Mnemonic Fakery and Other Interpretive Strategies: Reclaiming Shingwauk Hall through Ethical Spectacle

Abstract

Providing a glimpse of the ongoing wrestle with ethics and practice involved in the Reclaiming Shingwauk Hall exhibition, an iterative residential school Survivor-led reclamation project, this article considers critical methods for implementing museal projects reckoning with difficult knowledge, and the ethical latitude they require. Doing so, it discusses risks of misrepresentation/recognition and the necessity of hopeful wounding, exposing the manipulations, fakery, and the prosthetic memories that exhibitions with great affective force produce. Exploring a range of exhibition-focused museal strategies that seek both to redress and prevent the recurrence of genocide and mass violence, this article articulates the tensions between i) affective power and cultural safety, ii) absence and presence, and iii) prosthetic and “authentic” memory that permeate the process of exhibition design. Returning to the evidentiary landscape of the Shingwauk Indian Residential School, interventions hybridizing examples discussed, putting them into the service of Survivors, offer a direction for future reclamation.