Unsettling Pioneer Museums in Alberta, a SSHRC-funded research project, has taken place in three Alberta pioneer museums: the Camrose and District Centennial Museum, the John Walter Museum, and the Wadey Centre. At its core the project seeks to, as Principal Investigator Dr. Lianne McTavish explains: “unsettle the colonial structures of selected pioneer museums by prioritizing the signs of disruption, contradiction, and Indigenous resilience within them” (McTavish, 2024). Our work explores these small, often dismissed, community museums as “serious sites of knowledge production, able to transform both critical museum studies and museum practices” (McTavish, 2024). As such, we have entered these museums not as experts in each of our fields, but rather as collaborators and co-conspirators in unsettling pioneer narratives with the existing practitioners, volunteers, and board members in each museum. Our work aims to honour existing practitioner knowledge in each location and to position our research alongside the work already being done by these professionals. It is out of this ethic of care, respect, and curiosity, that I locate my place on the research team. For the project, I led an arts-based workshops in each museum.
The Workshops: Museum Community--practitioners, volunteers, board members (collage // sensory poetry // free writing // found poetry // critical conversations
van der Varrt, van Hoven, and Huigen (2018), quoting Jones & Leavy (2004), note that ”arts-based research is seen as ‘any social research of human inquiry that adapts to the tenets of the creative arts as a part of the methodology’” while also commenting that ”creativity in research is context-specific, depending on the knowledge, skills, and abilities of those involved, when and where the research is being carried out and other contextual factors” (para 1; section Creative and Arts-Based Research-Its Appeal and Challenges). With those qualifications in mind, our workshops relied heavily on methods of poetic inquiry as I came to these workshops as an experienced poet, the former Poet Laureate of the City of Edmonton, and long-time community poetry educator. To develop the workshops, I relied on my expertise as a poet and my longstanding work as museum practitioner.
The workshops were shaped by an insistence that as Hockett and Walter (2024) note, “poetic inquiry is a unique set of qualitative methods that forms a surprising nexus between the subjective perception producing this intimate meaning bestowed by poets, and (more) objective observation” where “knowledge and its production are shared among producer, participant, and consumer” (p. 2). Therefore, within these workshops, poetry, as Butler-Kisbet (2020) notes, becomes a “fertile ground for exchanges and learning” (p. 22).
These workshops were attended by members of each museum community: practitioners, volunteers, and board members. Using poetry provided an evocative way for participants to immerse themselves creatively into a historical narrative. As Fitzpatrick and Fitzpatrick (2020) note: “Poetry is unapologetically emotive and evocative. It speaks to what is at the heart of education: connections between people, places, and things. Poetry surprises and engages, and it can enable learning and spark curiosity” (p. 9).
We began our two-hour session with a collage activity where participants created collages in groups based on their understandings of the term pioneer. They cut out images from magazines and glued them to flipchart paper. Time was given for each group to speak to why they chose the images that they chose. The goal of the collage was to provide a low-risk way for participants to begin to unsettle their understandings of what “pioneer” means.
Following this we did a sensory poetry activity, where participants individually wrote responses to “pioneer sounds/smells/tastes/looks/feels like…” on post-it notes, which were added to their collages. Again, space was made for each participant to read their responses and think through what pioneer evokes and to begin to speak more personally to notions of pioneer and hear where their ideas coincided and collided.
We then returned to a group activity where participants constructed a definition of pioneer, using the ideas and words they had generated in the previous two activities. After this, participants went out into their museum exhibits with two different colour cue cards: on one card they wrote down parts of exhibits (labels, artifacts, etc.) that reflected that definition of pioneer and parts that did not on the other cue card. The purpose of this was to locate their thinking and the creativity exercise within the museum.
When they returned, participants used all the information that they had generated in the workshop to construct a “found poem” on what pioneer means and could mean at their museum. To conclude, we held a conversation that allowed participants to reflect on their experiences within the workshop activities, their shifting understandings of pioneer, and the success and challenges they have had in expanding or deconstructing this narrative in their museum in order contest colonial museological practices.
Unsettled Understandings (A Generative/Found Poem Using Participant Responses)
In the spirit of honouring the nature of these workshops and embracing one potential role of a researcher in poetic inquiry, I have created a poem from the findings of one of the workshops. The photos and the words in this poem were taken from the photo documentation and audio transcription of the workshops. The bolded words are direct quotes from the participants. As I move through the poem, it is my intention to show how participants began with a reliance on “common” and Eurocentric understandings of “pioneer.” However, as the workshop progressed and these understandings began to be challenged and their assumptions unsettled, this led to personal reflections that could potentially shift the terrain of their practices, which you will see at the end of the poem.
We begin with how we presume pioneers began:
staring from nothing or working with nothing and making something
A sensory storm whips up
It felt very visceral, very real, trying to put yourself in that place
A collage of images settles onto the tables:
pioneer
settler unbroken land into agriculture
logged cabin threshing machine one-roomed schoolhouse
working with resources
community builder innovation
New words begin to blanket our landscape:
Illness stereotypes
damned to extinction
assimilation extermination
Amidst discomfort we seek Little House on the Prairie idyllic:
A homestead, firearms, the wood stove
A bowl of borscht, pass down, tradition
Still there are images and histories that cannot be ignored: Proselytize, civilize, racism
We struggle with contradictions:
Hard work and beauty like that didn’t go hand-in-hand
flies in creamy milk
The way in which dust settles onto fields,
bodies,
museum exhibits
From romanticism to realism, we enter into
the exhibit space displaying hesitations and tensions
What needs to be unsettled?
