Canadian Museum Research Articles

How Public is Public Art? A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Racial Subtext of Public Monuments at Canada’s Pier 21

Abstract Much of the literature on public space focuses on physical inclusion and exclusion rather than social inclusion or exclusion. In this paper, the implications of this are considered in the context of two monuments, The Volunteers/Les Bénévoles, and The Emigrant, located outside the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. These monuments, while perhaps designed to celebrate Canadian multiculturalism, can be read instead as signaling Canada’s enduring commitment to white supremacy, Eurocentricity and colonization, when viewed through the eyes of racialized immigrants. Thus the “public space” becomes exclusionary. In the context in which the monuments are situated, the racial subtext cannot be ignored. This article purports that images, text and placement, regardless of intention, have significant implications on public space and public demeanor.

Statues in Time: Canadian Days and Holidays

Statues in Time:Canadian Days and Holidays Colin M. Coates (bio) CITIZENS AND GOVERNMENTS USE ANNIVERSARIES AND HOLIDAYS to confirm a connection to a past and to gaze towards a future. These special days embody values that serve as lessons and guides, but they may also serve goals unintended by the promoters and sponsors. In a self-referential twist, Celebrating Canada, Raymond B. Blake's and Matthew Hayday's two-volume collection of essays examining the history of remembering in Canada, represents a project linked to the 150th anniversary of Canadian Confederation: these books about commemoration are themselves a product of the commemoration process.1 Aiming at a publication to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the country's current constitutional framework, the authors presented their papers at an initial workshop at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau in 2014. Holidays and commemorative events, as these volumes illustrate, have often produced a lot of fodder for analysis, but it is hard to predict how much tangible evidence the sesquicentennial will leave behind. For those of us in Ontario, one of the most newsworthy features connected to the anniversary was the tour of a huge, plastic yellow duck to various towns around the Great Lakes. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's statement on the anniversary was a balanced and limited endorsement of the state of the nation, including his reflections on the relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples: "As we mark Canada 150, we also recognize that for many, today is not an occasion for celebration. Indigenous Peoples in this country have faced oppression for centuries."2 In 1967, many Canadians chose to celebrate different avenues into what they termed "modernity," but 2017 was a low-key affair. It is worth noting [End Page 241] that Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson's Dominion Day address on 1 July 1967 also struck a cautionary note: "As the world, to survive the nuclear future, must become a community of peace for all mankind, so must our country be a true homeland for all Canadians as it moves into its second century."3 In 1967 Centennial building projects changed the face of urban Canada, but there will be few lasting legacies of Canada 150. Perhaps a 150th anniversary does not have the same cachet as a centenary or the fairly recent change in the federal government may have made it difficult to plan events (although Robert Cupido notes that the committee to celebrate the 60th anniversary was only incorporated in February of the same year).4 Clearly, the community enthusiasm that sparked so much of the energy of the 1967 Centennial was not as apparent in 2017. Whether this reflects apathy or honesty about the project of "Canada" is a subject worthy of debate. Nonetheless, in scholarly work, a certain number of projects, like this one, will leave their mark. Universities disbursed federal funds that galvanized some collective works, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council targeted scholarly conferences linked to the anniversary.5 It is true that for historians there was nothing on the academic scale of the Canadian Centenary Series, which began with Tryggvi J. Oleson's 1963 study of the early European exploration of what later became Canada and which ultimately came to completion with Morris Zaslow's The Northward Expansion of Canada, 1914-1967 in 1988.6 Perhaps historians today wisely anticipate the long timeframe involved in such projects. Equally likely, historians may shy away from synthesis and globalizing statements about nation even when divided into the regions and discrete time periods reflected in the Canadian Centenary Series. [End Page 242] Blake and Hayday's two-volume collection of essays reinforces the difficulties of seeing a unified approach to the project of "Canada." Moreover, we live in a time when we, appropriately, apply critical analysis to the commemorative process and therefore we academics may hesitate to engage in it ourselves too deeply; in contrast, historians like George Wrong and A.G. Doughty were fully involved in the 1927 Diamond Jubilee planning. Today we may recognize more clearly how contingent and arbitrary the designation of specific dates for the purposes of rekindling and enshrining historical memory may be, and...

