Catalogue of Uncommon Curatorial Practices
The Case for Indigenous Desire-Centred Museum Practices: the Manitoba Museum
by Savannah Wilde
Abstract
Do museums continue to play into the notion of a “broken Indigenous peoples” (Tuck 2009)? Through an application of Tuck’s (2009) concept of damage versus desire centred approaches, this research investigates how the Manitoba Museum in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada is moving towards centring desire-based approaches in their operations. These changes are being implemented in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action (2015) and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (adopted by Canada in 2010). A desire-based future reflects damage centred pasts; museums must confront their colonial roots to move forward. Conducting three semi-structured interviews with two current and one former Manitoba Museum associate supplemented my examination of existing public documents. My analysis shows that over the last 10 years or more the Manitoba Museum has increased their collaboration with Indigenous peoples and communities but this has presented different challenges and sometimes undermined their own intentions. My hope is that other institutions can learn from this research and focus on how centring desire is a conceivable way towards decolonizing museums.
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1: Introduction
CHAPTER 2: How is the Damage Centered Past of Museums Guiding Desire Centered Work in the Present?
The Importance of Desire vs. Damage Centered Research
Historical Representations of Indigenous Peoples: On Museums and Damage-Centered Research
The Canadian Museum for Human Rights’ “Harris Report” and its Aftermath
The Manitoba Museum: A Shift Towards a Desire Centered Approach
Storytelling: Why is it the Start of Desire Centered Research?
Objects as Social Beings: Are Objects Important in Desire Centered Research?
Community: Why are People at the Heart of Desire Centered Research
The Two Dominant Forces Present in a Museum
Gaps in the Research
CHAPTER 3: Methodology
Units of Analysis
Ethnohistorical Research Methods
Data Collection and Analysis
Documents
Semi-Structured Interviews
Coding
Trustworthiness
Hopes
CHAPTER 4: The Manitoba Museum Today
What is the Modern Experience of The Manitoba Museum?
Dr. Amelia Fay
Where is the Manitoba Museum currently in Moving Towards a Desire Centred Approach?
What Changes Have Been Made to Centre Desire?
What is the Future of the Museum?
Dr. Cary Miller
What is Her Role at The Manitoba Museum?
Why Did Dr. Miller Become Involved in the Museum?
How Does Dr. Miller View the Museum?
CHAPTER 5: A Damaging Experience at The Manitoba Museum
Amanda McLeod
What Was Her Experience at the Manitoba Museum?
What was Her Experience with Curating at the Manitoba Museum?
What are her Feelings about the Museum and Hopes for the Future?
CHAPTER 6: A Desire-Based Approach in The Manitoba Museum
Code Analysis of Interviews
How is Power Shifting at The Manitoba Museum?
How is The Manitoba Museum Including Collaboration in the Structure of the Museum?
How are Policy and Projects Changing in Response to Modern Needs?
How are Narratives Changing?
How Do Financial Burdens Affect Change?
How Does We Are All Treaty People Centre Desire
Proposal for Change
CHAPTER 7: Conclusion
CHAPTER 1: Introduction
Opening
Museums often become contested spaces in which differing interpretations of history and culture struggle over meaning and representation. In Canada, Indigenous peoples have been outspoken about how museums have, and continue, to represent their cultural pasts and presents. In response, museum professionals (inclusive of curators, designers, board members, and educational staff) now largely include Indigenous voices in their exhibitions. The United Nations Declaration on the Right of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) Calls to Action both outline the expectations of heritage institutions when handling Indigenous pasts, emphasizing that it is the right of Indigenous peoples to attain control over the representation of their own histories. In this thesis, I argue that this shift shows a move from damage centred research to one of desire as outlined by the Indigenous scholar Eve Tuck (2009). I do this by using the Manitoba Museum as a case study for the analysis of this thesis.
Background
Practices of museum collecting have historically relied on the extraction of both objects and knowledge from Indigenous communities. Common stories told about Indigenous peoples are of genocide, dislocation, and past abuses on behalf of the colonial government. Notwithstanding the fact of such histories, their presentation as traumatic and damage focused both normalizes an image of Indigenous life and excludes community input from the storytelling of the exhibition.
In 2010, Canada adopted UNDRIP[1] making it easier for Indigenous communities to make claims of ownership over their pasts. In 2021, UNDRIP became law in Canada. The government envisioned its implementation as a guide for different agencies to foster new forms of engagement with Indigenous peoples and, in the process, craft a new kind of future-forming policymaking. Most importantly, UNDRIP calls for heritage institutions to create the conditions and opportunities for more Indigenous led initiatives, meaning more Indigenous control over the public representation of their own (peoples’) histories. This is a shift for museums who have historically rejected external control over its operations. The TRC was formed in 2008 after a formal apology from the Canadian government for the impact of the Residential School system on First Nations, Metis and Inuit peoples. The TRC was tasked with creating a report documenting the stories and testimonies of Residential School survivors, leading to the Calls to Action[2]released in 2015. In their report, the TRC called to prioritize the representation of Indigenous peoples in exhibition spaces, archival records, collection practices and systems of governance. Both UNDRIP and the TRC’s Calls to Action have protocols and recommendations for heritage institutions that Indigenous peoples continue to leverage in their efforts to change the damage-focused work of many contemporary museums.
My Connection to the Manitoba Museum
My research is heavily influenced by my own middle-class upbringing in Winnipeg, where I was able to visit the Manitoba Museum often. I worked at the Manitoba Museum for a brief period during my undergraduate degree and continued to work at different museums in Winnipeg. While I am Métis, I more often identify as a white woman as that is how I am visibly received. My Métis identity was never a large part of my life or upbringing and only became important to me in my late teens. Coming from Winnipeg, I was brought up with Indigenous culture around me even if it was not a prominent part of my life. Being raised surrounded by Indigenous peoples yet with little connection to Indigenous culture affected how I saw myself. Indigenous identity was not something I would choose to talk about when I was younger, and to this day I still struggle with my indifferent attachment to “culture.”
What and Why
What I have investigated at the Manitoba Museum is threefold. One, I wanted to see how community input and engagement is being incorporated into the museum space. Seeing how museums are using the knowledge and labour of Indigenous peoples is key to centring desire. Secondly, how are museums changing their policies and narratives to better suite Indigenous needs as outlined in UNDRIP and the TRC. To decolonize museums, they need to include permanent change. Governance and policy changes are in direct response to the TRC and UNDRIP. Finally, I wanted to see how the Manitoba Museum is changing because of my connections to the institution. Social change in museums is often ignored in academic writings, instead there is a focus on technology or changes outside of the museum that may affect how the museum operates. Everything that changes inside the museum is in direct response to the social world outside of the building.
I talked to a curator, now director, I previously worked with to see how the Manitoba Museum has changed, and to understand how the changes have affected the way this museum operates. I wanted to see how community integration has affected the narratives told in the spaces. The main objective was to see how daily changes to the museum structure are affecting how the museum is renewing its galleries and policies. Knowing how the changes affect larger shifts allows for more insight into how the museum is responding to UNDRIP and the TRC. Adding community engagement allowed for communities themselves to have a say in the research that I was doing, and how they felt about the museum and their work. In this thesis, I interpret these actions as demonstrating a move towards a more collaborative and therefore relationally-responsive and “desire-centred” (Tuck 2009) form of curatorial practice.
Scope
I am focused on Indigenous peoples and narratives within the Canadian Prairies. I chose the Manitoba Museum because I previously worked there, but also because I know they recently updated their exhibitions and are continuing to update the galleries. This is good timing as they are updating policy to better accommodate gallery renewal processes. They made mistakes with regard to previous renovations and have since gone about adapting their approaches based on feedback from community.[3] The Manitoba Museum is an interesting institution as it acts as and is often mistaken for a provincial museum, but it is neither owned nor funded by the provincial government.
Because of this narrow scope, this research may not be applicable outside of this specific context. The prairies have a strong Indigenous community that pushes for change. Museums in this region understand they cannot ignore Indigenous communities’ wishes. I chose to conduct three interviews with people directly associated with the Manitoba Museum. I do not have broad information about how communities as a whole feel and cannot assume that the community members I interviewed are representative. Attitudes outside of Manitoba may be different, but this research can hopefully show how museums can and are trying to change.
Approach
In my research, I used semi-structured interviews to supplement public documents as this allowed me to engage with both the museum and community members. Public documents can only tell so much, thus the interviews filled gaps and showed what the museum has already accomplished and is still continuing to do to improve their exhibitions in response to calls for institutional change. This information was analyzed via coding and thematic analysis to discern the overall feelings, struggles, and future for the Manitoba Museum. Engaging with theories such as “contact zones” (Pratt 1991) and “difficult knowledge” (Blumer 2015) allowed me to critically view the museum as a place of knowledge production that is complex and ongoing. I was able to see how joy, frustration, and hope connect when discussing the Manitoba Museum.
Structure
This thesis begins with a literature review that frames the history of museums as damage centred. I then introduce the Manitoba Museum and discuss the contemporary desire-based approaches that the museum is implementing. Subsequently, I discuss my methods and how they were applied in this research, with a focus on how Indigenous peoples are engaged in the museum and how the museum is reacting to Indigenous desire. My results present the interviews discussing the work the Manitoba Museum is doing and have done in the past decade. The results will highlight how each of the interviewees have varying levels of confidence in the museum. The contents of the interviews will be discussed based on the themes that emerged from the analysis, and I compare those themes to other Winnipeg institutions to demonstrate their strengths and weaknesses. I conclude with a brief summary of the research and outline how I see the findings from this research can be applied.
Chapter Endnotes
[1] The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) was adopted in 2007 with the goal of reaffirming Indigenous Peoples’ human rights. The purpose of the declaration was to reaffirm Indigenous Peoples’ rights to self-determine their own affairs. In 2021, Canada adopted UNDRIP into federal legislation; this act requires the Canadian Government to commit to the declarations outlined in UNDRIP. This is important as UNDRIP outlines requirements for future building with Indigenous peoples at the forefront, and mandates cooperation and consultation with Indigenous Peoples over matters that may concern their cultures and lands.
[2] The Truth and Reconciliation Commissions Calls to Action were released in 2015 following the commissions inquiry into the impact of the Residential School System. The calls, while similar to UNDRIP, outlined recommendations and requirements by Indigenous Peoples for larger social institutions. In the Calls to Action, it includes calls for changes to the government, education, healthcare, child welfare, and the justice system. The calls are specific, yet broad enough to be implemented into other social systems that are not directly mentioned. Museums in particular took the calls seriously when coming up with future strategy plans for their institutions.
[3] Community is used to refer to Indigenous Peoples and Nations in Manitoba specifically. This is a fairly common practice in the prairies when discussing Indigenous Peoples.
CHAPTER 2: How is the Damage Centered Past of Museums Guiding Desire Centered Work in the Present?
The Importance of Desire vs. Damage Centered Research
In a now well cited paper entitled Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities, the Indigenous scholar Eve Tuck (2009) states that histories of peoples’ suffering are important to know and surface, though they should not be the only way a specific group’s history is presented to the public. Tuck’s point is that suffering is a reality of many peoples, especially those of minority groups. She also does not neglect the learning that comes from knowing past pain and how it can potentially help avoid similar events being repeated in the future. Yet, as Tuck goes on to argue, by only focusing on narratives of pain and suffering, the message most often conveyed to different publics is that the most interesting feature of Indigenous peoples and their communities are the way they have been “broken” but despite that continue on, resiliently, to exist (Tuck 2009, 5).[1]
In contrast, Tuck (2009) argues for a kind of research with Indigenous communities that does not focus on a singular moment of trauma. Instead, Tuck advocates for research that considers the long-term effects of seeing oneself represented as coming from a “broken culture” (Tuck 2009, 1). Research that only invites people to speak as if they are speaking about pain is not productive, she says. Marginalized communities are often expected to speak about their personal trauma because sensationalized narratives are perceived as the most interesting part of marginalized peoples’ lives; Tuck labels this “damage centered research” (Tuck 2009, 5).
Yet, Tuck claims, an alternative form of research centered on hope or joy is available. This is what she calls ‘desire-centered research’ (Tuck 2009, 8). Desire-centered research concerns itself with the complexities of living before, during, and after the moment of trauma, and the ways that people find small aspects of happiness and resilience in those memories (Tuck 2009, 8). It is my position that the distinction Tuck (2009) makes between damage and desire centered research correlates to the change in approach that curators are taking when renewing exhibitions of Indigenous community life.
This chapter reads the history of museums through the lens of a damage centered approach before discussing the contemporary changes that certain staff at the Manitoba Museum are trying to implement – changes (such as collaborations with Indigenous communities) that I see as centering desire within the institution. However, whereas desire-focused practice highlights a shift in authority away from the museum to one of collaboration, this does not characterize an irrevocable break or a rupture in museum practice. Instead, all desire centered research is based on or is a working out of damage centered research in as much as more contemporary forms of research are moving on cognizant of not repeating previous harms.[2]
Historical Representations of Indigenous Peoples: On Museums and Damage-Centered Research
The history of the museum as an institution is rooted in a confluence of colonial ideologies that characterized European life as located at the center of civilization and anyone else’s experiences as foreign to it. Salvage anthropologists, for example, saw themselves as moral agents collecting the goods of Indigenous peoples before their inevitable demise into the status of a “bygone culture.” Salvage anthropology was the practice in which knowledge and objects were taken from Indigenous peoples because it was believed that they would no longer exist due to the “natural order” of civilization in which European life was the epitome of modern, civilized life. The purpose of display then, was to show how “primitive” peoples lived before European interference in order to highlight the ways that colonialism was “saving” - by civilizing - a culture stuck in the past (Rowlands, Stanley, and Were 2025, 3). The point is that museum exhibitions may have changed over the years, but the reality is that they are still designed for the same audiences that have occupied institutional spaces for centuries (Watson 2007, 161).
Museums began as a nation building tool in the European metropolitan centers of London, Paris and Berlin. They served to reinforce the idea of a shared cultural identity (Simpson 2007, 235). European visitors could identify themselves in the exhibition as superior to the peoples exhibited because of the way narratives framed “the Other” as somehow backwards or lesser than themselves. Although contemporary museums are now used to having to change and adapt in response to the world around them, the spectre of the dominant majority still looms large over display spaces as they are the primary audience the institution is appealing to.
Settler Colonialism in Museums: Damage Centered Research
Settler colonialism is defined as an ongoing, structuring process rather than a single event (Wolfe 2006, 398). In similar ways, most dominant museum practices tend to present colonialism as a series of traumatic moments rather than an ongoing legacy. Museums themselves played a role in the colonization of many places, purchasing stolen goods from colonial officials – this served to enhance the social status of the collector or official who acquired it to begin with. Colonial powers imported capitalism into their new colonies, bringing with it a new mania for collecting (Wolfe 2006, 394-95). Indigenous goods were seen as a commodity to be sold to collectors, where the most valuable items were burial goods and later human remains (Wolfe 2006, 394-96).
Thomas (2016) reminds his readers that goods were not always accumulated through violence, but rather sometimes through trade, or purchased, or received as gifts (85). While different examples demonstrate that this was certainly the case, Thomas (2016) does not acknowledge the complexities of that assertion. Goods may have been traded, paid for, or given to settlers, but the power imbalance and differences in understanding those encounters between the colonizers and the colonized still raise concern over the ethics of past collecting methods. Intentions of past collectors are shown through collections, but one cannot assume that those intentions were good (Thomas 2016, 84).
An example of improper collections of materials, and damage centered research, is the 1987 Slack Farm Incident in Kentucky. While this is a more recent case of grave robbery, it is well known as it was used to found the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA)[3] in the United States (“Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (U.S. National Park Service),” n.d.). The farm was located on a known Indigenous burial site at the time the looting took place (Henderson 2015, 56). The looters of the burial goods never received proper clearance or permits to dig on the property but permission from the owners was given none the less (Henderson 2015, 56-57). They dug 450 holes, piled the human remains they found, and destroyed most of the breakable or softer objects taking only what they deemed “valuable” (Henderson 2015, 58). The disrespect shown by the looters for the dead is what made this case so infamous, only enhanced by gruesome details of how some of the skulls were purposefully damaged (Henderson 2015, 59). Historically speaking, this event was not uncommon – the reason why many museums and universities have Indigenous remains (or Ancestors) and their burial goods in their collections is because of similar clandestine activities. These kinds of events not only damage the reputation of the field of both anthropology and archaeology, but also the reputation of the institutions that house these types of objects. One is left to wonder how the museum has acquired these goods, and if they come from situations similar to Slack Farm. How objects are positioned and articulated in the museum leaves clues to how the institution understands the value of the object itself.
Te Māori: Art versus Artifact and a Move Towards Desire Centered Research
Patrick Wolfe describes the settler colonial desire to remove Indigenous peoples from their lands as the Logic of Elimination, a tactic by which colonialists set out to destroy (peoples) in order to replace (them with other peoples) (Wolfe 2006, 388). This logic can be seen in the museum through the ways in which Indigenous knowledge systems are marginalized in favour of White academic knowledge production (Bruchac 2018, 3). There are instances where the museum collaborates with Indigenous peoples and gain approval but still do not grasp the ways that they are overlooking the issues they are trying to address. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1984 exhibition ‘Te Māori’ is a perfect example of an attempt made to address the complex issues of displaying Indigenous cultures in museum spaces but continuing to work within a damage-centered mindset, fully missing the point of including collaborative design.
