What Is a Museum's Job?

                                                

                                                What Is a Museum's Job?

                                            S. B. Julian

Museums are part of the communications landscape, and deserve as much as other media to be zones of free expression. “Free” means unconstrained by ideological agendas. Museums have ancient heritage as homes of the nine classical Muses, and in our era Clio, Muse of History, is perhaps the most contentious. Clio is a storyteller, but people don’t agree about which stories she is telling. History scholars uncover stories in records, graves and buildings and museum technicians display them in exhibits, but ethnic groups increasingly wish to re-package their own back-stories.

This reduces public trust in museums, as impartial venues.

        The theme of International Museums Day in 2022 was “The Future of Museums; Recover and Imagine”. To the general public outside of museum industry, that title is ambiguous. What are they aiming to recover from? The Canadian Museums Association conference 2022 took as its title  “Dismantling Foundations”, which seems counterintuitive for a history museum. Is it appropriate to dismantle history in the name of the preoccupations of the present?

        The job of a museum is to collect and display artifacts in a subject area. Can it best do that by presenting artifacts in a way that lets patrons draw their own conclusions about their significance, or should exhibits come freighted with interpretation? In other words, should they show, or tell?

        Two museums located but a couple of miles apart in Winnipeg illustrate the difference in these approaches. One is “Dalnavert”, the home once lived in by Hugh Macdonald, son of Prime Minister John A. Macdonald, which has been saved from demolition and preserved as it looked in Hugh’s time. The other is the large and imposing Canadian Museum of Human Rights, founded in 2008.

Visitors to Dalnavert wander from room to room soaking up atmosphere and drawing their own conclusions about life in 19th century Manitoba. We see the functions which artifacts on display had in the lives of the inhabitants as if we had just dropped in for a cup of tea with the family. 

By contrast, the Human Rights Museum in Winnipeg bristles with signage and instructional bullet points that announce what various events in history “mean”. The captions are prescriptive to the edge of propaganda.

The Canadian Museums Association intends, under the influence of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to disconnect itself from “the colonial project”. This plan was adopted by the provincial museum of BC when it decided to dismantle its well-loved life-sized colonial “Old Town”, to widespread protest from tourists and citizens who grew up imaginatively experiencing the past while wandering through it. (It has since, under public pressure, partially re-opened it. But damage is done: the public no longer trusts the museum.)

In the Fraser Valley there used to be a “Pioneer Village” preserved in situ, which consisted of original narrow dirt roads, log houses, stables and shops (the grocer, the ironmonger, the blacksmith and so on). Children visiting this site could run about on a summer day just as children must have done a hundred years earlier in that same spot, smelling the same scent of grass under native evergreens, kicking the same pebbles, hearing the same birdsong. It was an entrancing site to visit, a remnant of a vanished world. Visitors didn’t need anyone to tell them what to think about it. They felt what life had been like there.                                            The BC Provincial Museum's "Old Town" offered something of the same feeling, but some groups didn’t approve of the history the display depicted. Others consider its removal an example of literal de-platforming -- of censorship. As soon as curators decide to re-tell stories in response to demands of an ethnic or interest group, Clio has left the building. 

        In his fascinating 2009 book Dry Storeroom No. 1, Richard Fortey describes various early eccentric curators at Britain’s Natural History Museum. These scholarly experts were amusingly obsessed with departmental secrecy and territoriality. By contrast, today’s curators seem more like bureaucrats than subject experts, and less interested in research than in pleasing the public, being ideologically correct, and keeping their funding. Unfortunately not all the public follow the same ideology, and revenue from visitor-ship is down in most museums.

A history museum can be hi-jacked by activists with little interest in disinterested scholarship. Groups want to see their own ethnic history presented where they feel it hasn’t been in the past, but shouldn’t best practices of presentation still apply: display, don’t preach? Don’t tell patrons what to think. Show them a maid’s room, not an empty plinth.

Canada’s Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg falls short of that in a gallery of life-size statues of the heroes of various equal rights movements. These included Aung San Sun Kyi, jailed heroine of Myanmar’s democracy movement and later the de-facto leader of its government. After the last military coup when she was again arrested, the West abandoned her due to her response to the Rohingya refugee crisis. The Museum of Human Rights went beyond displaying information about this to passing judgment, by banishing Aung San Sun Kyi’s statue from the hall of heroes, literally de-platforming her. 

        A museum thus nudges visitors’ attitudes in a chosen direction. J. L. Granatstein (a former Director of the Canadian War Museum and head of its Advisory Council, 2001 - 2006) was already worrying about the trend toward “correct” thought in his 1998 book Who Killed Canadian History? Schools, he wrote then, “scarcely teach history, so busy are they fighting racism”, while the media “use history only to search for villainy”. Already in the 1990's the very study of History in Canadian universities was being called “harassment", and museums too launched war against wrong-thought.   

The British Museum opened in 1759 for “all studious and curious persons”, but in 1865 also established a Secretum, a “Cabinet of Obscene Objects” which only some patrons were allowed to view. Are we today creating another “secretum” – a Cabinet of Obscene Ideas? Colonialism, mis-genderism, ablism, stigmatization and racism are, according to some, today’s obscenities. 