Microfade Testing for Heritage Institutions: A Canadian Experience

ABSTRACTSince 2008, the Canadian Conservation Institute (CCI) has provided microfade testing (MFT) as a service to more than 13 Canadian museums, archives, and galleries. In addition to obtaining lightfastness data for objects and collections planned for exhibition, MFT is also used for research and for training. This article summarizes the experiences and practices that arose from the variety of objects tested, the demand for the service, and the lessons learned. These include protocols to ensure reliable and reproducible results with multiple users, ways to report large number of results, and how MFT data are used with the CCI Light Damage Calculator for effective communication of the results with other museum staff for exhibit planning.

Constructing patriotism: How Canada's History Hall has evolved over 50 years

In this article, I illustrate how the national narrative in Canada's Museum of History has evolved over 50 years. Located in the national capital of Ottawa, the new Canada's History Hall presents a concise overview of a nation, stretching from time immemorial to the present. It was opened on 1 July 2017 as a signature exhibition in celebration of Canada's sesquicentennial. It also represents a fourth manifestation of a national museum narrative for Canada. From humble beginnings in 1967 (when Canada celebrated its centennial), the narrative has changed substantially in response to national policies and societal values. Adopting a critical discourse analysis methodology, and drawing from archival evidence, I analyse how this national narrative has evolved. Canada's History Hall presents Canadian students with a concise national template for remembering Canada's past. Over the past 50 years, this narrative has changed, as curators have employed artefacts and museum environments to construct patriotic pride in their nation. Until 2017, this narrative was blatantly exclusionary of Indigenous voices. More recently, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has called for reconciliation in education, including public forums for education. The Canadian Museum of History has responded to this call by weaving Indigenous voices into the national narrative of the new Canadian History Hall. In so doing, I argue, the museum has successfully entwined patriotism with reconciliation against past wrongs.

Institutional culture and the work of human rights in Canadian museums

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the limits, challenges, and benefits to working with community partners on human rights related issues in different types of museums in Canada. Drawing from interviews conducted with heritage professionals from across Canada, this research finds the institutional culture of smaller gallery spaces provides the most fertile atmosphere for rights-related community project development. This success results from the combination of the institutional ethos being connected directly to the needs of the community, a focus on small-scale exhibitions, and a high degree of interdepartmental communication that takes place in smaller working environments.

Subverting Colonial Choreographies of Memory: Drag the Red and the March for Tina Fontaine

Winnipeg, Manitoba is located on the sacred territory of the Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, Dene, and the Métis Nation. Like most Canadian cityscapes, though, these unceded lands are the grounds on which Jets hockey, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR), and the Royal Winnipeg Ballet (RWB) take centre stage. Punctuating the city’s skyline from the historic downtown Forks site, the CMHR marks Winnipeg’s rising sense of self as a tolerant multicultural centre. However, as Indigenous-led choreographies of assembly continue to demonstrate, these sites of settler life are the same sites where Indigenous women and men are brutalized. In this essay, I specifically move with the February 2018 March for Tina Fontaine and the annual Drag the Red initiative as my objects of analysis. Looking closely at gendered racial violence, performativity, and necropolitics, I discuss how these public assemblies spotlight settler space as always already ghosted and constituted by Indigenous bodies. In particular, I explore how the March and Drag the Red subvert the sweeping grand narratives of human rights and liberal multiculturalism rehearsed by the CMHR, The Forks, and the Red River, where colonial violence is reiterated as an ever more insidious, moving target. The march and Drag the Red underscore how Indigenous people continue to fall from the national story. However, the rigorous physical labour performed by those who march and dredge is a form of radical care for those disappeared and site of Indigenous resurgence.

DOLMEN : Towards a better access to virtual museum collections

The DOLMEN project proposes toexamine theelements essential to the description of museumobjects and to model them using related opendata. In this first phase, an inventory of metadataused by Canadian museums in the humanitiesand social sciences. 25 types of metadata andtheir frequency of use are presented.

