We would like to acknowledge that we practice, live, and study from Treaty Six Territory, homeland of the Métis Nation, Region 4, and one of the largest communities of Inuit peoples south of the 60 th parallel. This territory is a traditional gathering place and traveling route for diverse Indigenous groups, including the nêhiyaw/ Cree, Dene, Anishinaabe / Saulteaux, Nakota Isga / Nakota Sioux, and Niitsitapi / Blackfoot peoples. In a discussion on inclusivity, it is especially important for us (as two scholars of settler descent) to honour the place where we have been fortunate to locate our work and to recognize the generosity with which our interrogations into critical museum studies have been taken up and welcomed by Indigenous scholars and museum practitioners living in Treaty Six territory.

Holding this recognition and gratitude as directional for our work, our paper begins with an explanation of our current research work and its place within the larger context of inclusivity in museums, written by Lianne McTavish. Mary Pinkoski then considers how knowledge production in small, rural Alberta museums positions these sites as places of critical practices.

Part 1.

The Extraordinary General Assembly of the International Council of Museums recently approved an updated museum definition:

A museum is a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage. Open to the public, accessible and inclusive, museums foster diversity and sustainability. They operate and communicate ethically, professionally and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection and knowledge sharing.

Though criticized by some members for avoiding such terms as decolonization and repatriation, the definition has changed in significant ways, as indicated by the words in bold in the quote above. The addition of the terms inclusive, diversity, and knowledge sharing is of particular interest to our discussion today. We will address these terms in relation to our ongoing research, while immediately noting that we are both privileged white settlers with limited insight into these topics. We are currently part of a team that is conducting research in relation to small pioneer museums in Alberta. This SSHRC-funded, collaborative, and multi-year project is entitled “Unsettling Pioneer Museums in Alberta.” It 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. We and other team members, both Indigenous and non Indigenous ⸻ Heather Caverhill, Skye Haggerty, Andrea Korda, and Erin Sutherland ⸻ strive to “unsettle” the colonial structures of selected pioneer museums by prioritizing the signs of disruption, contradiction, and Indigenous resilience within them.

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 relate stories of pioneers who traveled west to “civilize” a “desolate” terrain. This narrative is nevertheless undermined by references to violent possession and Indigenous resistance. In one small-town pioneer museum, hundreds of pieces of barbed wire allude to the aggressive division of land. In another museum, a beaded buckskin bag affirms the artistic skill and cultural resilience of its Indigenous donor. By looking for such disruptions of dominant pioneer narratives, our team is challenging representations of the pioneer while demonstrating that this category has long been subject to debate. During the past year, we have examined archival documents, accession records, and material collections at three small pioneer museums in Alberta. Mary has also led arts-based workshops with staff and volunteers at each site to explore and question concepts of the pioneer. Among a range of outcomes, one in particular stands out: a new exhibition case at the Camrose and District Centennial Museum features materials related to the Laboucane Métis settlement that flourished near Camrose from about 1880 to 1930. These items had become detached from their identifying information within the museum’s storage areas. They were interpreted and installed as evidence of the longstanding contributions of Indigenous Peoples to the region by Skye Haggerty, a graduate student member of our research team. (See the display here.)

While highlighting the history and culture of a local Métis community might seem like an act of inclusion or striving toward diversity, we did not approach it as such. Our goal is not to enrich and expand the museum ⸻ to show how it can in fact encompass diversity ⸻ but to disrupt and challenge it with different voices. Much ongoing research shows that museums are irredeemably colonial organizations that cannot be transformed into reliable sources of knowledge. Here I want to stress that we are not critiquing particular museums, like the one in Camrose; nor are we working to improve them with our university training. Our work relies on the generosity of the volunteer staff members at small pioneer museums, mostly retired white settlers who grew up in the region. We need to be included by them. We rely on them to provide us with access to the museum spaces that they literally built with their own hands. We learn about local heritage from them, with an emphasis on such skills as repairing and running steam engines, operating a wagon tire shrinker, and explaining how the local community has changed. Collaborating with senior volunteers at these pioneer museums affords us with opportunities to intervene in the collections in ways that are either cumbersome or impossible at other museums, especially large provincial and national museums.

Even as the staff and volunteers at small-town and rural pioneer museums generously include us in their efforts to produce local heritage sites, for the most part they are excluded by the museum community, and not officially recognized as museums by provincial and national organizations. In previous SSHRC-funded work, my team identified 315 museums in Alberta by using a rather broad definition of a museum: these organizations had to be open to the public and have educational goals. Yet only 113 of the museums we identified are recognized as museums by the Alberta Museums Association, meaning that over 200 of them are not recognized as such. The majority of these “non-museums” were founded and are still run by local communities; they rely on donations and do not have collecting or other policies; they depend almost exclusively on volunteer labour, especially seniors with many skills and much local knowledge, but generally without official museum training in conservation, accessioning techniques, or modern methods of displaying objects. Without official recognition, these museums can access only municipal funding and are shut out of most provincial and national heritage grants. Such museums are excluded by ICOM’s new museum definition, despite its focus on inclusion, diversity, and knowledge sharing. These excluded museums are sometimes disdained for their supposedly uneven displays and “unprofessional” exhibition and conservation methods. Our research nevertheless shows that small pioneer museums are important sites of knowledge production, able to transform both critical museum studies and museum practices.

Part 2.

I (Mary Pinkoski) would like to begin with a story. The first time I was taught to bake bread in the clay bake oven was at Fort Edmonton Park on a fall day in 2003. My teacher was a woman who grew up in rural Alberta, she can bake full meals in the bake oven but prefers the woodstove. She is an expert in performing domestic skills without electricity.

