Welcome! About Unsettling Pioneer Museums in Alberta 

This website features research stemming from a SSHRC-funded collaborative, multi-year project, entitled “Unsettling Pioneer Museums in Alberta.” This study was inspired by the 94 Calls to Action made by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) in 2015. Four of the calls (67˗70) insist that respect for Indigenous sovereignty must include the full, active, and funded participation of Indigenous peoples in archives and museums. All team members and collaborators strive to “unsettle” the colonial structures of selected pioneer museums by prioritizing the signs of disruption, contradiction, and Indigenous resilience within them.

Our emphasis on small pioneer museums is an extension of Lianne McTavish’s earlier SSHRC-funded work on small-town and rural museums in Alberta, completed in 2020. This research identified 315 museums in Alberta, noting that the majority of them are in towns and rural areas, are relatively unfunded, are entirely reliant on donations to form their collections, and are often operated by volunteer rather than paid staff members.

Some 168 museums in Alberta can be classified as pioneer museums. These grassroots organizations celebrate settler colonialism. In Alberta, their exhibition spaces feature the material culture used by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century settlers ⸺ rifles, plows, washboards, toys, clothing. Accompanying texts sometimes relate stories of pioneers who traveled west to “civilize” a “desolate” terrain. This narrative is nevertheless undermined by references both to violent possession and Indigenous resistance. In one small-town museum, hundreds of pieces of barbed wire allude to the aggressive division of land. In another pioneer museum, a beaded buckskin bag affirms the artistic skill and cultural resilience of its Indigenous donor. Looking for such disruptions of dominant pioneer narratives can challenge representations of the pioneer while demonstrating that this category has long been subject to debate, changes over time, and carries different meanings in the various regions of Canada.

We have been investigating the archival documents, written records, and material collections at different small museums in Alberta, including the Camrose and District Bicentennial Museum in Camrose, the John Walter Museum in Edmonton, the Wadey Centre in Blackfalds and the Musée Héritage Museum in St. Albert. We have also conducted arts-based community workshops at various sites and invited contemporary artists to investigate and respond to museum spaces and objects. In order to pursue this research, we are collaborating with the founders, staff, and volunteers at each museum. They provide us with access to the sites and their contents, and they share their thorough knowledge of the collections that they accessioned, information about the people who donated them, and insights about the exhibition spaces that they often literally built. Our goal is to learn from these museum workers to determine the best methods for highlighting Indigenous content and Indigenous peoples within their collections. We are not assuming that we already know what should be done; nor are we bringing our “university training” into their organizations to teach them how to do their jobs better.