The opening of the 1984 ‘Te Māori’ exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) is commonly referred to as initiating a change in museology (McCarthy 2007, 117-19). The exhibition was praised for presenting Māori material culture as art rather than artifact (McCarthy 2007, 117-19). This exhibit became regarded as a turning point for Indigenous exhibition practice: one would hear of whether an exhibition was “before” or “after” ‘Te Māori’ (McCarthy 2007, 119). This exhibition introduced the idea of contested meanings of objects, allowing for an understanding of different interpretations. Māori peoples themselves chose objects chased on what was appropriate for larger audiences to see, and excluded objects that were not meant for the public eye; this in itself was a revolutionary act in understanding objects as living. The art versus artifact debate argues the differences between what is art, and what is artifact. In the case of Indigenous belongings, they are often labeled artifact even if they are made of the same materials or use the same concept as Western artists. This debate is based in the damaging colonial roots of the museum in which non-European objects were automatically labelled as artifacts; more contemporary approaches are more likely to refer to Indigenous goods as art. ‘Te Māori’ made meaning of the objects on display by presenting them as continuing pieces of a present culture rather than placing Indigenous peoples in the past (McCarthy 2007, 118-9). This practice followed a shift in trends that occurring in New Zealand throguhout the 1970s that place Indigoes and European culture parallel in the present rather than following a cultural evolutionary path (McCarthy 2007, 118).
Many museums are beginning to address their colonial legacies, but their collections remain disputed due to the ways that they were originally assembled, and the association collection practices have with assimilative practices that colonial governments advocate for. The original displays and collections in museums are being updated to reflect on and open up to representations of history that take into account different (i.e. non-majority) perspectives. This work, it is said, needs to be inclusive, not singling out the people excluded from the narrative and expecting them to fix past problems; it should be collaborative. The Manitoba Museum – the main focus of this thesis – is trying to address their colonial roots through updating gallery spaces and including Indigenous peoples and representatives in the process. Throughout major changes the museums are taking, the colonial legacy of the institution looms overhead.
The Canadian Museum for Human Rights’ “Harris Report” and its Aftermath
In 2020, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) conducted their second external review of racism and oppression within the museum, these reports are known as the “Harris Reports.” The review’s report was published in 2021, outlining major issues that continued to plague the museum, and other institutions more broadly. The report was based on 35 interviews conducted with museum staff, with issues and complaints dating back to 2014 when the museum opened. The report confirmed that many of the issues that were found during the first report were of continuing concern (Harris 2021). Findings of the second report primarily focused on racism within the institution, whereas the first report focused on the oppression towards non-White, heterosexual, cis gendered staff. The main themes that emerged from the second report are: racism is systemic within the CMHR, and management does not have sufficient understandings of racism to address issues that are present in the institution (Harris 2021).
Importantly, the Harris Report (2021) proved that the TRC and UNDRIP were not being taken as seriously as many previously thought. The TRC Calls to Action call for museums and archives to align themselves with UNDRIP. Articles 31 and 32 of UNDRIP are most relevant to cultural heritage institutions, stating that Indigenous Peoples have control and access to their land and cultural materials (United Nations 2007, 11). The CMHR has gone against this call prior to the museum opening its doors, having been built on an archaeological site that has not been properly excavated.[4] Due to the improper treatment of the site, many Indigenous Peoples have continued to boycott the museum. This is just one example of the CMHR, a federally owned museum, not following the TRC or UNDRIP.
This report had a great impact on many institutions in Winnipeg. The Winnipeg Art Gallery-Qaumajuq reacted promptly by having an external equity audit conducted which came to find many of the same issues as the Harris Report (2021) and provided the gallery with 75 recommendations to improve themselves (WAG, n.d.). The gallery responded by having quarterly equity training that focused on racism and homophobia (WAG, n.d.). Unfortunately, the Winnipeg Art Gallery-Qaumajuq did not make their report public. The Harris Report (2021) spotlighted the fact that many cultural heritage institutions have hard to fix systemic issues engrained into their design that are not easily addressed or changed due to their roots in colonial projects. The Manitoba Museum has not had an external audit conducted in response but undoubtedly read the report and took the accounts into consideration.
The Manitoba Museum: A Shift Towards a Desire Centered Approach
The History of the Manitoba Museum
The Manitoba Museum (hereafter MM) was popularly known as Winnipeg’s largest museum until the opening of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in 2014. The MM collection boasts millions of artifacts ranging from human to natural history (Manitoba Museum n.d.-e, sec. Introduction). The museum officially opened as The Manitoba Museum of Man and Nature in 1970 (Manitoba Museum n.d.-a, sec. History of the Manitoba Museum). The museum was originally just 2 buildings, museum and planetarium, both of which were opened by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II (Manitoba Museum n.d.-a, sec. History of the Manitoba Museum). In 1986, the museum opened the ‘Touch the Universe Science Gallery’ that emphasized interactive design targeted towards younger audiences (Manitoba Museum n.d.-a, sec. History of the Manitoba Museum). The museum changed its name to The Manitoba Museum between 2000-2005 to encompass new gallery spaces as part of a strategic plan (Manitoba Museum n.d.-a, sec. History of the Manitoba Museum). The name marked the shift of the museum to a more corporate identity (Manitoba Museum n.d.-a, sec. History of the Manitoba Museum). Today, the museum has made accommodations to better suit the needs of modern Indigenous communities.
Sacred Storage at the Manitoba Museum: Desire Centered Research
Currently, one of the larger accommodations the museum has made is a space for sacred storage or sensitive and ceremonial objects (Manitoba Museum n.d.-e, sec. Collections and Conservation). This storage space is made not only for past acquisitions, but also new requests from others to have materials stored in the space (Manitoba Museum n.d.-e, sec. Collections and Conservation). Sacred storage ensures that those who should not be interacting with the objects, both human and non-human, are not coming into contact with the sacred objects in the space; therefore, allowing for proper care and storage of sensitive materials.
Sacred storage is an example of what can be considered desire centred research. The objects are treated in such a manner in order to avoid reproducing older and therefore less respectful ways of thinking about and handling the objects. The entire point of sacred storage is to make sure the objects are cared for and kept in good relations with their communities. It is a targeted measure of the museum to make sure that these objects in their care are treated in line with what the community asks of the museum. In some cases, understanding certain objects as living things demonstrates a move towards desire-based approaches to curation and care. As long as objects in collections are regarded as an extension of a relation with their owners and communities then collaborative input will be sought into how they are cared for.
Collaboration and Partnerships at the Manitoba Museum
The MM now tries to centre ways that it can work with and for Indigenous communities to mend some of the past harms it has been complicit in (Manitoba Museum n.d.-e, sec. Introduction). One of their larger initiatives is the Indigenous Advisory Circle (IAC). The IAC is comprised of ten Indigenous members from different communities; the webpage also lists former members of the IAC (Manitoba Museum n.d.-h). This circle exists to aid the museum in policy and exhibition making, as well as represent their communities within the institution.
Outside of the board, the museum offers tours and programs designed for learning about the collection and its intersections with colonialism. An offering for community access is the ‘Collections for Community’ program (“MAYOR’S INDIGENOUS ACCORD PROGRESS REPORT” 2024, 2). This program was designed by Dr. Fay and Tanisha Houle-Gaywish to allow for communities to visit the collections outside of normal work hours (“MAYOR’S INDIGENOUS ACCORD PROGRESS REPORT” 2024, 2). This helps to create community collections access for those who may not be able to make an appointment during the weekdays and need to visit on a weekend (“MAYOR’S INDIGENOUS ACCORD PROGRESS REPORT” 2024, 2). This opportunity allows for community members to share their stories with the MM employees, attaching Indigenous stories with objects in collections.
Storytelling: Why is it the Start of Desire Centered Research?
Personal Approach to Object Stories
Museums are moving towards a narrative approach that considers both the role of object and person in storytelling. Crooke, for example, argues for a push towards a more personal approach to curating, where the object is the primary storyteller of a personal narrative that is directly connected to it (Crooke 2019, 618). The objects themselves become agents of story helping people discover what happened. Based on this idea, Crooke organizes memorial objects into two categories: the object of mourning, and the object as evidence (Crooke 2019, 618). An object of mourning is something that is personal or part of the home; they are objects that have a role in negotiating loss (Crooke 2019, 618). The object as evidence has a public role in informing others of what happened by acting as physical evidence (Crooke 2019, 618). These two categories are useful when thinking through the representations of suffering that overrepresent Indigenous exhibitions as they provide a practical and personal purpose to displaying these types of objects. Well-thought out and carefully crafted exhibitions are more valuable, as they should include knowledge from those directly involved with the materials on display.
Oral Histories and Stories
The original storytellers[5] of Indigenous narratives should be treated as the absolute authority of their stories (Knickerbocker 2020, 28-29). Oral histories and traditions were seen as lesser for a long time in the academic world, having been relegated to the realm of folklore and myth (Phillips 2011, 81). This has changed over time as oral histories have been accepted as a valid source of evidence and record. This is important in the context of museums, as oftentimes Indigenous histories are passed down orally rather than in writing. Including Indigenous voices and narratives into the canon of the institution has created more space for peoples to tell their own stories the way they want them to be told. Storytelling is an important part of Indigenous culture, as stories pass down knowledge and life lessons to future generations. Incorporating stories into the museum space allows for Indigenous epistemologies to be shared to a larger audience. Attaching a story to an object is a powerful tool for knowledge production, as people will remember the story based on their engagement with the object and its role as a vessel for storytelling.
Objects as Social Beings: Are Objects Important in Desire Centered Research?
Thomas versus Bjerregaard
In his book The Return to Curiosity, Nicholas Thomas argues that objects are given meaning by people and can be changed (2016, 49). The ongoing process of objects being given new meaning plays into what Thomas calls ‘object diaspora’ (2016, 75). Object diaspora is the event in which objects from one collection or context are moved to various locations (Thomas 2016, 75). When an object is brought into a new location, it is put into an existing category within the institution where it becomes part of that collection, creating a new relationship with the objects they are with. New relationships created between objects through association give each object a new meaning. This raises the issue when thinking outside of the Western belief of objects as non-living things, as different cultures may see things differently. If one is to consider the fact that many Indigenous groups believe that an object is alive in some ways, then the way that object is treated becomes increasingly important. An object has a past beyond its cultural material associations that needs to be considered. Thomas (2016) does not address the ways that non-Western beliefs may view objects as the ones that create new meaning for themselves.
On the other hand, Bjerregaard (2015) argues that the objects themselves do not matter so much as the way they make people feel. Their argument centers on humans as active agents in meaning making. Objects are therefore part of the way humans create relationships between each other, as well as with objects (Bjerregaard 2015, 76). Humans use objects to create a form of language game in which objects are organized in specific ways to convey a meaning, but the authors of the language are always the humans who put them there to begin with (Bjerregaard 2015, 76, 80). In a similar vein to Thomas (2016), Bjerregaard (2015) oversimplifies social objects and the agency they can embody in distinct cultures. Objects are seen as material rather than animate beings, which is why they argue objects have no impact on meaning without human intervention. This is reductive and does not consider different ontologies that believe objects do matter as they are ancestors rather than simply crafted materials. This points to a fundamental lack of understanding outside Western institutions. In order to move towards a desire centered approach, objects and people both need to be considered as active agents in the meaning making process.
Object and Object Relations
Tegomoh (2007) presents a case that is in direct opposition to that of Bjerregaard (2015). They argue that those who care for an object will perceive it as an active agent in meaning making regardless of what others may believe, this means that outside voices do not hold weight in the ways a culture understands an object’s personhood. Those that believe are included and have control, and those that do not believe are excluded from the conversation (Tegomoh 2007, 228). This is the very basis for a desire centered approach, where the people for whom an object matters are the ones in control of its treatment. The care that an object is given is not just about keeping its physical appearance; it is also about the way it is treated as it holds power and knowledge (Thomas 2016, 65). Objects are seen as alive because they connect the past to the present (McCarthy 2007, 127). This understanding of objects as alive and active is a more complex approach to objects as conveyors of meaning and feeling, as it acknowledges different understandings that people may have of an object beyond the ways in which they are displayed or organized.
Objects in storage should be treated the same as the ones on display. Care and consideration about how an object is stored is important to consider when thinking about the objects as living things that require human-like treatment. Objects need human care and interaction; they deserve the attention you would give to a friend or family member, not simply put in a drawer and forgotten about until they need to be repaired or cleaned.[6] A museum is a home for the objects that are kept in the building and have a deep connection to the people they represent within those walls (Phillips 2011, 74). An object has a history with stories about its many lives and purposes that can be traced and told to others.
Drazin (2020) argues that objects have lives that intersect and run alongside the lives of humans, which is what creates their social world (63). Over an object’s life, it changes hands many times creating connections between people even when the context or use is different (Thomas 2016, 81). Thomas (2016) proposes the idea of the three naturalisms of heritage (96-99). The first is one cannot assume the significance of an object (Thomas 2016, 96-99). The second is that a collection is more than just a group of objects, as the pieces themselves have relationships with each other based on the ways that they share a space (Thomas 2016, 96-99). The final of the three naturalisms is that you always need to ask if a collection is representative of a group (Thomas 2016, 96-99). This last point is the most important since museums act as large repositories for cultural groups all around the world but have little input from the groups themselves.
Gregory and Witcomb (2007) argue that objects can make people remember and feel things (267). The authors hint at the idea of object agency and material affect with the ability to change the world around them when they are occupying a space. If we think back to Bjerregaard’s (2015) argument that the objects themselves do not matter, Gregory and Witcomb’s (2007) approach seems to be more nuanced with room to consider different ontologies and beliefs. Objects, people, and the places they are from or occupy create a relationship (Simpson 2007, 244). All three have their own rights and responsibilities to create more performative parts of culture and community that are then shared with others on a larger scale in the museum (Simpson 2007, 244). Cultural heritage is experienced through objects and their presence that can be enriched with community involvement (Watson 2007, 168). Objects and community work together to create an experience for others, while creating an experience for each other in the process (Watson 2007, 168). The relational museum model means that people collect objects, but in tandem, objects collect people (Stevenson 2024, 59). In this model, the artifacts themselves are the things that tie networks of people together rather than people creating groups of objects. The objects are the active agent that are creating direct links between communities and culture.
Community: Why are People at the Heart of Desire Centered Research
Shared Authority
A useful strategy for modern desire centered approaches is shared authority (Flinn and Sexton 2019). Shared authority is the situation when authority in knowledge is shared between professionals and community members and/or groups, allowing for greater co-production of knowledge (Flinn and Sexton 2019, 626). This is a creative project that explores different paths and ways of knowing that may not be familiar to a researcher who is trained in a Western institution (Flinn and Sexton 2019, 626). When done successfully, it can allow for greater community access and control over the collections and their records that may otherwise be restricted or inaccessible to the community (Flinn and Sexton 2019, 627). The process allows for local myths and knowledge to be considered, including stories from the community to be put on record for the future (Watson 2007, 168). Making space for people to tell their own story and control the narrative is important to those who are willing to share in the first place. If a museum willingly takes information and materials from communities and then restricts their access and control, they are proving that they remain an extractive colonial institution unwilling to change. The MM has been using this method when it comes to updating some of their new exhibitions, allowing them to centre Indigenous voices as authority.
Human Assemblages
Blumer (2015) outlines the idea of the ‘networked museum.’ The networked museum is a concept that defines an assemblage as more than just a collection of objects and broadens the term to encompass human relations as part of the collection (Blumer 2015, 130). They argue that stories, people, experiences, and social forces connect the past and present through cultural memory (Blumer 2015, 130). This concept of the networked museum brings assemblages into a new light that allows for a deeper understanding of the connection between people and artifacts. It is also important to consider that a networked museum holds non-physical artifacts to the same standard of importance as the physical ones, allowing for stories and collective memories to become important pieces of history while simultaneously challenging Western knowledge production.
Partnerships in Museums
Dhillon (2017) has put forth a discussion about participatory politics that defines Indigenous participation in colonial spaces as an act of liberal, multicultural ideology (Dhillon 2017, 13). Acts of participation are performed to make the state or power structure seem less responsible for colonial damage by reasserting power dynamics (Dhillon 2017, 13). Asking Indigenous peoples to take part in museum spaces may not be the way forward, since Indigenous contributors are rarely mentioned directly in the museum space.
The term “partnership” is liberally used to describe governance relationships between outsource communities and the museum, ignoring the ways that the partnership favours the majority population more than the Indigenous peoples they are working with (Butts 2007, 220). Partnerships can be a useful tool to create strategies to address concerns and issues, but they are only productive if they are used to enact the proposed changes. More related to Dhillon (2017), Indigenous museum collections in the prairies are often curated by Indigenous peoples or have Indigenous guest curators for the exhibitions. These types of inclusion practices allow for community voices to have a say in what is being told about them without the performative actions used in multicultural ideologies. This is a more direct and straightforward approach to desire centered practice.
Museum Identities
As the result of a community-based research project in a small UK town that was formerly a fishing port in the early 20th century, Sheila Watson (2007) found the community cared more about collective memory of place than sensational stories. The community wanted to experience their cultural heritage through shared interactions and involvement based on memories that the majority of ordinary people could relate to (Watson 2007, 168). The community wanted to move beyond sensationalized stories that might have drawn more visitors to the museum to focus on the things that they found to be worth remembering. Watson’s (2007) research is an example of the power and joy that communities can feel when they have some control over their own representation.
The Two Dominant Forces Present in a Museum
Contact Zones
A museum is both a repository for objects of knowledge and an object of knowledge in and of itself (Simpson 2007, 243). The museum as contact zone includes not only the people and objects, but also the building itself; everything is constitutive of the museum as a specific place where people, objects, and even architecture is caught up in the often tense relation between past and present.
Hope for the future is found in the past, thus knowing about the real ways ordinary people feel about their history is important; this includes the violent and disturbing parts of history (Thomas 2016, 104). Tuck (2009) and Thomas (2016) align with this thinking, calling for narratives that challenge assumptions about the past. Museums need to move away from the dominant narratives to make room for people to add their own histories and stories that may have been forgotten, ignored, or kept unknown. Today, Indigenous stories are being taken more seriously and are increasingly taking on the role of educating younger generations.