Museums follow an International Council of Museums’ Code of Ethics (https://icom.museum). In the U.S., the National Coalition Against Censorship (https://ncac.org) guides museums in “Best Practices For Managing Controversy”, reminding them of the “museum’s mission as a forum for the exploration of diverse ideas”. Do most of the world's museums share that mission? Can they retain diversity while censoring perceived inequity?

 One of the "recover and imagine" techniques the CMA favours is increased digitalization of display. This is meant to expand access but much research shows that the human brain receives digital and virtual information differently than it does print, and physical display. Immersive physical exhibits increase perspective, while virtual exhibits can shape and narrow patrons' viewpoints.

            Are museums becoming distorted by Grievance Culture then, with a mission to “decolonize”? Is it their job to veil “discredited” history, or to reveal all history?  The question is complicated by the fact that museums are considered commercial tourist attractions as much as arenas of knowledge. Some consider them only marginally relevant, even effete, their very existence “colonialist”. Even some working inside them see them that way, if the conference theme of "dismantling foundations" is any indication.

The world’s first museum was the storied Mouseion (“seat of the muses”) of Alexandria, founded in 323 BCE and burned down by Christian and then by Muslim zealots. Museum collections are still destroyed by zealotry and war, but maybe even more are suppressed by ideological warfare. 

The museum-haunter who worries about it (and the volunteer or donor) can always voice concerns to a museum’s Board of Directors. Some institutions (such as the Canadian Human Rights Museum) display a visitors’ feedback board, but one senses a certain performativity in the consultation.

        For patrons looking for Clio the Muse of History, she will be with the house-maid in the attic at Dalnavert. Like the late house-maid she is invisible, but the imaginative visitor intuits her presence. Let’s insist that even in these identitarian times, museum managers and technicians maintain the "show not tell" standard. It may help them reach their funding needs.

       

Non-privileged Non-elite Who Made the Country of Canada

The folks who built Canada -- that amalgam of climatic regions within one parliamentary democracy, having the second largest landmass in the world and the longest coastline (on three oceans), inhabited by over 250 ancestral groups -- were not who many think they were.

They were not privileged and elitist "colonials" but often obscure, non-wealthy, and uncelebrated men and women of variegated cultural backgrounds. Even when they emerged from the obscurity they started with into positions of fame (and recently, of blame and denigration), they often remained non-wealthy.

Like who, you ask? Take David Thompson (1770-1857) who fled England as an impoverished street urchin and crossed the Atlantic to work in a freezing northern Manitoba Hudson Bay post, and turned out to be a cartographic genius. He surveyed and mapped, for the first time ever, an astounding 3.9 square km of the North American continent, travelling over mountain ranges and through bush by canoe and snowshoe with aboriginal assistants he met and befriended.

Thompson's maps are still in use, and his achievements, accomplished without modern transport or comforts, are astonishing, although that doesn't stop them being brushed off as "colonialist" by current history pundits ("pundit" being a Hindu world for "learned person"). The officially learned persons of BC (where the Thompson River was named after David Thompson by explorer Simon Fraser) have learned ideological correctness. Thompson, beginning as an impoverished orphan in London, ended his life as an impoverished senior in Montreal, in 1857. His material and reputational rewards were few; nevertheless his unique role in Canada's history is unalterable.

James Douglas too began life on the low rungs of Hudson Bay employment, without personal wealth behind him, and through sheer ability, strategy and energy became a government appointee, lawmaker, landowner, road-builder and Governor of Vancouver Island and then BC. He established Fort Victoria and later, the first elected assembly of Vancouver Island (which was elected as was customary at the time, from among landowners only).

Prime Minister John A. Macdonald had a similar life trajectory: going to work as a school-leaving teenager, becoming apprenticed to a law firm, becoming a lawyer and in time entering politics, blending warring political factions and regions into one nation through sheer force of character and allegiance-building, and steering a nation-spanning railroad through the thickets of party- and commercial politics.

And the pre-existing "privilege" of these self-impelled nation-builders was …? 

They weren't the only type who built BC and Canada. Do many people know who Sister Mary Providence was? She travelled to Fort Victoria from Quebec in 1858  to become superintendent of the first school, set up by the order of the Sisters of St. Ann. She was 22 years old. (Many current citizens still haven't "aged-out" of youth-care housing at age 22.) Hardly a member of a rich elite, she was a youthful ascetic dropped into a rugged pioneer environment. 

Mary Spencer was another teacher of humble background, who arrived in BC from Ontario in 1898 and then became a professional photographer (then a very new profession) in Kamloops and Vancouver, before becoming, with her sister, a fruit farmer in the Okanagan. Of the same ilk was hardworking boarding-house owner and sometime gold-miner Nellie Cashman, an Irish-American immigrant who famously in 1874 led a rescue team of men mid-winter to save miners snowed under by a blizzard in the wilds of northern BC. 

