Part 1 Lianne McTavish
Today we are going to present some of the research stemming from our 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. We and other team members, including Andrea Korda, Erin Sutherland, Mary Pinkoski, and Heather Caverhill, 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 my 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 operated by volunteer rather than paid staff members. These museums are sometimes disdained for their supposedly uneven displays and “unprofessional” exhibition and preservation methods. Yet such museums are not secondary to large, urban, funded museums. They are serious sites of knowledge production, able to transform both critical museum studies and museum practices. For instance, they offer important opportunities for both revealing and reshaping narratives about settler-colonialism because they are less bureaucratic than larger museums, and often lack solidified policies that can prevent change.
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 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.
Last year we began investigating the archival documents, written records, and material collections at three pioneer museums, and will conduct arts-based community workshops at each site. 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.
I want briefly to focus on our activities at the Camrose and District Centennial Museum, located in Camrose. Like other small museums, the volunteer staff is comprised of retired white settlers who have lived in Camrose for some time. After building relationships with the museum and its staff, we started combing through the accession records, documents, and collections last year. At first, we were reading files while seated at tables while the volunteer staff rushed around, inventorying items, fixing the roof on one of the outbuildings, climbing up ladders and so on. Our seeming reproduction of the distinction between intellectual and manual labour did not last long, however. For the more we learned about the history and practices of the Camrose museum, the more we could participate in building the museum. The skilled volunteer group had learned about museum work by doing it, and some had been there since the 1970s. The museum was their community and their home, really, but we were nevertheless welcomed because anyone who puts in the time, demonstrates consistency and reliability, and works sincerely for the good of the museum is welcomed. These experiences echo the findings of Fiona Candlin and her research team, whose work on micromuseums in the United Kingdom has shown that the museums are primarily devoted to community building, with volunteers who value the specialized technical and organizational skills of team members.
Collaborating with senior volunteers at these pioneer museums affords opportunities to intervene in the collections in ways that are either cumbersome or impossible at other museums. For instance, after finding records related to the Laboucane Métis settlement that flourished near Camrose from about 1880 to 1930 (Skye will tell you more about that), I spent one morning in the blacksmith shed of the museum, looking for a plow once used by François Gabriel Dumont at the Laboucane settlement ⸻ he was the cousin the more famous Gabriel Dumont. Instead, I located this handmade tool used by his son, Pascal Dumont. Another example of the exciting opportunities available at a small pioneer museum is illustrated by these beaded picture frames sold by Indigenous makers from the Niagara Region and purchased by a tourist from Camrose in 1906. They were hanging in the Grue House (a settler family), but were immediately removed by a volunteer so that we could reposition them within a case about the historical and cultural complexities of Indigenous souvenir beading. These examples indicate a lack of presumed ownership over the items, their placement, and the stories that could be told about them.
There were nevertheless moments of resistance to our activities. I am not sure how to discuss these instances because the staff members of pioneer museums are not our objects of study and I do not want to report on interpersonal exchanges in a way that could identify specific individuals. I am instead going to consider events that highlighted my own narrow ways of understanding museums. Though I thought that I was open minded and not at all committed to traditional conceptions of preservation, authenticity, and originality, I learned that I was in fact quite devoted to these concepts. One day, a volunteer showed us a stamp map that had been circulated nationally between 1944 and 46 by the Sunny Boy Cereal Company, founded in Camrose. Children could collect individual stamps from cereal boxes to affix to the map and win a prize if they completed it. This map provided ways of thinking about collecting practices, the misrepresentation of Indigenous Peoples, and efforts to possess their identities, among other issues pertinent to the museum. We presumed that we could simply put the map on display as we had the other items. The response from the volunteers to our request, however, ranged from no to yes to no, to maybe, and then back to no. Assuming that the hesitation was based on conservation questions about the newsprint map, we purchased a large acid free matte for it. The answer was still no, and in the end, we made a colour copy of the map to put on display. I was really disappointed with and confused by this outcome, but why? The copy of the map looks great, was not expensive, and will hold up well under various lighting conditions.
In the end, I realized that I was opposed to the use of copies, replicas and recreations in museums. Many aspects of the Camrose museum are recreations, including the log house of Ole Bakken, Camrose’s supposed founder, which was rebuilt by volunteers, including some still working in the museum, using photographic and written evidence. I mistakenly thought that the cabin was supposed to replace the original one in some kind of authentic way, but actually the cabin was a site for telling stories, theatrical reenactments, and also community building for those who had made it, as they learned about historical technologies and hands-on processes that engaged with local building materials.
Part 2 Skye Haggerty
In May 2022, Lianne asked me to curate a display for the Camrose and District Centennial Museum that focuses on the Metis heritage of the area. Before this opportunity, I had worked with another larger, government-funded institution and its collection of Indigenous objects and ancestral belongings. I had experience researching, creating social media posts, and delivering talks about Metis material culture, but this was my first real opportunity to curate and install a display. With that came the chance to reflect on my experiences working in museums-- both large and now small.
One of the items we selected for the display was a chair that belonged to a branch of the Dumont family. The owner, Francois Gabriel Dumont, was first cousin to Gabriel Dumont of the Red River Settlement. Within the community of Laboucane Settlement, known now as Duhamel, the Dumonts were one of many freighter families. We know from an account by Mrs. Laboucane, another Metis family engaged in trading, that they travelled extensively and seasonally, engaging in a multitude of occupations and activities on a yearly basis. Accordingly, the skills and values cultivated within this community corresponded to their distinct lifestyle. It was a way of living and being that challenged the lone pioneer narrative by revealing the importance of collaboration and the role of knowledge sharing within the community. It also proved a potential model for collaboration and knowledge sharing within the museum.