Difficult Knowledge
Described as the effects of learning or having to engage with violent histories, ‘difficult knowledge’ is markedby the discomfort we feel when we are faced with narratives that challenge what we assume we know about the past (Blumer 2015, 127). ‘Difficult knowledge’ highlights the importance of bringing different pasts into the museum space. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson draws on Indigenous thinkers, such as Kim TallBear, when discussing how institutions need to allow space for Indigenous peoples to tell their stories (Simpson 2017). They state that people will tell you the story that is important to them, and that people should not try to gain knowledge about others that they themselves do not feel comfortable sharing (Simpson 2017, 31-32).
The traditional museum is extractive because it does not respect others’ boundaries around their own sense of what can or cannot or should not be known. Making space for community to share what they feel is important and crediting them for their time and knowledge is part of shared authority (Flinn and Sexton, 2019). Shared authority (Flinn and Sexton, 2019) highlights the need for a museum to work with and for the communities that they are representing. The shift in museum practice to collaborative exhibition development emphasizes how museums are changing to better suit and represent communities for a desire-based approach (Phillips 2011, 185). There is a shared understanding that the power to control the narrative of the past is co-managed by museum and outsider (Phillips 2011, 188).
Gaps in the Research
Existing anthropological or museological literature tends to dwell on how collaboration was utilized for a specific exhibition rather than the long-term partnerships communities have with an institution. These ongoing partnerships are often the legacies of institutional responses to the UNDRIP and the TRC’s Calls to Action.
Conducting research at one museum allows for a place specific inquiry that can provide a less ambiguous case study on Indigenous collaboration in colonial institutions, and how they are responding to UNDRIP and the TRC through their practices to create more desire-based approaches to curation and partnership. The MM is a perfect case study as they have been updating their policies and exhibitions over roughly the past decade to better fit the needs of communities. Another reason for choosing the MM is because of the lack of research done within the Prairies context. The existing literature highlights the importance of local knowledge in museums, but most of the research conducted in Canadian museums and Indigenous communities is done on the West Coast.
The research that has been conducted on Indigenous museum collections and collaboration has largely focused on trauma and broad generalizations about people and their pasts (Bruchac 2018; McCarthy 2007; Phillips 2011; Tuck 2009). Moving beyond outdated ideas of what a museum is and how it is expected to represent minorities is a necessity for the future of museums.
Phillips (2011) presents three main arguments about collections and museum overhauls needed to create an institution that responds to Indigenous peoples’ wants and needs. Firstly, the names of existing collections in the museum are outdated and in desperate need of overhaul (Phillips 2011, 95). Secondly, existing categories create areas of inclusion and exclusion that perpetuate traditional Western colonial ideas about the ‘other’ (Phillips 2011, 95). For example, Indigenous objects are put into “ethnology” collections, but European objects are put into “history” collections. How can a museum change when it is based on a colonial past? Phillips’ (2011) final proposition is that museums cannot and will not change until someone forces them to start the process with simple changes that lead to larger ones (95). Collaborative development is based on the idea of change from those most impacted (Phillips 2011, 184-5). This research was centred around these ideas in relation to the MM and see how they engaged with some of these proposals during their ongoing renewals.
Chapter Endnotes
[1] That being said, there is the risk of muting damage by not discussing it
[2] Desire-centred research does not require painful pasts to not be discussed, but it does necessitate that people be credited and consulted about those pasts.
[3] The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) is a United States federal law implemented in 1990 (“Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (U.S. National Park Service),” n.d.). NAGPRA is threefold as it outlines procedures for the repatriation, management, and discovery of Indigenous cultural heritage (“Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (U.S. National Park Service),” n.d.). It requires Indigenous peoples in the United States to be included in discussion and management of material culture (“Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (U.S. National Park Service),” n.d.). The law applies to all cultural institutions housing Indigenous materials that receive federal funding.
[4] The lead archaeologist suggested a full excavation of the site prior to the construction, but the federal government overruled the decision.
[5] Different Nations will have different terminology for storytellers, but often times the term refers to the community member that shared the story with others. This role is often designated to Elders within the community or Nation.
[6] Many museums do not have the funding or staff to properly take care of objects in collections; this makes the ideal or needed care procedures impossible.
CHAPTER 3: Methodology
Units of Analysis
Positionality
In 2022, I secured my first museum job at the Manitoba Museum as a summer student working with Dr. Maureen Matthews. While my time there was short, I was able to work on a collection of archival materials consisting primarily of oral histories. The people on the tapes were members of a Métis community that was burnt down in the 1930s to become crown pastureland. Much of the tapes focused on trauma and pain, which was difficult to listen to especially when many of the interviewees wanted to discuss their life in the town rather than the pain of losing it. This experience proved to be critical to my interests in how research includes Indigenous desires.
I received my Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Anthropology from the University of Manitoba in 2023. I was encouraged to participate in more spaces that challenged me, such as museums. This encouragement allowed me to critically engage with public education sites as well as literature on critical museology. Since that time, I have luckily built connections within the Manitoba Museum through not only working there but also volunteering with the University of Manitoba’s Respectful Rematriation and Repatriation Ceremony, and working with professors on a variety of research projects. These connections and past experiences have led me to doing this research and allowed for some ease of access in the context of this research.
The Manitoba Museum
For context, the MM is located in Winnipeg and it is the province's largest cultural and natural history museum. The museum boasts a large collection of Indigenous material culture in both the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) collection and its ethnology collection. Due to my past experience there, it felt appropriate to conduct research with these collections and work with the now former curator, Dr. Amelia Fay. The exhibitions are largely concerned with Indigenous histories and life ways. Winnipeg has a prominent Indigenous population, meaning the MM followed many other institutions in immediately reacting to the TRC’s Calls to Action. One widespread practice in Manitoba is free admission for Indigenous peoples at heritage sites; the MM is one of said locations. This was a call in the TRC’s Calls to Action that was easily implemented in the province.
The MM has recently renovated some of their older exhibitions to fit more contemporary museum practices and prioritized Indigenous collaboration in the process. Other exhibitions have not been updated since their conception in the 1970s-80s. This offers a point of comparison between the older and newer exhibitions and how curation practices have evolved in the past fifty or so years. Currently, the museum is updating all internal policies as best it can to meet the demands of the TRC and UNDRIP (Manitoba Museum n.d.-h). New policies being addressed include collections, repatriation, programs, and collaboration (Manitoba Museum n.d.-h). When discussing my project with Dr. Fay, she expressed interest in the timing considering my research coordinated with the museum’s ongoing policy overhauls. Due to this timing overlap, I will be able to discuss current changes that are happening rather than ones for the future. The MM is transparent about current affairs on their website, which makes it a valuable tool for research.
I was interested in how policies have changed over time with new needs of Indigenous communities and their involvement with the museum. Tuck argues that museums are focused on suffering rather than cultural differences, so keeping that in mind when considering how things are presented was key to making interview questions and how I thought about the answers.
Access to Field site
In order to do this research, I needed the approval of the museum. This took some time to formally receive approval because the board only meets monthly. This meant that I had to wait until August 2025 to have this research formally approved. My proposal was approved with no questions, but I organized a meeting to discuss the project more with Dr. Fay. While getting approval was not a problem, this still put an extra stress on the already short timeline of a Master’s project. The MM’s board gave me the green light and said that they were excited for me to use them in the research because of the timing. They also knew I had previously worked there, which I am sure reassured them that I had a stake in what is going on at the museum. I am also an Indigenous person, thus having Indigenous led research done within their museum looks good and helps bolster their more desire-based approach they are trying to take going forward. This is specifically discussed in the TRC’s Calls to Action, as it outlines a desire for more Indigenous led research within institutions that house Indigenous histories.
Ethnohistorical Research Methods
For this research, I employed ethnohistorical research methods. Ethnohistory can be defined as the history of non-European peoples, but more specifically with a focus on experiences of colonization, resistance, and change (Turner Strong 2017, 31). It acts as an interdisciplinary methodology that looks at the connections between colonial, Indigenous, and any other groups that may have impacted histories of contact. I used this method when thinking through my research design, specifically in how I wanted to approach data collection. In order to complete this research, I drew on past experiences at various museums, and documents[1] that discuss ongoing efforts to decolonize museums. This method helped to address my research question regarding how collaboration is changing the MM, and how the MM is addressing their pasts through new updates.
Community Knowledge
I chose to include community members in my research to challenge assumptions about how the MM engages with the community. Community members possess a deep understanding of and emotional connection to the objects in the museum. Those who created these pieces, or their descendants, hold greater authority over their significance and purpose than a curator.
Understanding the importance of Indigenous collaboration requires confronting the museum's uncomfortable past. Collaboration can facilitate a dialect change[2] in the narratives presented in exhibitions, and I observed these shifts in response to earlier practices that focused on damage-centered research. Involving Indigenous peoples in this research enabled a more nuanced understanding of how the MM incorporates community input into its processes. Community input allowed me to compare the MM’s goals for their institution with how community members actually feel regarding the MM’s efforts to decolonize. Creating a space for individuals to share their feelings about the Manitoba Museum and its operations is a vital aspect of a desire-centered approach.
I approached Dr. Amelia Fay to begin with, as she is my main contact at the MM. I emailed Dr. Fay my proposal to receive approval from the museum board before I was able to approach others; this ensured that the research was confirmed before I found interviewees. All communication prior to interviews was through email, and the interviews were conducted over Zoom for the ease of interlocutors. While Dr. Fay was my main contact and interlocutor, my sample was those who were available and willing to be a part of the research. Dr. Fay suggested I speak to Dr. Cary Miller, who recommended I speak to Amanda McLeod. Beyond Dr. Fay, I was concerned with approaching people who were both Indigenous and have experience working with the MM. It was important to include Indigenous voices in this research to ensure that there would be more than just a white academic’s voice discussing how the museum engages with Indigenous peoples. Indigenous voices allow for Indigenous perspectives on the museum’s goals for inclusion.
Data Collection and Analysis
Documents
Public Documents
I used public documents to collect data, which was the most useful data collection method before conducting interviews. I use ‘documents’ here as an umbrella term to describe a variety of visual materials both written, digital, and physical (Tisdell, Marriam, and Stuckey 2025, 197). Museums not only have press coverage, but also websites that include information they make public in addition to links to government documents. The information on the site is rich. I started my research by using the website to help me figure out which level/departments of the museum’s structure I wanted to research, as well as what kind of questions I should ask interlocutors. The website outlines what the museum is aiming to do in the next few years, so I structured my questions around what has already been done and what they are hoping to do in the future. Beyond that, there are lists of board members, exhibitions, and contact information for the museum and its employees. The website is public data that is not produced or published by the government, excluding it from my secondary document source ‘public records’.
The public documents such as the Manitoba Museum’s website and blog posts provided insight during the early stages of research, as well as create interview questions that were more specific to their case. Public documents showed the ways the museum was hoping or trying to incorporate more shared authority (Flinn and Sexton 2018) into their institution. Being able to use this to guide questions meant that I could compare the website ideals, to what the museum was actually trying to accomplish with their more recent efforts to decolonize the space. This information allowed me to begin data collection before my interviews. I received ethics clearance in October 2025 and then organized interview dates for December 2025. During the period between August and December, I relied heavily on the website and blog to create a question guide for the interviews and gather preliminary data. I focused solely on the interview data after conducting the interviews.
Public Records
Public records are official and ongoing documents published by a governing body (Tisdell, Marriam, and Stuckey 2025, 199). The MM website includes multiple links to different ongoing government projects and initiatives they are a part of. All of these are public records available to those who are interested. The most valuable document in my research was the 2024 Mayor’s Indigenous Accords Progress Report, a document created by the museum and provided to Winnipeg’s municipal government. The Mayor’s Indigenous Accords is an offshoot of Winnipeg’s Indigenous Accords that were created and signed into city legislation in 2017 (Winnipeg n.d). These accords comprise of six commitments and ten principles chosen by the Mayor’s Indigenous Advisory Circle in collaboration with other community leaders (Winnipeg n.d). Organizations, businesses, and institutions are able to join at their own discretion, but upon doing so they promise to follow the accords (Winnipeg n.d). Part of the commitment is writing the annual progress report that is submitted to the city each year to show how an organization is following and progressing in line with the accords (Winnipeg n.d). In the context of the MM, this document outlines and describes all new and future initiatives the museum is undertaking regarding Indigenous peoples and communities. The most recent version of this document is from 2024. Analyzing this document and gathering data from it heavily informed the direction of the interviews for both staff and community members, as it detailed all the existing policies as well as ones that are in the process of being updated.
The Mayor’s Indigenous Accords Progress Report again highlighted shared authority (Flinn and Sexton 2018) at the forefront for change in the museum. Because this concept is so heavily applied both the TRC’s Calls to Action, and UNDRIP it became the easiest way to analyze and compare the Accords Progress Report to interviews for differences and similarities. The main point of the accords is to draw attention to the way the city itself is working with others to help decolonize the historical canon of the city and address different pressing issues for Indigenous peoples. The accords are made directly in response to the TRC’s Calls to Action and different protests that have taken place in the city that have forced the local government to address the issues facing Indigenous peoples.
Access
Open access public documents and records became very important to this research because it provided more transparency, a key point of desire-based approaches. Transparency to the public in specific means that I had access to these files without needing to go through the museum to get permission to use. This was simple because the museum is trying to be more accessible to a wider public audience.
Semi-Structured Interviews
I conducted interviews with community members that were treated as a recorded conversation loosely guided by a few questions. My research questions were concerned with how the MM is incorporating the TRC and UNDRIP into their future making policies, as well as how the museum is involving Indigenous peoples in the museum structure. These questions were chosen due to their relation to how the museum is addressing sensationalized trauma and the essentialism of Indigenous peoples. I chose to do interviews based on the archival project I was in charge of while working at the MM. The interviewers spent a lot of time trying to keep people on track and discuss their trauma. This technique made the interviews feel very one note and flat comparing to some of the things people wanted to talk about. I allowed people to speak about what they find to be important, as I cannot assume that my interests are important to them. Obviously, keeping people on the right track is the priority, but if people steered the conversation in a slightly different direction, I allowed for that. I did not know what people find to be important in terms of museums, collections, or collaboration.
I chose to interview three people all of which have experience at the MM. Two currently work at or with the museum (Dr. Amelia Fay, and Dr. Cary Miller), and the third previously worked there as a curatorial assistant (Amanda McLeod). The two who are currently employed with the museum provided more recent information on what is happening, as well as information on how the museum has changed since they first started working there. Dr. Miller is Anishinaabe, I wanted to include an Indigenous person who is currently working with the museum. This interview was important to have an updated opinion on how the museum is working with Indigenous peoples coming from an Indigenous person. In contrast, in the interview with Amanda McLeod she shared her experiences working on different exhibitions during the museum’s capital renewal project from 2016-2020. Amanda is a member of Sagkeeng Anicinabe Nation, which meant she could provide information on how she felt about being an Indigenous employee in a museum environment in the past.
The interview with Dr. Amelia Fay, the Director of Research, Collections, and Exhibitions, was treated in a similar way to the community interviews. This interview focuses on the ways in which the museums and their staff work to include community members and their stories into the spaces themselves, and how policies are changing throughout the process in response. I conducted this interview prior to community interviews, as this informed the kinds of questions to ask community about specific actions from the museum. I define community participants as any Indigenous person who took part in this research. In Manitoba, it is quite common to define Indigenous peoples as community members more broadly, so I followed this framework.
Museum Participant
I worked closely with Dr. Amelia Fay during my brief employment at the museum. Dr. Fay was the curator of ethnology and the Hudson’s Bay Company collections at the MM, recently taking a new position as the Director of Research, Collections, and Exhibitions (“MAYOR’S INDIGENOUS ACCORD PROGRESS REPORT” 2024, 2). She works with others to create programs, as well as meet with community members to oversee collections management and proper care. One of her priorities at the museum is updating the older exhibitions that are outdated and contain inaccurate information. Most of the interview was spent discussing the ways the museum has changed during the 12 years she has worked there. We spent a lot of time talking about collaborative projects the museum has been a part of, and the future of new collaborative ideas she is hoping to be able to facilitate in her new role.
Shared authority was the main concept used to analyze and think through how the museum was including outside voices into the museum space (Flinn and Sexton 2019). In relation to the MM, shared authority meant that I could discern how the institution is trying to work on being collaborative or include more co-curation in everyday processes. This is the more desire centred approach that Tuck (2009) outlines and that the TRC and UNDRIP have called for. A desire centered approach values that information of Indigenous collaborators and acknowledges their contributions to a project.
Community Participants
Dr. Cary Miller is an associate professor at the University of Manitoba, as well as the chair of the Indigenous Advisory Circle (IAC) and board member at the MM. Dr. Miller is Anishinaabe from the American side of Anishinaabe territory, her families are from St. Croix and Leech Lake communities.[3] During her time at the museum, Dr. Miller has elevated the role of the IAC to where they have more say in the daily systems rather than just Indigenous peoples there to review exhibition materials. Being a historian, she is passionate about making sure the museum is not only telling correct information but also aiming to right the wrongs of the past through Indigenous inclusion on a meaningful and long-lasting level. Dr. Miller sees museums as a place of learning for the public and strongly believes in the possibility of a decolonized museum.
The second community member in this research is Amanda McLeod. Amanda is a member of Sagkeeng Anicinabe Nation in Manitoba. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Art History and Native Studies from the University of Alberta, a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Conservation Studies from the City and Guilds of London Art School, and a Master of Arts in Curatorial Practices from the University of Winnipeg. McLeod is a former Manitoba Museum employee who worked with Dr. Maureen Matthews, opening her up to the world of curation, and is currently one of the only Indigenous conservators in Canada. McLeod brought a vastly distinct perspective of the museum because her experiences at the museum between 2016-2020 were not positive. Her experiences both highlight the newer focus the museum has put on bettering their relationships with Indigenous communities, and how the museum has had a recent past of issues with Indigenous employees. Most of our conversation centred around the ways she felt frustrated and constrained by the museum in her position as Dr. Matthews’ assistant, and how Dr. Matthews was the one she felt most supported and uplifted her.