These are but a few of the often-anonymous professionals, politicians, surveyors, engineers, educators, farmers, shopkeepers and ad-hoc social workers (anonymous women who adopted orphans and fed the poor) who built the two colonies that became the Province of BC. They didn't bring their energy and abilities to Canada thinking "let's go across the ocean in risky boats to find some people to oppress on the other side of the world". Today, over 150 years after the nation of Canada was formed, they are being quite mean-spiritedly denied the recognition conveyed through landmarks named after them. Signs bearing colonial names are being removed, but as George Orwell and others have pointed out, we can cloud the memory of history, but we can't erase history. 

These figures were indeed an "elite", a word of French derivation which simply means "chosen". They were chosen by fate and the circumstances to which they so staunchly rose. It's interesting how our latest pundits wish to knock them down again, along with the signposts of streets named after them -- but to what end? 

It will also be interesting to see how the next elite is chosen.

(Note: this article was rejected by a Canadian History conference "due to subject matter considerations". What do YOU think of the subject? )

The Trial of Joseph Trutch

THE CHARGES:

The accused

-- Did not sufficiently recognize aboriginal claims to land in B.C., believing that Governor James Douglas's system of reserves and treaties was “disproportionate to the numbers or requirements of Indian Tribes”, and that “good arable and grazing land” was being wasted.

-- Held the opinion that most of the aboriginal people he had met were “lazy”.

-- Kept sentimental ties to Great Britain, its culture and values.

-- Was friendly with other prominent professionals and landowners in the colonies of Vancouver Island and BC

-- Lived a gracious “colonial” and “privileged” lifestyle.

-- Schemed with Governor Musgrave in 1869 get BC into the Canadian Confederation.

-- Supported the Government of Canada's cross-Canada railway project.

-- Transferred lands to the federal government as an enabler of Canadian Pacific Railway in 1880, in a manner resulting from the fact that aboriginal tribes did not have Land Title Offices.

-- Doubted the likely success of James Douglas's policy of “assimilation” of aboriginal people – although paradoxically James Douglas is now himself judged guilty for promoting assimilation.

In retribution against Lieutenant-Governor Trutch, his views and career, the Crown asks the Court to change the name of the street named after him.

DEFENCE COUNSEL'S RESPONSE:

1 Mr. Trutch's enabling of both railways and land-transference amounted to a social good. Today, climate change activists support railways and oppose cars. Ironically, Trutch oversaw completion of the E & N Railway, now the darling of Vancouver Islanders who long for alternatives to car travel.

2  Privacy (from whence also the word and the concept of “privilege”) is not an illegal commodity.

3  Wealth is not an illegal commodity. (The Defence asks: Is this trial about wealth-envy, as bodied forth in land ownership?)

4  As an engineer and surveyor (before later political appointments) the accused favoured values around hard work, and laziness was an evil in his view. (Is it possible that some aboriginal individuals he met were lazy? How can we know now? It is beyond the ability of the Court to judge how many of the people known to Mr. Trutch might have been lazy.)

5  The Court is obliged to respect freedom of opinion. It was the opinion of the accused that “I am satisfied from my own observation that the claims of Indians over tracts of land, on which they assume to exercise ownership, but of which they make no real use, operate very materially to prevent settlement and cultivation.” Are freedom of opinion, observation and speech  what's on trial here?

6  Mr. Trutch's wealth rested on effort and ability. It is the opinion of his defenders that his accusers are engaged in slander and character assassination.

7  The career of the accused has benefited the public, who have inherited the resources, opportunities and civil freedoms provided in early British Columbia: for instance, the Canadian Pacific Railway, completed in 1885, the E&N Railway and the Esquimalt Graving Dock -- an enduring source of employment and positive legacy for energetic tradespeople of any and all races.

THE JUDGE'S RULING:

Mr. Trutch is guilty of being “controversial”. He stands accused and of necessity is convicted of being a colonial official in a then-colony, and afterwards an official in the new province of BC within the Confederation of Canada. He was a product of and shaper of his time.

In 1906 when the Trutch family property (named “Fairfield”) was subdivided, Trutch Street was named after Mr. (by then Sir Joseph) Trutch. The district of Fairfield, plus Fairfield Road were named after the property. It is the Court's finding that changing the name “Trutch Street” would logically mean also banning “Fairfield Road” and would lead to the banning of the names of a great many roads in BC's capital, such as Gonzales, McNeill, Wark, Douglas, Blanshard, Quadra, Cook, Vancouver, Pemberton ... all named for early explorers and colonial province-builders. 

The Court finds that nothing it says today can change the fact of a Fairfield estate having existed, a life-style having existed, and a parliamentary democracy having emerged from a British colony due partly to the exertions of Lieutenant-Governor Trutch and his colleagues.

It is the finding of the Court that there is no public benefit in denying the history of a heritage neighbourhood as recognized in street names, or denying the historic transformation of a jurisdiction from a primitocracy to a democracy to a victimocracy over a space of 170 years

SENTENCE: SUSPENDED.