Oh wait.
All of the sudden I just saw it
Those words started popping out:
Holy! Holy! Holy! Primitive Uncivilized
They felt hard to write down
If I had to speak to it here, would it be hard to speak to it?
It doesn’t matter. It should be hard.
What we find becomes just as much about what we are also not finding
It wasn’t the things that were there, it was the things that weren’t there
Indigenous culture
multiculturalism
languages other than English
Collages, poems, exhibits leave us unsettled with the implications of making our patrons uncomfortable
We are practitioners flipping both sides of the same coin:
Like whether or not we are romanticizing the pioneer which makes it seem like we are forgetting the harshness
Or we are focusing on the harshness or making some people feel uncomfortable with their own histories
And yet the compulsion to change prevails
Our success is an Indigenous display.
My dream is that we are helping facilitate these displays that counteract.
My dream is more collaboration. Honest, true, whole collaboration.
Implications for Educators
Alexandra Fidyk (2017) begins her chapter on poetic inquiry entitled a “a setting of things side by side” with the acknowledgement that “place begets poetry: poetry begets place” (p. 32). The conversations we had at each museum and the poems written are specific to the particular places where they were created. Like other arts-based methods, in these workshops, poetry provided an opportunity for each of us (researchers and participants) to understand, as Leggo (1999) articulated, that “there are many ways to know the world, and the world can only be known in many ways, and, even then, only ever known a little” (p. 114). Through the workshops, participants sought to see mirrors of how their understandings of the term “pioneer” were reflected in their interpretive and curatorial practices (practices which are inherently pedagogical) and areas where their understandings were unsettled. They highlighted these points within the critical conversations, noting gaps in their museum’s narratives and spaces where contestations could take place. As they reflected on this, they extended their discussion to realizing that representations affected who they conceptualized as community at their museum and, again, the absences in representation.
Tracey (2020) writes that “poetic inquiry is not a turning away from the complexities of expressing difficult ideas in academic language, but an exploration and expansion of the possibilities of language itself” (p. 259). Throughout these workshops, we learnt that despite the multivariant means of understanding “pioneer”, narratives in each of these museums still defaulted to the colonial foundations of the institutional structure. This narrative was often shaped around the notions of nostalgia or hardworking and hardships of the pioneer - as we saw at the beginning of my research poem - with small (and sometimes temporary) interventions. Therefore, the continued reproduction of this inert narrative across the sites we visited demonstrates the concerns participants voiced of offending visitors (or communities who have found a home at museums – namely white, Anglo-European descendant communities). And yet, through the creative poetic exercises participants still expressed a desire to make changes, which we saw as my research poem progressed.
I would argue that the same colonial frameworks that bind museums also bind other pedagogical institutions, such as schools. In saying this, I also recognize that as sites of informal learning not as strictly bound by legislation and curriculum, museum practitioners can move more nimbly to elicit change and the museum structure itself is also more malleable. That being said, I would propose that poetic inquiry provides a starting point for educators to begin to peel back and unsettle their understandings in order to examine further the particular knowledges that are being reproduced within their pedagogical practices. As Fitzpatrick and Fitzpatrick (2020) write: “poetry can be both political and pedagogical” (p. 8). This case study is a urgence to take up the practice of both the political and the pedagogical.
References
Butler-Kisber, L. (2020). Poetic inquiry. In E. Fitzpatrick & K. Fitzpatrick (Eds), Poetry, Method, and Education Research: Doing critical, decolonizing, and political inquiry (pp. 21-40). Routledge.
Fidyk, A. (2017). A setting of things side by side. In P. Sameshima, A. Fidyk, K. James, & C. Leggo (Eds.), Poetic inquiry: Enchantment of place (pp. 32-37). Vernon Press.
Fitzpatrick, E. & Fitzpatrick, K. (2020). What poetry does for us in education and research. In E. Fitzpatrick & K. Fitzpatrick (Eds), Poetry, Method, and Education Research: Doing critical, decolonizing, and political inquiry (pp. 1-18). Routledge.
Hockett, J. & Walter, M. (2024). Toward new understandings: An overview of field development through critical poetic inquiry research methods. Qualitative Inquiry. DOI: 10.1177/10778004241232924
Leggo, C. (1999). Research as poetic rumination: Twenty-six ways of listening to light. Journal of Educational Thought, 2(1999).
McTavish, L. (2024, February). Welcome to Our Website: About the Unsettling Pioneer Museums in Alberta project. Retrieved from https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/unsettlingpioneermuseums/unsettling-your-pioneer-museum-resources/welcome-to-our-website
Tracey, S. (2020). Poetry drops a plumbline into meaning: Findings from an inquiry into teacher creativity. In E. Fitzpatrick & K. Fitzpatrick (Eds), Poetry, Method, and Education Research: Doing critical, decolonizing, and political inquiry (pp. 254-267). Routledge.
van der Vaart, G., van Hoven, B., & Huigen, P. (2018). Creative and arts-based research methods in academic research. Lessons from a participatory research project in the Netherlands. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 19(2). https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-19.2.2961