Community interviews provided insight into how Indigenous peoples feel about working with a colonial institution. Unsurprisingly, using contact zones as the primary theory for creating questions for these interviews and deciding who I wanted to include was important (Pratt 1991). I knew there was the chance that people would find the museum to be a space of contention and clashing ideologies. Broadening it to include objects into the contact zone allowed for a more considerate approach to what Indigenous participants felt was the main concern of the museum (Stevenson 2024). People are concerned with what is in the museum collection and how it arrived there; this steered the conversations with community members. The ongoing relationship between object collections and the people who come into contact with them was key to why people became involved in the museum to begin with.
Access
The interviews conducted developed an idea of how communities engage with museums, as well as how they feel about the way museums depict Indigenous Peoples. The people interviewed have a connection to the MM and have been selected for this reason. This is the most appropriate approach to interviewing community members in relation to the museum as some communities prefer not to be associated with anyone who works with larger institutions. Access is an issue to consider, as my connections to people and communities in the prairies is limited. My first interview was with Dr. Fay with whom I had previously worked. Indeed, having worked at the museum, I took advantage of my preexisting contacts. After this interview, Dr. Fay suggested I interview Dr. Miller, chair of the Indigenous Advisory Circle and a professor who I had known from the University of Manitoba. After I conducted that interview, Dr. Miller suggested I speak to Dr. Suzanne McLeod, professor at the University of Manitoba who works in the Indigenous art world. When I reached out to Dr. McLeod, she forwarded me to her daughter, Amanda McLeod. In the end, I realized I had previously met Amanda McLeod on a couple occasions. My access was entirely predicated on the fact that I had made connections throughout my undergraduate degree with people who wanted to see me complete this research. Without these connections, I undoubtedly would have had a harder time gaining access to both people and location.
Coding
I transcribed the interviews using a transcription software and then coded digitally. I coded using inductive codes to allow for flexibility in code creation (Saldaña 2012). Inductive codes were established during the transcript analysis. Inductive code examples were any emotional responses to the collaborative process or stories they are telling. Coded data was analyzed for code co-occurrences to compare museum knowledge to community knowledge, as well as how museum processes have changed over time (Castleberry and Nolen 2018, 808). Additionally, any cross over between themes and common phrases were noted and compared. Some common phrases or terms were TRC and UNDRIP, as well as collaboration as they are the main focus of this research.
Trustworthiness
Member Checking
Member checking provides the participants with amassed data to review and correct any misunderstandings and provide feedback on the data results (Abidin et al. 2024, 11). All members who wished to be sent a copy, have been sent a version and had a few weeks to read and send feedback. This allows for clarification of any misunderstandings I have made during the research, which is important for community members who I have reached out to for interviews. In the case of my research, only 1 participant was concerned about the data. All they asked was that I send them copies of what I wrote about their interviews and the direct quotes I may have used. They were not concerned about what was used but wanted to ensure content was not being used out of context.
Hopes
My wishes are that these interviews can shed light on how the institution is working to mend community harms[4] and compare how community members working with these institutions feel about what is changing. In seeking to enact a desire centred style of research, I aimed to put community first and have their input on every step of data collection and creation. Having a curator speak about how community is involved adds a layer of comparison to how the two parties engage with each other. The role of the curator is changing as the role of the outsider changes. No longer are curators just researchers who take acquisitions and pull information for exhibitions, rather they have become a sort of mediator between the museum and those outside the institution. My interviews delve into this more with my participants, discussing how they feel this process is working or not working as intended. Most importantly, having both the inside and outside voices offers a more nuanced approach to discussing collaboration. Asking people within the institution to discuss possible downfalls may be complicated as they are employed by the museum; there are very obvious power dynamics to consider. Community members working with the museum still face power imbalance issues but are not reliant on the museum for their monetary livelihoods, making it possible to be a little more transparent about what the museum may not be doing.
Chapter Endnotes
[1] Including the TRC’s Calls to Action, UNDRIP, The Mayor’s Indigenous Accords (Winnipeg), and the Manitoba Museum’s annual reports.
[2] The use of the term “dialect change” is referring an evolution or progression of narratives both visually and literary regarding Indigenous Peoples and their pasts.
[3] Dr. Miller is non-band status. This is something she directly asked me to make sure I clarify.
[4] For example, housing ancestors in their institution and displaying sacred objects.
CHAPTER 4: The Manitoba Museum Today
What is the Modern Experience of The Manitoba Museum?
Introduction to the Manitoba Museum
The galleries at the MM are divided into biomes based on the geographical areas that they are representing; therefore, there is the Prairies gallery, the Nonsuch gallery, the Arctic-Subarctic gallery, the Winnipeg Gallery, the Earth-History Gallery, the Boreal Forest Gallery, HBC Museum Collection Gallery, and the Parklands Gallery. Your journey through the museum begins in the Welcome Gallery.
We Are All Treaty People as Modern Curatorial Practice
The ‘Welcome Gallery’ is home to the museum's land acknowledgement. The land acknowledgement is the legacy of the 2014 exhibition We Are All Treaty People curated by Dr. Maureen Matthews, the then curator of Anthropology at the MM. The land acknowledgement is a small exhibition comprised of ceremonial pipes and corresponding treaty medals for each community represented. “During a visit to the museum by the Elders Council, we asked what the next step at the museum should be … we should move the treaty exhibit up to the entrance of the museum so that it would be the first thing people see, so that the pipes and medals would stand before visitors like the treaty acknowledgment at the beginning of a meeting” (Matthews, Roulette, and Wilson 2021, 17). This display is uncommon as generally pipes are kept away from the public eye due to their sacred status within Indigenous communities. The pipes on display are special as they act as ambassadors for the communities within the museum; they are ancestors that have a physical presence in the space.
Including both the treaty medals and the pipes are important, as they each represent an aspect of the treaty signing process. “They (the Elders Council) felt that the best idea was to match every one of the treaty medals that stood for treaties in Manitoba, Zaagaakwa’on, with a peace pipe, Opwaagani-mashkimod. The medals would signify Canada’s treaty promises; the pipes would signify First Nations treaty promises and remind everyone of the sacred nature of the agreement” (Matthews, Roulette, and Wilson 2021, 10). For the British Crown, signing a treaty and gifting a medal were sufficient for the treaty process. In contrast, Indigenous communities understood the act of smoking a pipe as the important aspect in creating a contract between parties. “The pipe and those who smoke it become brothers through participation in ceremony” (Matthews, Roulette, and Wilson 2021, 13). For the Lakota, smoking a pipe is a meaningful practice that creates an understanding of the agreement discussed and represents a peaceful encounter (Grant 2017, 70). This demonstrates how pipes are a rhetorical being that assist in addressing the needs of the community and forge a lasting agreement between parties (Grant 2017, 20). The physical act of smoking is much more important to Indigenous peoples than a signature on paper, as it brings two groups together in an ongoing agreement (Howes 2023, 214-15).
As a symbol of the ongoing agreement of treaties, the pipes are brought back to the community regularly to be smoked and experienced by those who may not have a chance to experience its teachings. The pipes on display become active members of community due to this practice. This practice is unique and allows for the pipes to be more than simple objects on display as they are not only members of their communities, but also public facing actors in ongoing treaty discussions. The museum’s role in this process shows that they are progressing towards relational practices that centre Indigenous desire. “The museum is a complex relational environment, and colonial legacies are often dominant, but these artefacts, as diplomatic and political interventions by Indigenous families, challenge the museum” (Matthews, Roulette, and Wilson 2021, 5).
Gallery and Policy Renewal
The MM has been slowly updating its policies and galleries for a decade. Any new spaces or mandates are aligned with four UNDRIP articles: articles 11, 19, 31, and 32 (Manitoba Museum n.d.-h, sec. Introduction). Article 11 states the right to practice and revitalize traditions and customs, and for the state to provide redress to effectively respect cultural aspects of being (United Nations 2007, 11). Article 19 declares that states must consult and cooperate with Indigenous peoples and must do so before implementing changes that affect them (United Nations 2007, 16). Article 31 asserts that Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain their cultural heritage and knowledge systems (United Nations 2007, 23). Finally, article 32 attests the Indigenous right to development priorities or use of land and its resources, and maintains that the state must consult and cooperate in good faith to obtain consent to land use as well as provide just and fair redress until a conclusion is made (United Nations 2007, 23-4). The MM has committed to making changes to their own ways of working based on these four articles.
In 2017, the Museum took part in a 17.5-million-dollar capital project known as 'Bringing Our Stories Forward' to renew 50% of the galleries with collaborative design at the forefront (Manitoba Museum n.d.-e, sec. Renewal of Permanent Gallery Spaces). Five permanent galleries were updated over the 4-year process. One major change was to the Nonsuch Gallery: a reconstruction of a 17th-century Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) ship and the surrounding town of Deptford, England (Manitoba Museum n.d.-e, sec. Renewal of Permanent Gallery Spaces). Changing the story from the ship about to leave Deptford, to now the ship returning to England and sharing stories about the welcome they received from Cree peoples in what is now Waskaganish, Quebec (Manitoba Museum n.d.-e, sec. Renewal of Permanent Gallery Spaces).
Leading into the Nonsuch gallery is the Boreal corridor, where they added a telling of an oral history from Elder Louis Bird to introduce the ship (Manitoba Museum n.d.-e, sec. Renewal of Permanent Gallery Spaces). The story is about the first encounter between James Bay Cree and the European fur traders, told in English, French, and Cree (Manitoba Museum n.d.-e, sec. Renewal of Permanent Gallery Spaces). This empowers Indigenous voices and knowledge production in museums.
The ‘Winnipeg’ and the ‘Prairies’ galleries were redone to put more emphasis on Indigenous presence on the land (Manitoba Museum n.d.-e, sec. Renewal of Permanent Gallery Spaces). Both galleries now highlight the ways that land, water, plants, and animals are all connected to the way people use and exist in relation to each other. This once again brings Indigenous knowledge systems into colonial spaces.
There are three more galleries the museum would like to redo to align the exhibitions better with newer policies being made. The 'Arctic Subarctic Gallery' is probably the most urgent. While the three galleries are around fifty years old, the 'Arctic Subarctic' is very text-heavy and made to appeal to a more academic audience as its focus is on the mining industry in the Northern parts of Canada. Many of the exhibits in this gallery do not meet modern museum standards or the TRC and UNDRIP, which is why it is part of their ongoing renewal and reassessment goals (“MAYOR’S INDIGENOUS ACCORD PROGRESS REPORT” 2024, 6). The museum is starting discussions on the galleries and what needs to be changed in the Arctic-Subarctic gallery with Denesuline, Ininíwak, and Inuit communities to develop the renewal ideas with their collaboration (“MAYOR’S INDIGENOUS ACCORD PROGRESS REPORT” 2024, 6).
Goals of the Museum
On page 6 of the Mayor's Accord report for 2024, the museum outlines multiple goals for the future regarding Indigenous peoples. Collaborating with Indigenous communities to develop and assess Museum activities, and ensuring communities have access was the first goal they presented in the accord (“MAYOR’S INDIGENOUS ACCORD PROGRESS REPORT” 2024, 6). The museum stated its desire to develop collaborative research relationships with Indigenous academic and research teams to better conduct repatriation, Indigenous learning methods, and object research (“MAYOR’S INDIGENOUS ACCORD PROGRESS REPORT” 2024, 6). By doing this, they would work towards many of the TRC and UNDRIP's articles/calls, including language and cultural representation.
Dr. Amelia Fay
My first interview was with Dr. Amelia Fay, the Director of Research, Collections, and Exhibitions. Dr. Fay was the curator of the HBC collections at the MM when I worked there in 2022. She has a background in archaeology and has worked at the MM for over a decade. The interview was approximately one hour long. We mostly discussed current and earlier changes the museum had made. We focused our discussion on collaboration and narrative changes in the museum space, using the Arctic-Subarctic gallery as a reference point to fall back on; this is because this gallery is a priority for renewal. The most common code co-occurrence within this interview was between collaboration and updates. This shows how much of the conversation was focused on how the museum is bringing collaboration into the new updates within the institution.
Where is the Manitoba Museum currently in Moving Towards a Desire Centred Approach?
Dr. Fay described many of the changes and challenges in the space (museum and galleries) as a struggle to maintain balance. It was about thinking about the overall space. How much space do we have to tell all these stories? … But really thinking more holistically about, because we do biomes, what is the most important thing we want visitors to know about the prairies or this, and what are things that are absolute musts versus things that, well, it would be nice if we can fit it in, we’ll squeeze it in.
Balancing visitors' wants with academic desires creates a challenging atmosphere.[1] Added to that is the struggle between traditional views of what a museum is supposed to be and the way that the museum needs to change to maintain its relevance, as a publicly funded actor, in the twenty-first century. The narrative shifts are necessary, but the visitors will fear that the museum is changing too much of the space that they have a strong connection to through their memories; “Part of it was about nostalgia too, right? Even when we updated the old galleries, there was public outcry about where we were going to mess things up.” This balance is all a part of the shift the museum has made to acknowledge the role of colonialism in the creation of the museum itself.
As Dr. Fay explained to me during her interview, the Indigenous exhibitions at the Manitoba Museum make up approximately 80% of the content. Due to the museum’s “biome approach” to its exhibition spaces, Indigenous lifestyles are incorporated into each of its zones. This approach allows for there to be an Indigenous presence in every gallery of the museum without singling out their narratives from the overall history of Manitoba, or essentializing communities to their experience of suffering. Vitally, Dr. Fay stressed how the organization allows for there to be multiple perspectives on a single topic, shifting authority away from the museum and allowing others to share their side of the story, which highlights a desire-centred approach to curation.
Looking at really homing in on multiple perspectives. Not using an authoritative ‘this is the only way to tell it.’ So that's the kind of approach we've shifted towards. And even telling different stories and the narratives we take. It's like sometimes there are many ways to interpret this and many ways to think about it.
This power shift, allowing museums to step away from narrative construction, means that communities have more of a say in how their histories are being presented to the public, giving those outside of the institution more voice. This process raises new concerns however over who is and is not included in telling these stories. How much the community is involved, and who is speaking on behalf of the community, is always a pressing consideration. The MM is always thinking about how it can include community consultation in the narrative generation process. The museum’s work practices have changed since they first opened; community members are now considered collaborators rather than subjects to be studied as part of the past. That being said, there is still the need to consider space, competing disciplines in the museum, and what narratives are necessary to tell versus those that would be better to save for other ideas. Dr. Fay specifically discussed trauma narratives as ones that are up to the community to decide if they would like them to be shared. In this conversation, we discussed the next gallery slated for renewal: the Arctic-Subarctic gallery. Dr. Fay is taking into account some of the critiques from the last renewal process and bringing in the community earlier, so they have more control over the narratives being told in the space. “I already know from Denesuline community members that they would love for us to talk about the relocation.[2] That's a story they want to talk about…So kind of going to them with, okay, like this, you’ve identified this, but how do you want to tell that story?” Beyond the gallery spaces, Dr. Fay discussed the “Collections for Community” events the museum hosts as a way that community is involved behind the scenes of the museum. These events are designed for community members who want to visit collections but do not have the time to go during normal museum hours. “So, for students, for people who work full-time Monday to Friday jobs who can’t get time off, being able to come in on a Sunday and see some collections, use some collections, and hang out with them is cool." These events were designed to allow community to engage with the spaces and collections more personally, which also helps the museum gather more information about community desires and the pieces in collections. These events create a more personal approach to information gathering that is less extractive than the traditional ways of going into a community, as it allows those to engage with the museum based on their own decision. Dr. Fay described the events as a casual way for people from the community to hang out and share their knowledge with others. Community collaboration is now more common than academic collaboration at the Manitoba Museum, which Dr. Fay noted has been a substantial change in the twelve years she has worked there, demonstrating how community-museum relations have changed over time.
Beyond trauma, the Manitoba Museum is shifting its focus to pre-colonial contact communities and their technologies. “Look what life was like before we came over and messed things up.” Colonialism is not the only narrative approach a museum can take when discussing Indigenous peoples and shifting away from that notion can be a powerful tool in shifting public concepts of Indigenous peoples away from the notion of brokenness.
There's a lot of colonialism that was terrible and has a lot of traumatic histories associated with it. And if you only present that, then it doesn't give a lot. Because a lot of Canadians, newcomers, and visitors don't know our histories here. So, if they’re only seeing that, then that’s their takeaway. Of a flawed group of people who have had a lot of trauma that's terrible, and they don’t see the resilience, and they don’t see some amazing things, like the technological advances.
People are more than just the sum of moments of pain or joy; they existed and functioned before European intervention. People, even in the prairies, learn about Indigenous peoples in relation to European contact. Highlighting pre-contact life ways and the ways that people were before the pain and suffering shows what was lost after colonial contact.
What Changes Have Been Made to Centre Desire?
When the TRC’s Calls to Action report was published in 2015, the Manitoba Museum held meetings to discuss what needed to be done to comply with the findings. Repatriation or rematriation[3] is an ongoing project for the museum. Information for this project is collected over longer periods of time, where provenance is discovered, as it is often left blank or just given a region and time period. Filling in gaps in the information is the first and most important step in this process in order to ensure that the ancestors are being returned to the proper home. Much of the information about the return of ancestors is kept private; this is the most respectful way to treat the ancestors and respect the lives they lived. The TRC, along with UNDRIP, continues to be a strategic pillar in the museum going forward. "Aligning with not just sort of saying we're decolonizing but actually trying to Indigenize more in the museum and really thinking about how to improve what we've done." One of the major changes being made is to the policy. The museum is in the process of updating its older policies to better fit UNDRIP and the TRC. One of the major policies currently under review concerns procedures for the accessioning of Indigenous belongings. If implemented, this policy reaches out to the community to choose whether they would like the belonging or if they would like the museum to act as a steward rather than an owner. This is a major shift towards a desire-centred approach to object collection, in which the community has more power over their material culture.