During one of the many trips to Camrose in those months, we had a serendipitous and revealing encounter. Team member Erin Sutherland invited Dr. Willow White to join Andrea, her, and me at the museum that day. The same day we had our first close look at the Dumont chair. As we stood around the chair, each person had the opportunity to offer new insight and information. Dr. White was the first to voice the observation that the chair was made via joinery, a woodworking technique that involves no metal in the construction. This detail connected the chair to the Red River Carts, also made entirely of wood, which were essential to the livelihood of the families. The woven sinew seat further tied it to the hunting activities of the settlement—whether Francois harvested the sinew himself or traded for it from another family. A later observation also had us add a rabbit fur to the display as a seat cushion. Through this approach, we had the opportunity to share the chair in a way that inspired more insight and conversation than just one person metaphorically sitting and talking from it.
I placed this chair at the centre of the display, with a Metis sash hanging from the back and fur seat cushion, to emphasize the continuing presence of Indigenous peoples in these spaces where there is a perceived absence. This display does not make a new space or a new seat for Metis people within the museum or the community. It acknowledges the chair that was already at the table. That is why this chair, made of wood and sinew, might just be what collaboration within GLAMs can resemble.
Many of the objects chosen for the Metis display are ones which displayed a range of skills. I selected these objects not because they were exemplary or represented a type; they embodied alternative perspectives and brought about alternative visual readings. As an example, these beadwork pieces are made to be sewn on a separate garment. While many Metis women could make and bead a set of moccasins, a bag or a jacket, there are many cases where they collaborated on items. The creation of these material goods in isolation was an exception rather than a rule. In discussions of trade and Indigenous material goods, the attention falls on trading between Indigenous individuals and Settlers. The maker of these pieces made them for sale or trade, either within the community or outside. These objects do not belong strictly to the private or public sphere. Items produced for sale could alternatively be gifted to a family member or swapped for another item. These objects can thus be viewed as means rather than ends in themselves.
Encountering this beadwork and jacket recalled a similar experience with a beaded vest in another museum collection. There was little provenance beyond an explanation that the settler-donor had traded pots and pans to acquire this vest. It was difficult for me, a non-beader, to imagine trading a beautiful vest, with all the hours of beading and sewing that went into it, for something as little as a few kitchen implements. I related the story of this vest to my grandmother, a Metis elder and artisan, who challenged my perspective. She said the woman who made this vest could always make another one. What she could not do was buy those pots and pans she needed to cook for her family and herself. Her expertise, then, was put in service of making a better life for her family. When we look through this lens, the material qualities of the object cease to have a hold over us and what becomes visible is the knowledge and values surrounding each of these objects. These objects become precious not for the beautiful beadwork that adorns them but for the hands that made them.
The crooked knife you see to the bottom right is a tool made from a shaped metal file fitted with a horn or bone handle. I have seen the same knife across multiple communities and cultures, made for many uses. This knife, in its many incarnations, has carved canoes in Fort Chipewyan, made Dene Tha’ snowshoes in Ft. Nelson, scraped horse hooves in the Laboucane Settlement, and lived in the work-shack of a Metis man in the 1990s. This knife demonstrates that knowledge is shared over space and time between individuals and communities. It is shared because knowledge must be active, whether by production or movement. If institutions wish to be repositories, or keepers, of knowledge the objects they keep also say there is a different role for knowledge to play.
As Lianne discussed, rural museums are often volunteer-run and have access to less funding. However, they also face less bureaucratic tape with changing their content and narratives. In a larger museum, the timeframe for creating and installing a new display is a year-long process—at best. In a very streamlined form: this activity involves submitting proposals, meetings, months of writing and editing, outsourcing labour, and then installation. At the Camrose Museum, we conceptualized and installed three new displays in just under two months. We also gave a presentation to a group of over fifty elementary students and participated in a “Meet the Curators” session in the afternoon of the same day. We undertook these activities at this pace due to fewer restrictions, but we still took many of the same steps and underwent similar processes as a provincial museum.
However, in my experience, within larger institutions there is a focus on branding and image. They may want to share stories, but these stories must be spoken through a house voice. The desire for a singular voice and an impossibly impartial viewpoint stands in the way of a change of narrative. The exhibit at the Camrose Museum, from proposal to installation, underwent review and approval by team members, staff, and volunteers. But the focus of this process was not whether the exhibit would “fit” with the museum’s voice or image. It was to ensure that communication was clear, thoughtful and encouraged further conversation. The staff and volunteers who have spent years, decades in some cases, making this museum seemed excited to add new voices. The narrative will not change if there is only one voice speaking.
Transforming these sites into spaces for conversations and multiple voices to be heard is not a simple or smooth process at times. As individuals, we bring our own bias and lack of knowledge into these spaces, whether it’s wanting to put a very large wagon wheel shrinker in a comparably small display case or assuming the authenticity of an object based on a surface reading. I return, briefly, to the Laboucane Settlement. Although the site took on their family name, when the six brothers, two sisters, and matriarch arrived at Battle River Crossing, they were joining an established community. We can wonder then what new tools, like the hand drill (bottom left) Jean-Bapistite Laboucane brought with him from Fort Garry (Winnipeg), and expertise they must have brought to the area. But more importantly, how much knowledge the community must have had to share in return.
This work builds on the knowledge of the staff and volunteers who intimately know their museum and are willing to collaborate. The pioneer narrative within these museums is stubborn and persistent but easily undermined by the very items they hold and the people who care for them. These spaces, although small, are made from the many voices of the community. Should we be surprised when they let us speak?