect the spirit of truth and reconciliation in which the Blanket was created, they wanted to forge an alliance with the CMHR that did not reflect the traditional power imbalance between museums and Indigenous communities.

The agreement that resulted was unprecedented among museums. In a traditional gathering place on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, stakeholders and museum workers were invited to witness an oral ceremony that made Canadian museum history. For the first time ever, the Crown had ratified a binding legal document through Indigenous ways of knowing. The agreement struck between the CMHR and creators of the Witness Blanket would be put into effect using both written documents and oral agreements, both of which were given equal weight. Carey Newman described this groundbreaking contract as one that lives in two worlds, and joins Western and Indigenous traditions. But to my mind, that isn’t the only incredible part. The contract dictates that the Witness Blanket itself holds its own legal rights – not its creators or the museum where it will reside. This artifact, a physical testimonial to the horrors of residential schools and hope for a better future, has the right to its own story as an independent, living being.

This might sound strange to the majority of us who grew up thinking that museums owned artifacts, which were inanimate objects that were there to teach us about history. I know that’s how I grew up seeing objects in museums. But I think this unprecedented agreement is the first step to seeing artifacts in a different way, one that affords objects more agency. What does this mean for the future of museums?

When I heard about the agreement to treat the Witness Blanket as an object with its own life, I thought of this Robert Smithson quote: “Museums…are graveyards above the ground – congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality.” And while I don’t entirely believe that this is true, I can’t deny that sometimes entering a museum does feel like entering a graveyard - not just because of the artifacts taken out of their contexts and placed behind glass cases, but because of the atmosphere of silence and the idea that we should be treating the space with quiet reverence. Quiet reverence doesn’t have to be a bad thing, but the idea that objects are living things with their own spirits – which many Indigenous cultures on Turtle Island have always known – opens up a whole new pathway of what museums can be.

In the context of this agreement, the Witness Blanket isn’t simply an art piece that commemorates those who never came home from residential schools. It’s a living thing with its own spirit and agency; it isn’t owned by a museum but stands as its own being. What would happen if we treated all museum objects this way? If we treated each artifact as something distinct, with its own life, deeply connected to the lives of those who made and used it?

We would be making museums safer spaces for Indigenous communities – and everyone else! We would be injecting emotional and spiritual care into the sometimes-sterile atmosphere of collections care. And we would be taking an important step down the road to museum reconciliation. If we have the courage to unlearn, a whole new era of interacting with objects is at our fingertips. With the precedent of the Witness Blanket set before us, now is the time to consider just how alive museums can really be.