The most impactful change the museum has made is in implementing the Indigenous Advisory Circle (IAC). The IAC is made up of members of different Indigenous Nations in Manitoba, who bring their connections and knowledge into the museum to better respond to community needs. In connection to her thoughts on the IAC, Dr. Fay said, "Often I’m relying now on our Indigenous advisory circle, right? So, our advisors come from different nations in Manitoba. They all have connections, too." Dr. Fay described the IAC as a way the museum can improve its consultation process, with hopes that the museum will eventually play less of a role in Indigenous narrative development. "It's 2025, and consultation isn't enough anymore. So really, should we be telling the stories? No, we should be facilitating.” The shift from telling to facilitating is key to the future of community-museum relations, and museum function is general. Having the IAC shows how the museum has more formalized partnerships that are acknowledged by the institution, rather than just something they do in the background. Formalized partnerships create a way to have firsthand feedback about museum goals and expectations while simultaneously shifting power away from the museum.
Oral Histories: Agency Over Trauma
Shifting authority to communities is important for narratives of trauma. When talking about the Arctic-Subarctic gallery, Dr. Fay touched on some of the more painful memories the community wanted to share, and how the museum is approaching that topic.[4] In terms of the Arctic-Subarctic gallery renewal, Dr. Fay said the community wants painful stories about dislocation to be told: “It’s a painful story. I think having them (Denesuline) involved in design and, you know, do you want it to be a more private space where people can engage with oral histories, or how do you want to perceive that?" Dr. Fay once again brings up the idea of balancing narratives and desires in the museum. This is a complex decision for the museum, as the community may decide to make claims that go against the museum's messaging; in these cases, the decision may be more complicated for the museum.[5] It is, in the end, the museum's decision on what does or does not go against their code, but allowing for Indigenous voices is also a key part of their code. Presenting the narratives of trauma may be important to the community, so allowing them to have agency over that is important to the museum. Within suffering, highlighting the ways people found joy through those times foregrounds Indigenous resilience and strength that is just as important to the people involved. Balancing trauma and joy present Indigenous peoples as more than broken and pained, bringing in multiple perspectives on a moment in history and not presenting all experiences as universal. Dr. Fay specifically singled out the use of oral histories in traumatic stories. "I think the biggest thing is that oral histories are great. Because you get the first-person perspective. And you hear it in someone else's voice. So, it's not the museum voice, it's like an actual human who has lived this experience." She also discussed how oral histories can be complicated because they tend to be longer audio recordings, and visitors do not want to sit and listen to long-form recordings.
We did a visitor survey more broadly. And people said they don't really like the digital components. That's not what they (visitors) come here for. They come here to see artifacts and specimens. They come here for other stuff. So, being mindful of that and being mindful that you can use oral histories, but they have to be very short. Visitors have a short attention span.
This quote highlights some of the ways that visitors can challenge a more desire-centred approach to exhibition, as they enter the museum expecting something specific but are unhappy when given something different.
What is the Future of the Museum?
When asked what the purpose of the museum was, Dr. Fay responded by saying she sees it as a trusted historical source for the public. "I see museums as custodians of heritage and history, and not necessarily always owners of these things, but custodians. So, preserving things for future generations to enjoy appropriately.” The museum is a place of intrigue where the main job of the institution is to facilitate things behind the scenes and to make the space come alive. Dr. Fay views the museum as a place for research and visitation, in which creating spaces with people and for people is a principal aim. One major issue with maintaining spaces for people is the speed at which change happens in the museum. It is hard to keep up with change when the process of things being done moves so slowly, and where once something is done, it is already years too late. One of the major difficulties of this is finances and the lack of funding in museums. "That's (money) our biggest challenge is that we are unusual compared to other Canadian museums in that we are not-for-profit. So, we function as a provincial museum, but we are not actually a provincial museum. We're not government employees." This highlights how the Manitoba Museum struggles with funding when they receive little from the government and instead rely on donations and funds made from ticket sales.
Poor financing for museums was a common theme that my interviewees discussed. Many people involved in the museum see how there is plenty of work that could be done, but there is not the financial backing to do so. In the case of the MM, Dr. Fay is slowly working on updating the Arctic Subarctic gallery in phases to combat this. While she knows this is the only way to be able to get the work done, she also knows it is an uphill battle to keep up with the rapid changes that are expected of museums.
When smaller institutions, such as the MM, are expected to keep up with the larger ones, it becomes difficult for these institutions to meet the expectations put out by those that can afford it. That being said, the Manitoba Museum is using the scaffolding approach[6] to update exhibitions after its larger-scale capital project. This approach does work, even if it is not optimal for the museum, as they will be behind in the academic world. Funding is increasingly difficult when working with communities, as the museum needs to have the funds to pay for honorariums and properly accommodate the needs of community members willing to share their time and knowledge. The IAC is one way the museum has incorporated more consistent community involvement with people who want to be involved more long-term, rather than just on one project.
Dr. Cary Miller
After speaking with Dr. Fay, she suggested interviewing Dr. Cary Miller. Dr. Miller works as an associate professor at the University of Manitoba, she is also chair of the Indigenous Advisory Circle (IAC) and a board member at the MM. She is Anishinaabe from the American side of Anishinaabe territory. Her families are from St. Croix and Leech Lake communities.[7] My interview with Dr. Miller lasted about an hour and a half during which we spent a fair amount of time discussing the role of UNDRIP and the TRC in changes to policies and procedures in the museum.
Dr. Miller is passionate about repatriation, so much of the conversation steered towards discussing the ancestors stored in colonial institutions. She states that her original involvement with institutions is because she has an affinity for what she calls "colonizers who are trying," such as those in museums. The overarching theme of this interview was discussing the need for more formalized change to the governance structures of colonial institutions. "My work is working to change the governing structure so that it is inclusive of Indigenous peoples."
What is Her Role at The Manitoba Museum?
Dr. Miller first became involved with the museum in 2018 when she joined the IAC. At this point in time, the role of the IAC was heavily focused on community members reviewing didactics for the gallery updates. Nowadays the IAC has a vast knowledge pool to pull from, which allows the museum to go to them for more than just information on cultural exhibitions.
We were focusing on the update for the Plains, and so the Plains gallery is the most recently updated Indigenous gallery at the museum.[8] The composition of the IAC is focused not just on elders and historians, but we also have an Indigenous scholar from U of M (University of Manitoba) who works in the natural sciences, so we are thinking about bringing Indigenous voices into the other specified areas of expertise.
In an attempt to elevate the authority of the IAC, Dr. Miller wrote and presented a paper to the board of governors that called for more control over Indigenous heritage. “I cited the UN declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples about control of our own heritage and suggested that there should be a better balance in the governance of the museum in terms of Indigenous voice.” Due to this presentation, Dr. Miller was subsequently invited to join the board; this allowed her to advocate for greater IAC involvement. This action also addressed one of the issues that Dr. Fay raised, as the IAC was brought on too late to the updates to the galleries and could not review the ideas before they were completed. This made things complicated, as the IAC felt they could have been of much more help if they were informed earlier.
If the museum brings Indigenous voices into typically non-Indigenous spaces, it allows for more control and say over Indigenous histories, proving that the museum is capable of centring Indigenous peoples and voices in their processes. This is something Dr. Miller highlighted in our interview, as she is an advocate for bringing more diversity into institutional settings. She believes that without Indigenous people occupying positions of authority (however tenuous or “advisory” they may be), misrepresentation and discontent are hard to avoid, as others are assuming how Indigenous groups want to be represented. “They are vitally important voices to be at the tables. What I keep saying is that Indigenous voices have to be at the table, at the spaces and places where decisions are made, and unless that's the case, then the decision makers are making assumptions about what Indigenous peoples want.”
Dr. Miller’s efforts have led to the IAC becoming more formalized within the operational structure of the museum and thus much harder to dismantle if moves were made in that direction in the future. The importance of museums giving Indigenous voices longevity and permanency to the power Indigenous peoples have over their own history, as called for in UNDRIP and the TRC. The TRC’s Calls to Action and UNDRIP became helpful guides for the museum, particularly on how they should be incorporating Indigenous peoples into their spaces beyond a superficial level. “We keep hearing our survivors say truth comes before reconciliation, and that truth is an understanding, a true understanding of the history across all of our citizens, and the way that we do that properly is by funding K-12, post-secondary, and museums to do that job.” Reconciliation is for non-Indigenous peoples to reconcile with their pasts and the mistreatment perpetuated for the sake of white advancement, disguised as helping. The only way people can know the past properly is by having well-funded sites of learning.
Why Did Dr. Miller Become Involved in the Museum?
Dr. Miller stated that she originally became involved with the museum because she never considered museums to be “bad” per se. “I don’t think that everything is coming from a malicious place – I think a lot of it comes from ignorance.” She believes in museums as valuable learning tools and identifies their problems as deriving from their roots in colonization.
‘Homeward Journey’ is the name given to the ongoing repatriation/rematriation project. Dr. Miller and Dr. Fay emphasized some of the issues the museum faced with this project. Dr. Fay focused on the museum’s budget, citing its relatively limited size while recognizing that the museum had committed to putting money aside for the project as something that needs to be done. Dr. Miller focused on more technical problems the museum has faced such as identifying where the ancestors come from. "Oftentimes, the ancestors that have been recovered by museums and universities are so distant in time that connecting them with a living community is much more difficult than, say, you know, the material collections." Researching where the ancestors came from can be difficult, in more than just discovering the timeline of events.[9]
Museum records can be unhelpful at times. In the case of ancestors, many times the records are short on historical information and often only provide partial information on the donor. The repatriation of ancestors is also happening at the University of Manitoba, where Dr. Miller is employed. “Both the university and the museum had to go through a similar process, which is pulling the records and making sure that they, you know, can give the best information possible to the community about where these ancestors are from, making sure that the ancestors are complete as arrived at the museum."
The “complete” aspect of that statement is important, as sometimes only bones are loaned rather than the complete ancestor. This means that all the bones of an ancestral body must be recovered before it can be returned to its home, as outlined by community needs. The information is important to communities so they can decide what the best course of action is. "It's years of careful research to go through, the human body has hundreds of bones, and we need to make sure that these ancestors are complete, that we have the best information possible concerning location and estimated time of death. So that communities can make the best possible decisions.” Due to the sheer lack of information, some ancestors may never see their original home again. In these cases, there is ongoing discussion over a provincial memorial; this shows how even the province is trying to centre desire for the future. While the project is heavy and appears grim in some cases, Dr. Miller does hold out hope for the future. “I do expect, eventually, we will see some significant repatriation of ancestors as the communities determine where home is.”
One of the major things that Dr. Miller reiterated in her interview was the goal to meaningfully change the museum’s governing structure. This would mean that community voices are granted permanency in the institution, addressing the concern that Indigenous collaboration is simply a phase or trend in colonial spaces. Dr. Miller used the structure of the IAC and its difficulty[10] to be eliminated as an example: “When you literally change the governingstructures, for example, for the board to eliminate the IAC, they would have to take a vote of the board." Including the board in the decision-making process of whether or not the IAC exists requires serious ethical and moral conversations within a small group of people. Eliminating the IAC would be damaging.[11]
Outside of the museum, the Canadian Museums Association (CMA) has recently updated its guidelines for inclusivity; this has set the new standard for museums across the country. The updated guidelines include prioritizing Indigenous-led initiatives within museums. Prioritizing Indigenous initiatives allows for more longevity in diverse voices within museum structures, as the CMA is generally the standard in Canada, making their decisions more impactful on the Canadian Museum community. Dr. Miller stated that change comes from powerful organizations acknowledging and enacting change. “What’s really going to make a difference is more museums incorporating Indigenous voices into their governance structure, and I don’t know, nationally, if we (Manitoba Museum) were the first or among the first to do it." Here, Dr. Miller points out the fact that the MM did act fairly quickly in response to the TRC’s Calls to Action. She once again highlights the importance of not only changing governance structures, but also the value of larger organizations holding museums accountable. The CMA is not legally binding, but its guidelines strongly influence the Canadian museum world.
While the IAC was brought on later than they would have hoped for the previous updates, they now hold more authority than the museum board initially anticipated, permanently altering the governance structure in the museum towards a more desirable structure. One of the newer examples of this is over the hiring of a new curator for the HBC collection. The position was Indigenous preferred, but because the IAC does not have purview over hiring, the museum did not ask them for any advice. Dr. Miller pointed out that the IAC not only brings connections but could also provide favourable considerations for Indigenous candidates, such as Indigenous events in the city. When they told the board that they would have liked to be able to review the job posting before it was listed, the museum allowed them to help with the candidate shortlist. Dr. Miller said, “When you think about what we (IAC) can bring, we can suggest places to advertise this (job) that might give you more Indigenous applicants." Although she does not fault them for not asking, Dr. Miller was aware that the IAC is still a relatively new initiative and the museum does not always want to burden the members by adding extra responsibilities. “We have to find a balance between saying, you shouldn’t do all the work, and we’re going to exclude you from the work because we know we’re overworking you. It seems to again fall into that tricky institutional balance." This quote from Dr. Miller highlights how institutions need to hold space for more dialogue between their Indigenous base and the institution’s more corporate interests.
How Does Dr. Miller View the Museum?
Dr. Miller sees the museum as a place where people can update their knowledge about the past, as their education may be outdated; again, a lack of understanding can come from ignorance. “In a province that is about 20% Indigenous, it's really important to have accurate depictions in the museum.” Designing the museum around Indigenous collaboration is the way the institution can avoid speaking on behalf of a community they have no right to be speaking for. Diversity in voices helps eliminate some of the unconscious biases that museums may have due to their colonial roots. “Understand that the Indigenous through line is not culture, where we often emphasize it in museums and classrooms, but is in sovereignty.” Filling these gaps in knowledge and updating existing knowledge is the way museums can help fight some of the stereotypes that were perpetuated in the past, including Indigenous suffering.[12] Dr. Miller stated that the point of collaboration was to try to humanize other cultures, which is at the very core of a desire-centred research approach. “I mean museums, and this goes back to their origins in a very orientalist moment, they tend to exoticize, and so how can we instead humanize?” Knowing how the museum is trying to humanize Indigenous peoples keeps them relevant and allows for other institutions to look at the Manitoba Museum as a guide for updating their own policies and exhibitions.
Funding was a prominent theme of this interview, as it was with Dr. Fay's. Dr. Miller went on to point out some critiques of NAGPRA in the United States in regard to how it is dependent on government funding. NAGPRA can be an incredible piece of legislation, but it only applies to institutions that receive government funding, which limits its practical uses (“Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (U.S. National Park Service),” n.d.). She gave examples of museums and tourist traps for road trippers that sold pieces of ancestors or would charge to view burial mounds that had been opened. Places that get away with these kinds of stunts do so because they are private and do not receive funding. "If you are a private institution that takes no public money, you can still do whatever the fuck you want.” These loopholes lead to a lack of accountability on behalf of the institution. Things like UNDRIP and the TRC are not legally binding, but they are set as precedents for institutions with a hope that they will follow the recommendations; this means that institutions are held by social responsibility to comply. This demonstrates how a privately funded museum can avoid accountability, making it more important for the institution to include Indigenous voices in its processes to show that they are making an effort to centre Indigenous desires in their spaces.
Chapter Endnotes
[1] Need to consider visitors in order to meet financial goals and needs to keep the museum running. This means that academic wants are often put aside in order to think about what will draw in visitors.
[2] Denesuline (Sayisi First Nation) were relocated from Little Duck Lake to Camp 10 near Churchill, Manitoba by the Canadian Government in the 1950s. The camp did not provide adequate living conditions, with many community members dying because of the relocation (Sayisi Dene First Nation Relocation Settlement Trust, n.d.).
[3] Rematriation is often used for the return of the ancestors, as chosen by the communities, as they are being returned to the earth, which is a more maternal entity.
[4] This is an example of desire centred research that discusses pain. The museum is allowing community to choose what and how it is being said.
[5] The politics behind some of the stories may put the museum at a disadvantage for funding or promotional opportunities.
[6] A scaffolding approach means instead of redoing the gallery all at once, they will redo the space section by section over a longer period of time.
[7] Non-band status
[8] Updated during the capital renewal project
[9] Returning the ancestors would mend many relationships with communities, but the struggle is the lack of information. In the past, museums were damage centred and cared more about having things than information, this makes the more desire focused work now being done difficult.
[10] “Difficulty” in this context is referring to the fact that the IAC is now a part of the Manitoba Museum’s structure making it harder to go about museum tasks without involving Indigenous input.
[11] While there are no talks of eliminating the IAC, Dr. Miller feels that the difficulty in ridding of the IAC shows a structural change and consideration on behalf of the museum.
[12] All updates and desire centred work comes from an understanding that there has been damage done in the past.
CHAPTER 5: A Damaging Experience at The Manitoba Museum
Amanda McLeod
McLeod is an Indigenous woman and contract worker with an extensive background in museum practice. She discussed her experiences at the MM over a four-year period (2016-2020). The interview lasted almost three hours during which Amanda felt comfortable airing her frustrations with the Museum. Describing her overall experience at the MM from 2016-2020 as an “abusive relationship” her experiences were a stark contrast to those I heard from people currently employed at the museum.
What Was Her Experience at the Manitoba Museum?
McLeod felt there was a lot more resistance to change than others let on. In many ways, McLeod forced the museum to move toward a desire centred approach. During her time there she noticed outdated terminology for Indigenous peoples and nations throughout the panels in the museum. “I came in there and I was like you have Indian everywhere. You’ve got “half-breed” on this wall like 5 times.” In response, the museum pushed back telling her that it was not a concern as the galleries were slated for renewal soon enough. This renewal did not happen for some years. Luckily, a member of the public came in and took pictures of the aforementioned panels and posted them online; this sparked the museum to have McLeod alter the signage. The museum put it higher on the priority list after a member of the public came in, rather than listening to their employee beforehand.
“When I went through, I found 96 (instances of improper terminology). And I found one in the Arctic Gallery, where you guys already went through. All you did was put a sticker over top Eskimo and put a sticker that says Inuit over top of it, even though the gallery itself like the tone and ideas being said are problematic as well.”