Kanata/Canada: Re-storying Canada 150 at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights

“Kanata/Canada: Re-storying ‘Canada 150’ at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights” seeks to contextualize the changing role of museums and of heritage institutions within contemporary discussions about the urgent need for public education on Indigenous histories and contemporary realities. The author of this article argues that museums can become truly decolonizing spaces if they are willing to re-examine their own purpose and mandate. Through an examination of the CMHR’s own exhibition development for 2017, she maintains that undertaking grounded, reparative reconciliation that is meaningful to communities in a museum context means going beyond acknowledgement and recognition to re-storying the very foundations of Canadian nation-building, and of projects like Confederation that remain, necessarily, unfinished.

Building Next-Generation Collections: Natural History Specimens, Just One Click Away!

Digitisation has made significant advances in many natural history collections since the 1980s. The Vertebrate Zoology Collections team of the Canadian Museum of Nature (CMNVZC; ca. 1,250,000 catalogued specimens) has the ambition to go fully digital with our physical objects and associated data. Organising CMNVZC data electronically (primary digitisation) through computerisation for collection management purposes was initiated in 1972 and systematically implemented since the 1980s. This databasing process involved several stages, each with its own objectives and challenges. It resulted in ca. 100% of the CMNVZC being now digitised and core specimen data being retrievable from the Web (e.g., GBIF, and VertNet). Digitising requires regular updates to reflect the changing needs of the collections-based research community, and to capitalise on new opportunities that arise with the advances in technology. In this digital age, improving collections accessibility and usability through realistic and sustainable digitisation, while avoiding the downside of information overload, remains the most pressing challenge. Increasing CMNVZC accessibility necessitates further consolidation and information standardisation of various types (e.g. collecting data) to be retrieved from several sources (e.g., field notes, original data sheets, and maps). Optimising collections usability can be achieved by adding value to existing records (secondary digitisation) by means of additional information as mentioned above, georeferencing, as well as 2D and 3D imaging. Virtual sharing of 3D specimen images allows for remote examination of specimens usually inaccessible through loans, such as type and rare specimens, and the possibility for morphometric analyses. Digital imaging of the vertebrate collection, however, represents a major challenge given the complexity and variation of shapes and sizes among specimens. Limitations of current 3D surface imaging technology, none of which have been specifically designed for natural history specimens, hamper CMNVZC imaging workflows. Digital tools are key to the success of increasing usability of natural history collections and play an important role in preserving information. Digitisation activities should endeavour to improve online access of physical objects and their full array of data with optimized usability.

The Practice of Critical Heritage: Curatorial Dreaming as Methodology

In this article, I introduce the methodology of curatorial dreaming as a tool for exploring possibilities and limitations of critical heritage in Canada. Curatorial dreams are imagined exhibitions or interventions in museums, galleries, and heritage and vernacular sites. For our volume, Curatorial Dreams: Critics Imagine Exhibitions, my co-editor Erica Lehrer and I tasked scholars to propose exhibitions in response to their own critiques of museums and broader social landscapes. This article focuses on curatorial dreaming workshops that I have facilitated with curators, educators, activists, students, and scholars. I argue for the value of responding creatively, concretely, and constructively to problematic exhibitions and heritage products. My examples include an advertising campaign for Yum Yum Potato Chips in Quebec, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights’ representation of queer history and struggle, and the Women Are Persons monument that faces the Senate on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. In describing and analyzing curatorial dreaming in relation to these display sites, I compare realistic and impossible curatorial dreams and conclude by challenging mainstream, establishment museums and heritage sites to honour and acknowledge refusals and difficulties.

Balancing the particular and the universal: examining the Holocaust in the Canadian Museum for Human Rights

ABSTRACTThis article discusses the Examining the Holocaust gallery in the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, a national museum in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. It provides an overview of the iterative process by which conceptual plans for the gallery developed, leading up to the approach ultimately adopted for the Museum's inauguration in 2014. This approach aims to balance the particular specificity of the Holocaust itself and the universality of human rights, through the interrogation of themes that speak to both. The article concludes by discussing how this approach is manifest in the gallery's inaugural exhibits.