The second time I learned how to bake in the clay bake oven was at Fort Edmonton Park on a fall day in 2015 by a man who had built the oven we were about to use, replacing the first oven that I had learned on in 2003. He tells me the new oven has fourteen layers or 3000lbs of clay laid over willow frame on brick bed. I picture each layer resting on top of the other. He tells me that last oven had so many cracks it was unusable. I think about the cracks.

The trick is in the fire you build. The trick to fire is that it must first start small and never move beyond that. The trick of the fire is to keep it low and steady. You must make a deal with the wood and the flame that they will be enough to heat the space of the oven. You must be patient despite the impatience of the flame wanting to grow larger or the urgency of the dough wanting to bake. You must be patient. 

I have learned that if you build the fire too big, or if you heat the space too quickly, or open the oven door in the middle of winter, the change in the temperature will cause the clay bake oven to crack. How it cracks depends on the layers of clay, depends on how they have settled themselves on top of each other. There will be tiny fractures that you can’t see at first, just enough to let something move through the structure – into or out of the heat of the fire.

When I think of the clay bake oven with fractures stretching across its body, it reminds me of the colonial, imperial monolith of museums. When I think of museums I ask: where are the cracks?

Lianne and I are considering the concept of inclusivity from within the boundaries of the ICOM definition, especially in relationship to which types of museums fall within the borders of this definition and which are excluded. Based on this understanding, I would argue that the ICOM definition readily lends itself to a grand narrative defining which sites are museums (or worthy of being called museums) and which are not, based upon an inherent under-current and implied notion that a museum is not a museum unless it aligns with particular practices of conservation, collection, display, and education. These practices, rooted in the colonial foundations of museums, are exclusionary and reliant on practitioner’s knowledge being shaped through professionalization and certification (education that also takes places within colonial structures). As such, and as Lianne has discussed, many museums are excluded from this definition, including but not limited to Indigenous cultural sites, community-based museums, cultural-specific museums, online museums, temporary museums, and small, rural museums, which are central to our “Unsettling Pioneer Museums in Alberta” project. I believe that the exclusion of these museums from larger – and readily accepted – narratives of what constitutes a museum matters. Lianne has already spoken to how it matters in terms of funding ramifications. In addition to that, I think it matters in terms of knowledge production and, more specifically, what is valued as knowledge and what types of knowledge are reproduced within the museum community. I’d like to take up further the complexities of knowledge production, especially as it occurs in small, rural museums in Alberta. I come to my understandings through my studies and work as a critical adult educator, wherein I am compelled by an understanding of knowledge production that is constituted in a dialectical relationship through the lived realities of museum practitioners and the traditions of knowledge within the discipline of museology. Understanding and acknowledging this ever-evolving relationship of knowledge generation, which sits outside the relations of knowledge production implied by the ICOM definition, offers the potential to see small, rural museums as sites of critical museological practice.

Let’s return to the clay bake oven. I learned how to use the clay bake oven from a woman who learned how to use it from her grandmother. There are only three of us left at my job who know the specificities of the clay bake oven, there is only one person who can build the clay bake oven. The story of the bake oven makes evident how knowledge is produced and reproduced within small, rural museums, including living history museums. This is knowledge that is often handed down orally between museum practitioners and originating with the lived experiences of an older museum practitioner. Further, when I use the clay bake oven, it does not go unnoticed by me that the materials used to construct the bake oven are materials gathered from the place in which the bake oven is located. The North Saskatchewan River with its clay and river willow is just beyond the gates of the museum. The story of the bake oven makes evident how knowledge produced in small, rural museums is often rooted in the specific locale of the museum. In the arts-based workshops we have done at the museums for our unsettling pioneer project we heard personal stories of lived experiences that, when combined with larger generalized narratives of the Canadian pioneer, shapes the work of museum practitioners at these sites. Using sensory writing activities, many museum practitioners spoke to the visceral connotations of pioneer developed from family histories, personal lived experiences, and the reproduction of this knowledge in the museum through the continued use historic skills (such as baking with the woodstove). (For more information about these workshops, visit our resources page.)

I would argue that honouring localized, traditional skill and handicraft-based, orally transmitted knowledge positions museums outside of the ICOM definition. This is not the knowledge of professionalization, of conservation, or of curation, nor is it the knowledge produced through the discipline of museology. To me, existing outside standard conceptions of what is considered a museum or what is conceptualized as the work of a museum means two things. One: this knowledge and these museums run the risk of being lost due to lack of funding, lack of staffing, and insufficient means to reproduce this knowledge as it is deemed lesser or lacking in terms of the overall purpose of museums. And, two: by the very fact that these museums are positioned outside of considerations of a traditional museums, museum practitioners have the opportunity to engage in critical knowledge production without being bound by standardized museum practices. As we have seen in our research workshops, practitioners at these sites do not see their work bounded by museological practices and are willing to engage in critical discussions about their work and the narratives portrayed in the museum. Further, they have the flexibility to quickly experiment and change practices and narratives in response to these dialogues. The museum space presents itself as much more malleable than in a larger more traditional museum.

Returning to the clay bake oven, it is inevitable that if you bake enough bread, the structure of the bake oven will eventually crack. But if you think about it, you actually want the structure to crack over time because it means it was well used. It means that people were well nourished in the process. I believe that small, rural museums are the cracks in the structure. They are the place where alternative ways of knowing and critical knowledge production can flourish, perhaps until the structure of the museum is cracked.