As a cost-saving measure, the museum did not want to redo all the panels and asked Amanda if they could just continue to put stickers over top: she said no. The museum did not act on Amanda’s advice to make signs commenting on the use of outdated terminology – something that she felt would have been a temporary and cost-effective fix until the panels were properly overhauled. The museum stated that they did not want to put up signs because it would draw attention to the fact that the museum was using problematic terminology to begin with.
McLeod’s experiences at the museum led her to seeing the changes that were later implemented as largely performative and not signs of a meaningful engagement with the underlying issues. “Generally, we’re talking about change, like meaningful change, not performative change. I feel like there’s also that element at anthro(pology) museums, a lot of institutions are performative.” This led into a discussion about how museums are using reconciliation to receive funding from larger government bodies, including the Canadian government. “Reconciliationhas been appropriated by institutions to what they think it is, versus what we as a community expect it to be and what kind of ethical fractures have occurred…” Money plays a significant role in museums, and museums will try to take advantage of any funding they can get. Communities have hopes and expectations of the museum and what they plan to do when they say they are going to address an issue, but museums do not always consider community expectations in their plans.
After the TRC released their report about Residential Schools, the government created new funding opportunities to support cultural institutions in implementing the report’s Calls to Action. Many institutions adopted new policies to apply for that funding. “In 2022, when that budget ran out, when the 5-year plan ended, you had a lot of pullbacks on these institutions who disbanded their advisory committees, who were pulling back a bunch of projects.” She later states: “Reconciliation shouldn’t be tied to monetary grants or anything like that.” The Manitoba Museum took advantage of this funding to redo many of their gallery spaces such as the Bringing Our Stories Forwardproject. Again, McLeod’s experiences did not leave her feeling positive about the intentions of the Manitoba Museum and their involvement with Indigenous peoples.
McLeod felt that the labour expectations of Indigenous staff were not manageable and made the job more difficult than it had to be. “It’s the hard part of also being an Indigenous professional. I’m working within institutions without structural change.” Incorporating Indigenous collaboration is only valuable if the people themselves are valued, which they are not in a colonial structure. She felt that she was expected to over justify her actions when involving community in her work. “If I didn’t have to waste all this time and extra labour justifying what I was doing, having to explain things to the higher ups. I then had to re-explain what reciprocal relationships are. And then had to re-explain months later, what reciprocal relationships are.” There was the added layer of being an Indigenous person in the museum world which she described as creating a complex relationship between the museum and community. “For Indigenous professionals working with museums, their dynamics (responsibilities) create dual accountability. Indigenous staff may be held accountable by their communities for institutional decisions.” This quote exemplifies how the insider vs outsider perspective within museums creates complicated relations for Indigenous staff that may be put in uncomfortable situations within their lives outside of work.
For McLeod, museums continue to exert an extractive force on the peoples it represents in its gallery spaces. McLeod argued that museums need to do more than just tell community when they are doing something, as this does not include community at every stage of the process.[1] Writing in an upcoming paper of hers:
“If there is one principle that must guide contemporary practice, it is there’s nothing concerning Indigenous communities or collections that should be announced, exhibited, published or decided upon without Indigenous involvement. Any action outside of this regardless of intent continues to perpetuate colonial harms and predatory practices. Nothing about us without us”
McLeod also discussed how she does not care about the intentions of museum professionals, but rather the actions that they take. Community needs to be involved in all steps of the process, not just the ones that curatorial staff feel like they should be incorporated in. The museum should not be making decisions on behalf of the community but rather be a platform for community decisions as a whole.
McLeod expressed her particular disillusionment with the museum and its governance structure when the then chair of the IAC, a non-Indigenous employee, informed her that she needed their permission to talk to the IAC about something, even though she is a community member herself. “The advisory circle, you can’t just talk to them directly, you have to talk to me the chair.” Her response to the situation was simple, “Yeah no, I’m not listening to that.” For Amanda this episode reaffirmed the museum’s ties to an ongoing form of colonial bureaucratic patronage; it was definitely not something that would encourage Indigenous professionals (and those in training) to get involved with the Manitoba Museum.
What was Her Experience with Curating at the Manitoba Museum?
McLeod discussed how the IAC was brought on to the gallery renewals in 2018. This was too late in the planning process, something she pointed out earlier in the renewal process but was ignored. This ended up costing the museum more money. “So, this is another example of stuff costing more, because things weren’t being listened to or weren’t taken into account early enough.” The museum had to redo signs and display plans because they did not listenor ask their Indigenous peers earlier in the process. Signage became a major point of contention, as it was agreed that there would be Indigenous language panelling for the renewed exhibitions.
Another contentious issue over signage was over the understanding that signs would be in English, French, andAnishinaabeg moen. When the signs were installed, McLeod was dismayed to see only English and French.
“I happened to notice that the signs went up and were only English and French, so they were like, oh but we already paid for them. I said too bad, you gotta (fix them). I saw the advisory circle, and they were like, you guys said you were going to do this. So that costs more money again.”
The pushback McLeod received when she pointed it out bothered her, as it was frustrating not being listened to. Unfortunately, she had to get the IAC involved in the problem. Part of her frustrations came from the museum not understanding or considering the differences between working with community members in the cultural department, versus the people working with specimens in the natural sciences department. Everyone was put on the same exhibition planning timeline, but that did not account for those who need people outside of the museum to approve of the work.[2]Working with her community was natural to her, but the museum did not understand that relationships are something that take time. If you are to go to a community, take knowledge, and then leave, you are being extractive and continuing colonial harms.
The TRC and UNDRIP
When asked about how the Manitoba Museum is incorporating the TRC’s Calls to Action and recommendations for implementing equitable relations between institutions and Indigenous peoples in UNDRIP, McLeod did not feel particularly hopeful or positive. This again goes back to the ways that she felt the museum did not truly value her labour or knowledge or that of other Indigenous community members during the renewals. Overall, there was little consideration for the Indigenous control of their own history. McLeod felt that reconciliation and decolonization were not taken seriously enough, leaving the museum’s efforts to appear performative. I asked her if she felt that any of the articles in UNDRIP or the TRC’s Calls to Action had been particularly taken up by the museum, she responded “I think they like to pretend they are.” She then elaborated on this in a more community focused way, comparing what is expected versus what is being done. “What we expect as a community, and what we request as a community is completely different than what the institution decides they are good at.” Museums still have a disconnect between institution and community that keeps them from changing in ways that the community considers appropriate. The museum is good at saying they are trying but never addressing that effort in a meaningful way either through their policies or curatorial practices.
During McLeod’s time at the museum, she was tasked with curating the exhibition on Indian Residential Schools. Dr. Matthews gave her more space and time for this project, as it was heavily community involved, as well as emotionally and spiritually taxing. When deciding how to go about the project, McLeod stated: “I was just doing it, developing the content and the exhibits on what made the most sense to me and that was working with my community.” Working directly with the community meant that she would be able to allow for Indigenous peoples to tell their own story, decentering the museum’s voice and using a more desire-centred approach.[3] “Having the attitude that museums have told our stories for us for generations, so what we’re doing now is we’re providing a platform. The museum isn’t the one telling you stories. The community is deciding how these stories are going to be told.” She decided that digital videos for the exhibition would be the best approach, as it allowed for a more personal and less damage-centred form of storytelling.
McLeod explained that the museum did not interfere as much as she had initially expected in developing the exhibition. She attributes this more hands-off approach to the delicate and political context of the historical impact of Residential Schools; this allowed her more freedom. This does not mean the museum “higher ups” did not interfere at all. For example, they got involved with the terminology. “Some survivors object to being called survivors. So, it’s like you have so many things that you’re navigating in terms of who’s okay with how things are being said.” Taking a community validation approach to the exhibition meant that every time the museum got involved, she had to take that back to the community to confirm that it was okay. Community validation means that each decision is taken to and approved by the community; Amanda took this approach on all her exhibitions. The fact that not everyone wanted to be called survivors was questioned by the “higher ups.” In response, McLeod said “The museum typically wants uniformity across the board. But it was like, okay, so this one person doesn’t want to be called that terminology. Therefore, we will not use that terminology, even though we do in all the other stories.” She also pointed to the ways the videos were originally edited and translated incorrectly, once again, costing the museum more money. McLeod found the videos difficult to finish because of this interference.
When discussing how the museum addressed traumatic stories, McLeod stated that this had been part of the reason she wanted Indigenous peoples to be in charge of authoring the main narrative. This allowed for both the good and the bad to be included, as they chose what to say. The museum also allowed her to take on the role of curator for the exhibition, which was important as she is an Indigenous person. An Indigenous person may be more suited to that role as there are special considerations to take into account when discussing a complex topic such as residential schools. McLeod created the content warning for the videos, which the museum felt were too much and could be made simpler. The content warnings were to inform visitors of the potentially triggering information that they would be learning by engaging with the exhibition, as well as support information provided if the information causes any psychological harms for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. The museum suggested a simple warning with a number for a helpline; McLeod did not consider this acceptable. Eventually, the warning McLeod made was the one the museum used, rather than the more cost effective one they had first proposed.
The exhibition itself is located in a mock school room with desks and screens at each seat for you to watch the videos. This approach is directly made to be more confrontational and put you in a childlike state. The exhibition caused concerns amongst the museum’s superiors about comfort and children seeing the exhibition. McLeod responded that children were in these schools, so school children should be able to learn about the harsh realities of Indigenous childhood experiences. As for the discomfort of visitors she stated, “I’m not accommodating the discomfort of visitors, or the higher ups, that’s not my goal here.” She went on to explain that she knows she was deemed difficult by the staff because of her actions while she was there.
The Winnipeg Gallery at The Manitoba Museum
The Winnipeg Gallery in the MM showcases the city in different themes throughout time, along with a short video of the cities’s history from residents. Each exhibition case contains multiple objects that can be looked up on screens to learn more about them. McLeod was a curator for this gallery space and shared some of her experiences of making the exhibitions. I specifically inquired about narratives and object representation for the more complex topics being discussed, which she did not encounter pushback on. The ones that came to mind for her were the kettle and the tikinagan.
McLeod chose the kettle to represent Rooster Town, a Métis community in Winnipeg that was bulldozed and burned down in the early 1960s to make way for suburban development. The town only had one shared water pump. The kettle is symbolic as Rooster Town was well known as a welcoming town where the kettle was always warm for visitors to join for tea. McLeod chose this narrative to highlight “the attitude and the kinships that happened within the community” rather than the tragic dislocation and eventual demise of the community. She received no push back from this from higher ups or her fellow curator she was working with.
Another object McLeod chose to represent the 60s and Millennium Scoop was the tikinagan. A tikinagan is an Indigenous cradleboard used to carry a baby on your back, they are often handmade and decorated with much care. The 60s Scoop happened in the 1960s where Indigenous children were removed from their communities and placed into the foster system to be adopted by non-Indigenous families. The Millennium scoop is the ongoing crisis where Indigenous children are overrepresented in the foster system, continuing the legacy of the 60s scoop. She justified her choice for this object as something that is “Kind of like a vehicle or a way to talk about stuff or representative of talking about stuff, instead of being direct links to things.” Her reasoning was to make a painful story represented by a beautiful object but still carries the insinuation of children and parents being involved. Once again, McLeod received no pushback for this choice.
There were two instances where McLeod did receive pushback from the museum, those were the ‘Winnipeg got Water’ shirt, and the short film she put together for the gallery. The shirt was chosen for the gallery to represent the ways in which Winnipeg has clean drinking water. Winnipeg sources its water from Shoal Lake 40 First Nation, a reservation that only received clean drinking water in 2021.[4] When the museum questioned why she put something up that may be interpreted as confrontational, McLeod responded with:
“The reality is Winnipeg got fantastic drinking water on the back of engineers, Indigenous communities, and people died for it. When you talk about the freedom road,[5] which was only built-in 2019, and people just not even be able to access doctors because of the way that we sourced our water for Winnipeg. So yeah, I think Winnipeg got water.”
She once again had to remind the museum that her job is not to make sure visitors are comfortable with the difficult knowledge (Blumer 2015) of the past.
In a different case, for the gallery, she created a short film featuring individuals sharing their experiences and thoughts about the city throughout the years. She had to advocate strongly to ensure that the final version reflected her original design. The museum had cut out a lot of footage that had already been approved by the community during the community validation approach she took. McLeod argued that they needed to be in the final cut as the community already approved of the version that was originally agreed upon. In the end, this cost the museum more money because they did not listen to the agreed upon plans of the staff members. The tone of the film in the museum’s edit did not fit the message: “I got a lot of pushbacks on that, like truth and reconciliation, because the film felt very much like a travel Canada ad. I was like no, because we also had to deal with, the person scoring it, it was very triumphant music.” She went on to explain how this was inappropriate as the film dealt with heavy topics, including when McLean’s Magazine named Winnipeg the most racist city in Canada multiple times. This topic was discussed by an interview with the mayor, discussing how he responded to it. Due to the subject matter, the grand music made the film’s tone too uplifting for these topics.
What are her Feelings about the Museum and Hopes for the Future?
During our conversation, McLeod mentioned that there has been a more recent withdrawal from the museum on behalf of the community. She states that there have been rumblings in the community for a while, but the hiring processfor the new curator and director positions became a particular point of contention. Attributing the issues to the fact that the IAC had no role in the hiring process, did not know anything about it until later on, and that the museum stated they wanted Indigenous candidates but gave no incentives or details as to why. The position was posted on regular hiring boards rather than through more Indigenous focused media. McLeod stated that the IAC should have been involved from the very beginning to help with the hiring of an Indigenous candidate and allow for more Indigenous power in the museum structure.
Hopes for the Future of Indigenous Museums
Amanda hopes for a future where Indigenous peoples are in charge of their own material culture and the institutions that steward the objects. McLeod shared some of her work she has done with Southern Chief’s Organization (SCO) on their plans to develop a museum like experience in their redevelopment project of the old HBC building in Winnipeg. She shared with them that their best option would be to build an off-site storage facility, as retrofitting it into a historic building is more costly. This plan was cut due to costs in general.[6] She still has hope that this could happen in the future with other Indigenous led development plans in the province. Having their own facility would mean that the community could oversee their own cultural material histories and would not have to go through museums to loan objects. It would also ensure that the community knows where their cultural histories are and are being cared for appropriately. Access to materials would be made more permanent if the community has control of their futures.
McLeod emphasized how having a facility run by community would avoid a situation like that of the Parks Canada collection. Parks Canada recently built a new facility in Gatineau (Quebec) that consolidated all their collections under one roof. While this may seem like a great idea, it removed objects from their homes and took them away from their cultural contexts. There were objects in those collections that people only donated on the basis that they would be accessible to the community they belong to, but because of the move people now need to travel to visit their belongings. “We had stuff verbally which said, assured, that it would stay in Manitoba because its relevance to Manitoba. Now everything is being moved to a central location, and it was already hard enough for people to get to Winnipeg to see stuff.” McLeod points out that Park’s Canada did not respect oral promises made to community members who were already hesitant to donate these objects. This further shows how little colonial institutions understand the materiality of Indigenous objects (inclusive of kinship and community relations), and the expectations of the community.
Chapter Endnotes
[1] Accountability and responsibility are key to desire centred work.
[2] Desire centred work is slower because you need community involved during every step of the process.
[3] Important to acknowledge the the museum allowed an Indigenous person to lead this exhibition. This is a large step in the right direction, as it allows for Indigenous peoples to have control over an important aspect of their history as outlined in the TRC and UNDRIP.
[4] In contrast, the city of Winnipeg has been sourcing clean water from Shoal Lake since 1918.
[5] Freedom road is a stretch of gravel road connecting Shoal Lake 40 First Nation to the Trans-Canada Highway. This enabled people from the community to have faster access to healthcare and of reservation necessities.
[6] They will still have a museum, but all materials will be loaned or donated. This means there will be no SCO storage facilities.
CHAPTER 6: A Desire-Based Approach in The Manitoba Museum
As a former employee of the MM, I have much love and appreciation for the institution but can also acknowledge its issues. This research has shown that the MM is moving towards a desire-based approach by responding to damaging practices undertaken in the past. Desire centred research is based in hope and inclusion, where the institution takes accountability for their past actions by acknowledging Indigenous Peoples’ contributions and reacting to modern demands of community. In contrast, damage centred research ignores Indigenous voices in order to claim authority over history and its narratives, extensibly placing Indigenous Peoples in the past as non-modern beings. My main concern was to what extent - if at all now - museums continue to reproduce an image of Indigenous peoples as indelibly traumatized and broken through their exhibitions and policies. In relation to this question, I had several sub-questions. How is the Manitoba Museum changing the way it approaches and works with Indigenous partners and how well is it using collaborative methods in the process? Further, I wanted to know how Indigenous peoples are involved in the renewal of the museum exhibits and spaces, and how seriously UNDRIP and the TRC’s Calls to Action are being taken. How is the museum addressing sensationalized trauma in their spaces, and what is the purpose of the museum in the decolonizing world? These questions all come together to gauge how the museum is trying to better align itself with the modern government and community aims. First, I will present my analysis of the results, before moving onto covering my findings for each question, and wrapping up with the renewal of the Arctic-Subarctic gallery as a way to show the current state of the MM.
Code Analysis of Interviews
While coding the interviews and comparing results, there were four main themes that emerged through a thematic analysis. While interviews discussing current and future affairs at the MM were quite positive, McLeod’s experiences from 2016-2020 were less so. Dr. Fay noted that she has noticed the most significant changes in recent years, suggesting that McLeod's experience might be somewhat influenced by the time frame of her employment.