The construction of national identity and the curation of difficult knowledge at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights

ABSTRACTThe curatorial function of the relatively new human rights museum is to act as an intermediary between past atrocity and present social justice. However, as entrusted agencies of the state, national museums function as authorities on history through selective recollections that strategically define the parameters of their nations and citizenry. Through the analysis of two exhibits at the newly inaugurated Canadian Museum for Human Rights, this article explores how museums act as sites of historical consciousness through narratives that convey past, present and future visions of nationhood. It illustrates an innovative research approach that problematizes state visions that exclude or silence particular individual, or group identities, and offers insights into the practice and implications of Simon’s notion of a curatorial pedagogy of difficult knowledge. This article is pertinent not only to museum studies, but also more generally to the fields of public history and critical heritage studies.

Canada 150: exhibiting national memory at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights

This paper features an analysis of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) and its showcase for ‘Canada 150’, the sesquicentennial anniversary of Canadian Confederation. Particular attention is paid to how the Museum frames national memory, and its responsiveness (or lack thereof) to critiques and re-framings of Canada 150 by Indigenous artists, activists, historians and community leaders. Since opening to the public in 2014, the CMHR has had a mixed reception, including criticism for inadequately addressing Canada’s colonial past and present, privileging narratives of state benevolence and downplaying ‘missteps’ when it comes to Canada’s own human rights and Indigenous rights record. Recognizing that national museums have long served the colonial project of state formation and official memory, this paper nonetheless tries to notice potential openings for decolonizing or unsettling Canada 150 at the CMHR. Shoal Lake 40 First Nation’s Museum of Canadian Human Rights Violations is taken up as a counter example.

Keys to Lichens of North America: Revised and Expanded. By Irwin M. Brodo; photographs by Sylvia Duran Sharnoff and Stephen Sharnoff; drawings by Susan Laurie-Bourque. Published with the collaboration of the Canadian Museum of Nature, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada by Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut. $29.95 (spiral, paper). xi + 427 p.; ill.; index to names of genera and species.

Previous articleNext article No AccessMycologyKeys to Lichens of North America: Revised and Expanded. By Irwin M. Brodo; photographs by Sylvia Duran Sharnoff and Stephen Sharnoff; drawings by Susan Laurie-Bourque. Published with the collaboration of the Canadian Museum of Nature, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada by Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut. $29.95 (spiral, paper). xi + 427 p.; ill.; index to names of genera and species. ISBN: 978-0-300-19573-6. 2016.PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Quarterly Review of Biology Volume 93, Number 1March 2018 Published in association with Stony Brook University Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/696778 Views: 6Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Challenging the “Love of Possessions”: Repatriation of Sacred Objects in the United States and Canada

In 1990, the United States passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), requiring the repatriation of ancestral remains, funerary, and sacred objects from museums to source communities. Since then, hundreds of thousands of repatriations have occurred, allowing for respectful treatment of ancestors and reconnections to spiritual, communal practice, and ceremony. In Canada, repatriation has been recommended by the Assembly of First Nations, the Canadian Museum Association, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, but there is no federal law. Does Canada have a functioning alternative? This examination provides a comparison of how repatriation differs in the two countries, demonstrating that case-by-case negotiations in Canada currently allow for more flexibility and customization to the needs of different Indigenous communities but that the transparency, coordination, and funding associated with NAGPRA would be a significant benefit to claimants in Canada.

A study of the light sensitivity of birch bark

ABSTRACTBirch bark is commonly found in indigenous collections in Canadian museums. It is empirically known that light can cause the cambium side of birch bark to change colour. The purpose of this research is to better assess the light sensitivities of various colours of birch barks, and the manner, degree, and rate of colour change during light exposure. Six barks with different colours were used: beige, yellow, orange, orange-brown, red, and brown. Samples were exposed to daylight through a north-facing window (window), LED light from an enclosed chamber (LED), and the Newport-Oriel microfade tester (MFT). Window and MFT samples received a total light dose of approximately 25 Mlux-hours, and LED samples, 182 Mlux-hours. Colour monitoring of the samples showed that almost all barks initially darkened and then faded. Daylight through window caused the most rapid and extensive darkening and fading. Bluewool (BW) ratings for window samples were the lowest (most light sensitive). The MFT and LED samples showed a similar degree of colour change, with the same dose, despite the difference in intensity. Ratings of MFT samples are within one BW step difference compared to LED samples. The rate and extent of initial darkening depended on the colour of the bark; the middle range orange-toned barks showed the most rapid and extensive darkening followed by fading.