The most common code was ‘collaboration,’ described as anytime collaborative design, practices, or experiences were discussed; this code was used a total of 40 times. The second most common code was ‘updates,’ described as any time in the interview where participants talked about the last renewal project, current renewal projects, and recent or future policy changes; I identified this code 32 times. ‘Updates’ paired with ‘Shared authority’ which was used 22 times, shows an overall power shift in the way the museum is changing. Two with the same code counts were ‘clashing’ and ‘frustration’ which appear when there were still issues that participants did not feel the museum addressed or handled properly. These codes show that there are still major issues that the museum can work towards mending but are on the right track. Finally, the second most used code was to identify financial struggles within the museum. The code ‘finances’ was applied anytime during the interviews in which a participant mentioned how the museum is lacking funds, fundraising, or ways in which the museum can actively fund themselves. This code was applied 23 times.
This information led me to grouping four overarching themes: power shifts, collaboration, frustrations, and finances. These codes shed light on both the pros and cons of the museum’s current transition away from a damage-centered focus on Indigenous peoples to a desire-oriented practice in partnership with Indigenous communities where the museum acts as platform rather than creators. The MM is a not-for-profit organization, so finances are tight. Unstable financial situations can lead to clashing between the museum and its collaborators creating frustrations on one hand, but opportunities to shift the power to Indigenous communities on the other.
How is Power Shifting at The Manitoba Museum?
Indigenous voices and opinions are beginning to be taken more seriously in the museum, as desire-based approaches become more customary practice. This practice de-centres the institution as the authoritative historical voice. Most importantly this means that Indigenous people have greater input in, and influence over, how their histories are communicated to the public. This opens up new opportunities for partners to use the museum as a platform for their own projects.
In order to include Indigenous voices in new museum projects, Indigenous peoples need to be in the space and compensated appropriately for their knowledge and time. It is not the role of Indigenous peoples to engage with a colonial institution if their work is not being considered meaningful. Creating an assemblage of community contacts is vital to the museum’s relevance, but finding community members needs to be done respectfully with relationships as priority. This means valuing people and their time, something which McLeod felt the museum did not do. She stated that the only person who always stood up for her was her boss, Dr. Matthews. “It was really only Maureen (Matthews).” The institution should be there to support staff when they are working on challenging projects, it should not only be one person.[1]
While Dr. Fay said that the museum was still trying to figure out where and how they could do better, McLeod felt that the museum was not trying to better itself during her employment. Looking back at McLeod’s time employed at the Manitoba Museum, she felt that Indigenous labour and voices were not valued. The museum pushed back against a lot of what she told them to do when they asked. McLeod had to justify her use of community integration into the processes of creating exhibitions, while the museum should have understood the importance of community engagement and having people share their experiences and expertise on their own history when they claim to be listening to those people.
The museum as a contact zone (Pratt 1997) for difficult knowledge (Blumer 2015) is a hallmark of the museum. All the Manitoba Museum can do is keep trying to better themselves by including Indigenous voices and structural changes in their future. My participants felt that the museum could transform itself to act as a platform for Indigenous stories. Dr. Fay stated that Indigenizing the museum was an aspirational goal which can only be achieved by the museum giving space for different voices to be heard.[2]
How is The Manitoba Museum Including Collaboration in the Structure of the Museum?
The main form of collaboration at the Manitoba Museum is the IAC. The IAC draws Indigenous professionals and elders who want to help the museum by sharing their knowledge and resources, further allowing for more collaboration on a regular basis. The IAC acts as an assemblage (Blumer 2015) that can source others outside of the museum’s circle actively fighting the imbalance of representation in the institution. This practice lets the museum step back and offers control to those who are not a part of the institution. Shared authority (Flinn and Sexton, 2019) is once again key to this process. When collaboration is introduced, it leads to more authority being given to those outside the museum. A variety of voices, beyond just white academics, enrich the narratives and experiences presented, as illustrated by the Winnipeg Gallery at the MM. The Winnipeg Gallery includes different perspectives of what Winnipeg is to them, and how the history is affected by all peoples living in the city. Because of this process, the role of the curator has become one of facilitator. Their job allows for people to tell them about their stories without interference on how or what people are telling them. Facilitation changes the role of curator to become more focused on community relations and outreach. This gives a lot of authority to those that normally have none. Giving authority to marginalized voices is key to desire-based approaches of curation and research design[3] (Tuck 2009). A facilitator role takes some of the pressure off communities to advocate for their histories to be shown to the public, as it invites Indigenous peoples to share their stories on their own terms. The museum becomes more approachable when they ask for community to take part rather than expecting community to come to them. Facilitation focuses on having community in charge of design and narrative decisions, and the museum staff and funds are used to make those decisions a reality.
In the Harris Report (2021), one issue that Indigenous and racialized staff reported was being asked for advice on topics due to their identity only to be ignored in the end (Harris 2021, 16). Another issue was concerning labour, similar to McLeod’s testimony, Indigenous and racialized members of staff felt that they were given extra work due to their identity, which was isolating and put pressure on them to complete more tasks than white counterparts (Harris 2021, 16). Being ignored or pressured appears to be a structural issue within museums for Indigenous or racialized staff but could possibly be alleviated by changing the governance structure and giving communities more control. Regarding the MM, Dr. Miller felt that Indigenous labour was being valued and suggested that people were being asked to perform more rather than being told to complete impossible tasks.
There are some issues with the IAC, the most obvious being that they do not hold as much power as the museum board. Without Indigenous voices in power, Indigenous desire can be easily overlooked and ignored. Indigenous peoples in power means that they have more than one seat on the museum board and are in control of Indigenous narratives in the galleries. In that way, the IAC seems to be on some level there to check a box for the museum to seem like it is trying. This is something McLeod spoke strongly about. She expressed that as an Indigenous person, her contributions felt undervalued, and it seemed her role was more about ensuring participation occurred, allowing them to claim that the communities were on board. Once again, this may be different now, as Dr. Miller never mentioned that she felt that the IAC was not useful or meaningful. Dr. Miller also has a position on the museum board as a more recent addition, allowing for at least one Indigenous representative on a more powerful committee. When I asked Dr. Miller about how she felt about the labour situation, she said that she did not feel like they put too much on her, but rather that she was okay with extra work as long as they asked and people agreed to it first. This is the complete opposite of how McLeod felt. The museum sometimes forgot the additional labour that went into handling more sensitive or complex topics and how that may impact an Indigenous person working on the project.[4] There needs to be a middle ground where Indigenous peoples have consented to the labour, and where the museum does not pressure people to meet an unrealistic timeline. In the CMA’s Winter 2026 Issue of their publication, they found that there was extra work being put on Indigenous employees in which they were not being recognized for their contributions (“CMA | Canadian Museums Association,” 2026). Being recognized and included in discussions stems from issues with governance structures that are by Indigenous staff as an obstacle needing to be overcome rather than as an ally (“CMA | Canadian Museums Association,” 2026). This process can work through open communication, but there are still power hierarchies to consider. One way to help balance power is to have Indigenous board members also be in positions within the museum; they would be able to advocate for themselves and others while knowing some of the complications that go into working with community and avoid possible racial biases that are often engrained in power structures.
Behind the Scenes Opportunities
There was more collaboration behind the scenes than I expected, Dr. Fay discussed the many different opportunities she had both with different organizations and people. A substantial change she noticed was how many people that asked to collaborate were community members doing their own research over academics. This shows an increase in community interest in the museum.[5] The museum benefits from this because they can use these opportunities to learn more about the objects in their collections. Taking this back to the more material aspect of the museum, Indigenous collaboration is especially important behind the scenes because they can help take care of the sensitive materials in collections. Learning from community members should be a primary focus of these encounters, as it benefits the museum and their goals set in the Mayor’s Indigenous Accords (2024). The museum’s goals in the accords are a direct response to the TRC’s role in creating the Indigenous Accords that inspired the program. The museum does not necessarily advertise that community members can schedule a more personal visit. Having more transparent opportunities such as the ‘Collections for Community’ events means that more people may hear about these events and take advantage of them.
Indigenous Involvement in Change
The IAC was notably brought onto the renewal project far too late. All participants noted this fact in some way or another.[6] Dr. Fay found it to be one of the largest mistakes the museum made last time around, as it meant that a lot of already made decisions were not what the community wanted; therefore, did not consider Indigenous desires regarding their history (Tuck 2009). A desire centred approach would have included community involvement throughout the entire process, and prioritized reciprocal relationships. Dr. Miller said that she would have liked to have been informed earlier about the plans, and that the IAC could have been more helpful in the process. McLeod stated that she told the museum to bring the IAC on earlier but was ignored. This was not just a mistake on behalf of those in leadership roles, they simply ignored Amanda and insisted on the museum not bringing the IAC in earlier. The exhibitions of the Prairies, Nonsuch, and Boreal corridor, may have been different with more Indigenous involvement, but the plans were already set before the IAC was informed. The IAC is supposed to be the in-house Indigenous feedback loop for the museum, but the museum leadership did not use it as such. Instead of asking the IAC for advice or suggestions for the updated exhibitions, the museum assumed authority over Indigenous history without consultation. This action shows a performative form of collaboration on behalf of the museum. Ignoring the people who are there to bring more voice into changes being made is an example of foregoing desire.
Indigenous community members continue to clash with the museum at times because they do not hold a significant role of power. Community needs to have as much power in the museum as they see fit, this would allow for control without the possibility of forcing Indigenous peoples to perform more than they are comfortable with doing. The museum still does not have Indigenous peoples in significant roles of authority within the institutional structure, which Dr. Miller is trying to manage. In the Harris Report for the CMHR, many of the employees identified the predominantly white upperclass construction of the museum’s leadership roles led to bias and weakened the structure of the museum’s leadership (Harris 2021, 30).
A big problem with hiring Indigenous candidates in these kinds of settings is that there are educational level requirements. Many Indigenous peoples do not have access to higher education for a multitude of reasons,[7] whichexcludes them from the hiring pool. An educational requirement for a museum position, even if Indigenous preferred, ignores the gap in higher education between minorities and white populations. The TRC calls for equal educational and employment opportunities for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, this could include hiring practices focused on educational requirements (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Call to Action 2015). The museum acting as if the IAC holds significant power does not mean significant change to the overall issues that plague the museum relating to Indigenous involvement. Changing the governance structure of the bureaucratic museum may be the only way for the institution to ever address these issues truly; this means the museum would have to give up some of its institutional authority and hand it over to those that may seem “unqualified” from an academic perspective. In the CMHR’s report, Indigenous or racialized members of staff identified that they felt their skills were questioned more by others compared to their non-Indigenous or non-racialized counterparts (Harris 2021, 16). The same staff members told Harris that the expectations of them were consistently higher than those of other staff, and that it led to uncomfortable working conditions (Harris 2021, 16). While the MM does not have a report that directly tells you its issues, the bias toward Indigenous or racialized peoples as “unqualified” is a problem consistent in the institution.[8]
How are Policy and Projects Changing in Response to Modern Needs?
The MM has stated on their website and in the Mayor’s Indigenous Accords (2024) that one of their strategic pillars is to use the TRC’s Calls to Action and UNDRIP as guidelines for the changes they are making. Using UNDRIP and the TRC as guidelines makes the process of desire centred practices (Tuck 2009) less daunting, as they call for inclusion and engagement to be considered at an institutional level. One of the main goals throughout these documents is that museums need to allow for Indigenous control. The entire museum governance structure must undergo significant transformation if there is any intention for lasting change in alignment with the principles articulated by the TRC and the UNDRIP. This means including a long-lasting relationship of collaboration that cannot be easily discarded, even if the only punishment is negative social repercussions.
The difference between what the museum defines as meaningful change and what the community defines as meaningful change may be completely different.[9] The museum needs to go beyond addressing the TRC and UNDRIP, they need to actually implement some of the actions. While it seems like the MM is going in that direction, McLeod felt that the museum simply acted like they engaged with those documents. If community is not part of the change, then the change is not enough. I recommend the museum have the community help them with this process and make sure community members are informed of what is going on at the museum. The museum needs to take into account how people are feeling, rather than showing they care in a performative fashion. McLeod should not have felt like she had no support when working on the Residential School exhibitions. The community validation process should have been an obvious choice for the museum when handling sensitive topics.
In order for the IAC to even have some power in the first place, Dr. Miller had to present a paper to the board demanding more sway in the museum. She was disenchanted with being a proofreader and made that clear to them. This was made possible because Canada has adopted UNDRIP, something that she pointed out. UNDRIP specifically calls for Indigenous peoples to have control over their material histories and the narratives that accompany it. If the museum were to say no, they would blatantly ignore the claims Indigenous peoples have been making for decades now.
In contrast, the Winnipeg Art Gallery-Qaumajuq (WAG-Qaumajuq) underwent a year long equity survey to identify systems of racism and oppression in their institution; this led to a private report or 75 recommendations in 2022 (WAG, n.d.). Through this report the gallery began to introduce more programs for staff to discuss racism and colonialism within the institution. The Anti-Racism Employee Response Group meets monthly and is open to all staff (WAG, n.d.). The purpose of this group is to focus on educating themselves about racism to then discuss and try to dismantle internal biases (WAG, n.d.). Another program they offer staff is the Anti-Colonial Social Club that meets quarterly to discuss and feast (WAG, n.d.). For non-staff members, WAG-Qaumajuq regularly holds ceremony for the objects in collections and on display; this ensures that objects are receiving any special care they may need (WAG, n.d.). The efforts of the WAG-Qaumajuq show that the institution is responding to the issues identified and taking community knowledge and concerns into consideration in their approach to the future of the gallery.
Repatriation
Repatriation is one of the larger issues that both the TRC report and UNDRIP try to address. This harkens back to Thomas (2016) discussing museum collections being too large and containing things that hold no significance. Employees do not have the time to take care of everything housed in the museum, and there are not enough funds to hire more people to take care of belongings properly. The museum’s new policy that Dr. Fay mentioned should hopefully address this issue. The new policy reaches out to communities first, which shows the active agency an object can have. Adding in the extra step for accessioning Indigenous belongings where the curator reaches out to the community before proper accession takes place removes a lot of the more complicated steps of repatriation such as finding the community and deaccessioning the object from the museum. This extra step could make a dramatic difference overall. This attitude towards objects as being deserving of time and kinship marks a shift in the museum. Museums want to be seen as stewards of the past, where objects can be returned easily, rather than as owners that claim authority over history and belongings. The MM has been vigilant about repatriation in comparison to some other larger institutions.[10] Making repatriation easier is a relatively new development for the museum, and one they are trying to continue to improve as seen through their new policy changes. While some of these changes may seem small, they are large steps taken to make the process of repatriation less emotionally, monetarily, and physically taxing on Indigenous peoples.
The WAG-Qaumajuq statement about repatriation is very brief in comparison to the Manitoba Museum, and CMHR does not have one. WAG-Qaumajuq states that “If an artwork is found to be acquired in an unethical manner by WAG-Qaumajuq or by an individual or institution who collected the works prior to it entering the Gallery’s collection, we will move forward with the necessary steps towards repatriation” (WAG, n.d.). This statement is incredibly broad and does not outline what is considered “unethical” giving room for interpretation on behalf of the museum.
In my interviews, there was a hesitancy to discuss objects as they were seen as something that is between the museum and the community. Objects have become private matters; this shows that the museum is moving away from the idea that objects in collections are public. Objects have become beings deserving of privacy and respect. An example of this is the WAG-Qaumajuq recent “Artworks Renaming Initiative” in which artworks with harmful or racist names are give new ones by an Elder or Knowledge keeper (WAG, n.d.). This initiative was acknowledged by the CMA and given the award for “Outstanding Achievement in the Stewardship of Collections.” Initiatives such as this one show how the attitude towards objects in collections are changing, even for something as basic as the name of the piece.
Actively engaging in respectful repatriation practices means bringing in more care and respect for what is housed in their walls. Both Dr. Miller and Amanda discussed instances where human remains were shown to tourists, showing that even after death people’s bodies are seen as artifact in the museum. This is obviously changing with rematriation/repatriation becoming common practice, and places like sacred storage facilities being a more understood concept of storage. Museums house things they should not have, and ancestors and any other remains are one of them. This work needs to be done slowly to ensure that it is done properly. As Dr. Miller said, a lot of the documentation for ancestors is not thorough or does not say where they got them from. Ancestors are more complicated than objects because of the lack of documentation, and the implications it may have for communities. Providing communities all of the information gathered so they can decide the next steps is the most important thing that an institution can do. To the Manitoba Museum’s credit, when the TRC’s report came out, the first reaction was to start their repatriation project. Directly responding to the communities’ calls and requests is the best the museum can do for the time being, as this is a long process that cannot be done quickly if they want to perform correctly. Making sure ancestors are complete and taken care of until they return home should be top priority, and it seems the museum is aware of this and acting accordingly.[11]
How are Narratives Changing?
Bringing in Joy
The Manitoba Museum is listening and trying to fit joy in when they can, which is an important step in centring desire in practice and policy. To accomplish this, they are allowing communities to choose what stories they want to be told. Because of this process, trauma may be something the community wants to be discussed, but it is always on the terms of the community. This is once again an indication of the museum slowly letting go of their hold on narrative power in the space and giving it to the communities. Giving communities the opportunity to control the narrative is central to desire based approaches (Tuck 2009).
This once again raises the issue of the governance structure, which needs to change in order for Indigenous peoples to be taken seriously in the institutional setting. A colonial institution does not suddenly become decolonized because they have an advisory circle, they need to elevate voices to higher positions in the structure of the museum. In the Harris Report (2021) they state on page 14 in relation to the conclusion that the CMHR had structural racism issues: “Racist systems have been built and reinforced in Canada over the course of centuries.” They continue on page 15 saying: “colonialist structures are affecting processes related to corporate governance, decision making, and expectations.” Structural change is the main way institutions can address racist systems of power. The need for structural change is something both Dr. Miller and McLeod noted. McLeod said on museum structures in general that “it needs to still be having a full structural refresh, basically.” Dr. Miller on the other hand stated that governance structures need to change if long term impact is the goal. Both want a change that means people can choose how they present themselves to the public rather than just having Indigenous interlocutors help in the process. Needing more Indigenous presence in the galleries is a matter that all interviewees could agree on. Dr. Fay wants the museum to act as a platform for Indigenous voices, and have the museum take the backseat more often. Dr. Miller wants more Indigenous voices at the decision-making tables so things can be done more effectively. McLeod used the museum as a platform for Indigenous voices during her time working there through her curatorial opportunities, showing that this process is possible. This alleviates what Harris identifies in their 2021 report, in which they state that racism is still a problem in structures of the museum and everyday interactions in the institution (Harris 2021, 14). McLeod centring Indigenous voices shows that the museum can act as a non-racist system if they allow for flexibility.[12]
McLeod was able to fit joy into some of the exhibitions she curated but faced pushback from the museum at times. When I asked how she managed to keep going she said it was because she was ready to “die on every hill” but learned that sometimes you need to “let them (museum) burn” and figure things out for themselves. This is important to keep in mind when thinking about the objects she chose for display and how she chose to represent stories. When discussing Rooster Town, she chose a kettle to show how strong the community was through kindness and kinship rather than something that could represent the painful end of the community. This is relevant when thinking about fitting joy into these dreadful stories, highlighting that the community was content because of each other and their own actions without colonial interference. This perspective shows the community as something besides broken and needing to be fixed. She then uses that happy thought to make you feel what the colonial forces are taking away from Indigenous peoples.
The “higher ups” even allowed McLeod to have more power in the Residential School exhibition because they knew they had no place in telling her what to do. She still faced the pushback for the ‘survivor’ terminology and the trigger warning, but overall, the museum knew to intervene less throughout this process. They lacked support and tact when it came to telling her she was taking too long and needed to give her space. They did not approach the situation properly and did not understand relation making processes, which they should have from the start. I can only hope that they took that as a learning opportunity and do better going forward.
I think something the MM has to their advantage is the biome approach to galleries. Not having an Indigenous specific gallery allows for them to fit Indigenous peoples into every aspect of the museum, giving more of a variety in narratives. Having Indigenous peoples able to be represented throughout the museum draws attention away from a trauma specific narrative that often flows through Indigenous galleries and instead show the achievements and the things that were disrupted by colonial forces. The Manitoba Museum follows the idea that because the province’s population is 20% Indigenous, the information presented should be a minimum 20% Indigenous in every gallery. Going by this rule means that Indigenous peoples are included in every major event that has happened in Manitoba, not only ones of tragedy, or the distant past. Rooster town was approximately 60 years ago, and the Millennium scoop is an ongoing issue; this places a continuous narrative of Indigenous peoples throughout time in relation to ongoing colonialism.[13]
A Broken Peoples
Is the Manitoba Museum still representing Indigenous peoples as broken? Sometimes. Is the museum still representing Indigenous peoples as part of the past? Sometimes. The instances where Indigenous peoples are shown as broken or in the past are done with community involvement, where they have some control over the narrative. The obvious issue with this statement is that there were plenty of issues during the renewal process where Indigenous peoples did not have as much say as they needed. There is evidence that they are considering these past mistakes as well, as we will see with the current Arctic-Subarctic renewal project. Including Indigenous stories and voices ensures a continuous presence in the galleries. Storytelling is key to any museum experience as it is how we learn in the space, so making sure those stories are what the community wants to tell is important.
The last renewal saw a lot of improvements to storytelling in the museum. This change incorporates storytelling, an Indigenous epistemological practice, into a colonial institution. McLeod tried her best to fit in some positive aspects of everyday life into her exhibitions. There is little joy when discussing residential schools in Canada, but she chose to feature the resilience of the storytellers by having them tell their stories themselves. As an audience member, you have to listen to peoples’ stories and grapple with their suffering but see them today discussing it openly, displaying their strength. The Winnipeg gallery is especially important as after hearing about Rooster Town or the 60s scoop, you can listen to a story from the earlier Mayor of Winnipeg who was a Métis man himself. Highlighting the ways people can be Indigenous and suffer but also fight the stereotypes and negative connotations that come with it shows how the museum is trying to combat the damaging narratives (Tuck 2009). Control over the narrative should be up to community members, if we want to move towards a desire centred approach. Once again, storytelling is central to Indigenous epistemologies, so including them in colonial institutions should be the very easiest way to decolonize the space. People of all ages learn through stories. Narrative changes to include storytelling in the MM can be like the one that Elder Louis Bird tells on the way to the Nonsuch gallery. Centring Indigenous stories is wonderful, but they need to be presented in ways that people engage with. If people are not engaging with storytelling, then they will not learn anything new about what Indigenous peoples have to offer besides trauma stories. Centring joy even in those traumatic stories can be a way that stereotypes are subverted while still complying with what a visitor expects to hear. Minor changes can make a substantial difference in the future.[14]
Another issue that McLeod pointed out was the fact that she had to fight to have the three languages presented to the public rather than just English and French. This should never have happened in the first place. The museums states in their goals that they are complying with the TRC and UNDRIP by including Indigenous language reclamation projects in the space. Including a language that has survived despite the many attempts of eradication shows resilience. The museum is doing a better job now than when McLeod was employed, as most of the displays that include Indigenous narratives include an Indigenous language to accompany it. In comparison, a language initiative was taken at the WAG-Qaumajuq beginning in 2020 to respond to UNDRIP Article 13 and the TRC’s Call number 14i which address language sovereignty (WAG, n.d.). This project was undertaken by the gallery with community involvement. The project brought in Elders, Language Keepers, and Knowledge Keepers to gift Indigenous names to the gallery and its spaces; there are 9 languages represented in this project (WAG, n.d.). The names were then put on plaques and mounted in the space with pronunciation and a photo etching of the person who gave the space its name. This is a stark contrast to the MM that needed to be asked multiple times to include Indigenous language in exhibitions and spaces. The MM could attempt to undertake a similar initiative to include more Indigenous language in their spaces and comply with the TRC and UNDRIP articles. An issue that may arise is funding at the MM, as currently much of their spare funds are going to the Arctic-Subarctic renewal plans.
How Do Financial Burdens Affect Change?
There are concerns regarding collaborative exhibition and design processes, but mostly from a monetary standpoint. Museums are a marketable product but still depend on donors to make sure they can keep their doors open. Money often is used as a measurement to dictate the worth of a museum (Janes 2007, 137). This affects what a museum can afford to focus on in exhibitions to please their donors, and unfortunately violence sells tickets (Phillips 2011, 185). It also impacts how fast an institution can change exhibitions or policies, or how they can staff areas of the museum. When the museum lacks funding, it lacks power to change at the rate some would like. The Museum will do what is most cost effective, even if that goes against what is desirable. This attitude creates tension within the museum, as everything comes down to money when an institution does not have enough to do what needs to be done. The issue with this approach is that it sometimes overlooks Indigenous voices and validation because that costs money.
Museums have other ways of garnering funds, though not always relevant to their goals which can lead to pushback from the public. The Manitoba Museum rents their larger hall for the wrestling shows in the city, something the public has said is inappropriate for a museum to do. Dr. Fay said that it does not violate any of the museum’s guidelines, even if it is an odd choice, and that it makes the museum a fair amount of money which is then reinvested into the museum’s goals.[15] Another event the museum held was different music events in the gallery spaces. There were different musical events scheduled in galleries to fit the theme of the space. There was one event in particular that stood out, and that was an opera in the Nonsuch gallery. This stood out so much because Amelia approved a theme that went against the overall message of the gallery itself, but it was an entirely one-of-a-kind event to be held in a space like this. “They did this pirate opera on the ship. We rented it out, and I think it was a gay pirate opera too.” This was one of the only times Dr. Fay let the Nonsuch be used outside of its fur trading context. While this may seem like an odd choice, it was a first of its kind. One can assume, this brought in a lot of revenue for the museum even if it meant Dr. Fay having to put her conscience aside for a moment.
Missed Opportunity and Bias
Amanda gave an example of a time when the museum did not apply for a community grant as they did not think it was a significant amount of money without even looking into it. This points to a larger issue of the company not believing that an Indigenous community could provide a large amount of money.[16] “There was also this inherent bias that you don't get that much money from the community, and it needs to come from private donors. And needs to come from corporations and needs to come from governments and stuff like that. But there are some very rich communities.” The funding was millions of dollars that the museum lost out on, showing how the museum relies on large corporate funding. It also shows that there are still inherent biases and beliefs in stereotypes within the museum’s structure. Similarly, the Harris Report notes that management was passive of claims of racism or suggestions made by Indigenous or racialized staff within the CMHR, stating that “management does not appear to have sufficient knowledge of foundational concepts about racism.” (Harris 2021, 35). Bias towards Indigenous and racialized peoples appears to be an institutional problem rather than a problem of one museum.
How Does We Are All Treaty People Centre Desire
We Are All Treaty People is a unique exhibition as it centres desire throughout every aspect of its creation and on-going display. This exhibition emphasizes Dr. Maureen Matthews’ prioritization of community and Indigenous knowledge production in her curatorial practice. Each pipe was chosen with community consultation, which is why the sacred objects are permitted to be on display. “The unconditional commitment to consultation is not always easy to achieve in a museum institution” (Matthews, Roulette, and Wilson 2021, 6). As ancestors, the pipes are acting as community ambassadors within the museum space. Each pipe is a living being with knowledge that can be shared to those who interact with them; therefore, they are uncommon teachers of their community (Grant 2017, 62). To ensure the pipes are in ongoing relation with their community, each pipe is regularly taken back to the community to be smoked.
Practices that allow for community involvement as ongoing dialogue, such as being smoked by community, ensures that the pipes are being taken care of properly. The smoking of the pipe allows for the pipe to continue to share its knowledge and communicate with the spirits through the smoke (Howes 2023, 214). For to the pipe's role as communicator, herbs are chosen to address specific issues and terms with non-human actors (Grant 2017, 67-68). Tobacco in particular is a spiritual agent making it an important plant to be included when smoking (Howes 2023, 213). The MM is taking a step forward by allowing for community to be involved, this should be a more common practice.
Pipes are rarely on display due to their sacred designation but could be used as rhetorical tools when practices are created that allow for them to be included in community gatherings. During the treaty making process, pipes were sung, smoked, and danced highlighting their role as diplomatic agents in relationship building processes (Howes 2023, 214-15). Considering how a pipe is an ancestor, desire is centred through the fact that community can engage with pipes as they were intended to be treated, rather than having them constantly locked behind a glass case for an audience. “Permitting and even encouraging hands on engagement with museum artefacts by community members — from children, through artists and Elders, to ceremonial experts — requires the wholehearted surrender of museum authority” (Matthews, Roulette, and Wilson 2021, 7) Experiencing the pipe and its teachings are central to the way this exhibition treats treaties as ongoing agreements needing to be taught to the masses, with pipes as the authoritative voice in communicating treaty lessons.
We Are All Treaty People left a legacy thattreats ongoing consultation as a normal process in exhibition making and display. This exhibition is unique and encourages a more hopeful future of museum practice by creating a consistent and ongoing consultation process between the museum and community. Practices present in We Are All Treaty People go beyond simple consultation, rather they incorporate Indigenous ways of knowing and teaching into the Western museum space. “Through their work, the pipes have created the possibility that the museum will become a thoughtful partner in the type of respectful long-term relationship with First Nations people which the makers of the treaties envisaged” (Matthews, Roulette, and Wilson 2021, 17).
Proposal for Change
Not only did I work at the Manitoba Museum, I also worked at the WAG-Qaumajuq during the time that a lot their initiatives were beginning to see fruition. The WAG-Qaumajuq’s ability to react to the TRC’s Calls to Action and UNDRIP directly are what makes their action plan effective; these are central to their understanding of change. I think the MM needs to better respond to the TRC and UNDRIP in a direct manner similarly to the WAG-Qaumajuq. Everyone in my interviews wanted to see the museum as a platform for Indigenous voices, which can only be done if there is a shift from curation to facilitation.[17] This means putting community at the forefront and letting them decide what is and is not important to tell. Bringing in voices earlier can also be a part of facilitation, as it allows for Indigenous peoples to be a part of the process from the conception of the project until it is finalized. Finally, I propose that in order to avoid situations like the CMHR, the museum needs to have more open communication between different levels of staff. This is important to dismantle the colonial hierarchies that are present in museums that effect hiring and lead to overworking Indigenous or racialized members of staff. The future of the MM should be focused on directly responding to the TRC and UNDRIP through actions, facilitating over curating, bringing in outside voices, and dismantling colonial hierarchies that exist in all institutions.
Chapter Endnotes
[1] This is based on Amanda’s testimony.
[2] This is an example of someone in a leadership role trying to centre desire.
[3] Allowing people to share and giving them credit for their stories, work, and time.
[4] There needs to be consideration into power dynamics, age, and social status as to why they may have felt or been treated differently by the museum leadership.
[5] This can be seen as a result of the museum’s efforts into making the institution more approachable to Indigenous peoples who may not have felt welcomed in the past.
[6] Once again showing that my interlocutors all desire the same changes for the museum. This shows that there are larger issues at play than just what people want. There is a need to consider funding, politics, and social responsibilities when it comes to change in this space.
[7] Access to education, monetary struggles, lower high school graduation rates, stronger roles in community, etc.
[8] Even within the Indigenous community there is division regarding the hiring process at the Manitoba Museum. For example, Dr. Miller felt the hiring process for the curator and director role went well. In contrast, Amanda stated the lack of IAC involvement created tension and distrust in the community.
[9] Museum versus Community wants. The museum finds Indigenous involvement on at some levels to be sufficient. Community wants to be involved at all levels of the institution.
[10] This sets the MM as a different type of institution than some larger ones that have more funding. Relationships with communities may be seen as a larger asset to smaller museums as they need to rely more on a community and those that want to engage with the museum to operate properly.
[11] This is key to mending harms the museum has perpetuated in the past.
[12] She used the museum as a platform in the way that the museum has said they want to do in the future.
[13] “Settler colonialism” theorized and defined by Patrick Wolfe (2006).
[14] Small changes lead to large generational changes like the inclusion of the IAC.
[15] Example of how money is reinvested into the future, something Dr. Fay emphasized throguhout the discussion.
[16] Example of systemic racism as mentioned in the Harris Report (2021).
[17] Since everyone can agree and wants to same things, governance and funding may be the largest issues for the MM.
CHAPTER 7: Conclusion
The MMs is an example of an institution trying to centre desire in the production of their spaces and policies. There are issues with the approaches they have taken in the past that centred damage and are using the feedback they received as lessons for future renewals to ensure a desire centred approach. The museum needs to have better communication with the IAC and make sure they utilize the relationships they have built with the members of the circle. Amanda’s experience at the museum shows that they have treated staff poorly in the past. Based on the interviews with Dr. Fay and Dr. Miller, the museum has learnt from their past mistakes and are progressing towards a more desire centred future.
Having community involved is the main way the MM is trying to address some of these issues, community involvement centres community desire. Change comes from outside the museum by creating meaningful relationships which lead to long-lasting change (Phillips 2011, 95). The MM is trying to use collaboration to fix some of the representation in displays; this becomes clear when discussing the Arctic-Subarctic gallery renewal and the ways that the museum is bringing in community early. The museum aims to act as a platform for communities to tell their stories where community has control of the narrative as called for by the TRC.
The TRC’s Calls to Action and UNDRIP can be incorporated into the museum structure when Indigenous peoples have more control over their own pasts and the materials in the collections. The MM is trying to use both as guidelines for change in the museum. This is a desirable goal if the museum wants to meaningfully respond to what the community has made clear they need to see happen in museums for them to want to be involved in that space.
Implications
The MM was a familiar context to me having grown up in Winnipeg and having worked there. Having connections at the museum meant that my research had a natural starting point for inquiry, as well as easy approval from the museum to use their institution as a case study. Due to the Indigenous voice in the region, it was essential to include community members in this research. Indigenous voices need to be part of Indigenous based research (Tuck 2009). Museums are places where people are confronted with difficult pasts and are forced to grapple with how that impacts the present (Blumer 2015, Pratt 1991). I ended up focusing less on trauma than I expected to, as the museum has included community involvement into displays that deal with more sensitive topics, allowing community to chose how they are represented.
Sensationalized trauma is still present in the Manitoba Museum, but in a different way than expected. Trauma is contextualized in the larger narrative of the exhibition rather than the main point. Joy is also included in canon whenever it is possible to foreground resilience. In the Arctic-Subarctic renewal, the community said that they wanted their relocation story to be included in the gallery. The museum is giving control back to the community to decide how the story is told, and how much the community wants to share. This is a clear example of the MM centring desire-based approaches; the community has more power over their histories and the ways that the museum tells their stories.
Desire and damage are not black and white. The difference in experiences at the MM are a clear example that both damage and desire can be practiced by the same institution. For example, Amanda felt that she was working within the confines of a damage-based system, but simultaneously she was able to take a desire centred approach by involving community in her research and exhibition designs. The institution may be based in a damaging past, but moving towards desire is the proper way forward; this is something the MM is fully aware of and is trying to achieve.
Contributions
This research adds to the existing knowledge on Canadian museums and Indigenous knowledge production in their spaces. The difference with this project is that it focused on a museum in a region that does not get a lot of academic attention. Indigenous peoples are involved in museums in the prairies because of the larger and more vocal population, forcing institutions to address some of their colonial pasts. Seeing how the Manitoba Museum reacts to the newer demands of the community can inspire other institutions to form connections and try to better themselves for the future.
Confirming that museums can include community into the way they are telling stories in the museum shows that some of the existing literature does not include community input enough in their research. Museums can still tell stories of trauma and tragedy, but it needs to be the choice of the community with their desires are at the forefront. Community involvement is the way forward for museums if they want to maintain relevancy in the modern era where decolonization is a major concern. Much of the negatives that academia focuses on when discussing museums leads academics to feel that the institution needs to die. When discussing this attitude with my participants, all felt that it was a problematic idea because of the role museums play in education. They all felt that fixing the museum through community engagement and structural change was the way forward. Addressing the damage of the past is hard but it leads to a more desirable future, one where museums are the platform and Indigenous peoples are the storytellers.
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