Leeches (Annelida: Hirudinea) from the far north of Ontario: distribution, diversity, and diagnostics

Leeches have a worldwide distribution, yet numerous geographical regions remain to be adequately surveyed. Here, we present leech species records for one of these regions: the far north of Ontario, Canada. This region is primarily wetland habitat and includes two of Ontario’s three ecozones. Morphological examinations, as well as a single instance of successful DNA amplification with subsequent molecular identification, allowed us to identify representatives of 12 species from two predatory families (Erpobdellidae and Haemopidae) and one parasitic family (Glossiphoniidae) among samples of 130 individuals. To provide a more inclusive list of species records for this remote region, our data were also augmented by 25 largely unpublished collection records (for 102 individuals) from the Canadian Museum of Nature, which revealed the presence of an additional species. We comment on finds of particular interest in our sampling with comparison to relevant literature and provide new distribution data for these species.

Monkey Business: The Victorian Natural History Museum, Evolution, and the Medieval Manuscript

Victorian natural history museums (NHMs) incorporated sophisticated theories of literate culture through their architectural, artistic and cultural strategies; these literary gestures were fundamental to science communication in the nineteenth century. Victorian architects looked to the cultural and artistic pasts of classical, medieval and renaissance Europe as inspiration for artistic, cultural and social values: most obviously, in the medievalism of the Gothic Revival. The idea of the “medieval,” or a more generalized mythic past, shaped the development of NHMs that in the nineteenth century were wrestling with the idea of the past in biological science—specifically the idea of an evolutionary past. These two concepts of history—literary-historical and evolutionary-scientific—intersect in critical ways in the Victorian NHM. This paper will explore how Victorian medievalism interprets biological science through the built environment of the NHM, and will explain how these interpretations are essentially literary in nature. We will give special attention to the use of marginal figures in British, European and Canadian museums, specifically the Oxford University Museum (1860), the British Museum (Natural History), London (1881)—now known as the Natural History Museum—and the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna (1889), as well as an Art Deco homage to the Victorian neo-Gothic museum tradition, the Royal Ontario Museum (1914 & 1933). These carved and painted figures of plants and animals were at once part of the museum design and references back to the marginalia of the medieval manuscript. We will explore how this medieval literary motif impacts on nineteenth-century scientific interpretation in the built space of the NHM, with special attention to the depiction of monkey figures in these marginal spaces, and their symbolic function in the larger interpretive framework for understanding evolutionary science and our place in the natural world.

Rediscovery of the type series of the Acadian Masked Shrew,Sorex acadicus(Mammalia: Soricidae), with the designation of a neotype and a reevaluation of its taxonomic status

Abstract The name Sorex acadicus Gilpin, 1865 is currently recognized as the valid name for the Nova Scotian subspecies of the masked shrew, S. cinereus Kerr, 1792 (Mammalia: Soricidae), but a holotype for the taxon was never designated, and the location of the type series has been a mystery. The authority for this species, John Bernard Gilpin, was associated with the Nova Scotia Museum, Halifax, NS, but that institution has no Gilpin specimens in its possession, and I could find no record of Gilpin shrews in any other Canadian Museum. I recently discovered a series of Gilpin specimens in the Mammal Collection of the National Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC (USNM), some of which may have been part of the original type series of S. acadicus, and I show that these specimens best represent Gilpin's concept of the taxon. From this series, I designate a neotype for S. acadicus. I also evaluate the distinctiveness of Nova Scotian S. c. acadicus compared with S. c. cinereus from Maine, New Brunswick, a...

Honoring the Eighth Generation: Indigenous Childhood and Indigenous Children at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights

This article examines the foundations of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights's approach and content relating to Indigenous childhoods and to Indigenous children's rights. Through an examination of existing content, I position these practices at the forefront of new scholarly literature on children and Indigenous rights. Our exhibits engage with childhood on both conceptual and experiential levels within broader Indigenous understandings about the rights of people and communities. In doing so, our exhibits connect with the public in a new way that moves intersectionality beyond only the realm of academia and works towards building reconciliation.