Carleton professor Ruth Phillips’ new book, Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums, which won the Ottawa Book Award for non-fiction, was written with students in mind.
“Some academics have a wider public audience in mind when they write but when I wrote this book it was more addressed to students.” Phillips said.
Phillips explained that the book is about the changes to Canadian museums in the past 30 years and she regards these changes as being very important because they have been largely progressive.
“Museums have been challenged by aboriginals and also by various minorities who haven’t felt their histories and cultures have been represented in the past, in ways that accord with their own perceptions of who they are or what their experiences have been in Canada,” Phillips said.
“One of the great movements culturally in Canada since the 1980s has been the development of ways that give people voice in public representation.”
“Museums in Canada, I think, have been leaders in this and that is the history I try and tell in the book.”
Phillips’ book is timely because the federal government has announced plans to change the name of the Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Que. to the “Museum of Canadian History.”
Phillips finds this “a little bit troubling, but it doesn’t have to necessarily be an augury of something that goes backwards.”
“The troubling part for me is that the Museum of Civilization always had a mandate to represent aboriginal history and it has broadened its mandate to represent cultural diversity, including exhibitions in the 1990s about Italian-Canadians, Chinese-Canadians, Jewish-Canadians, and did the exhibitions with members of the communities and I would not want to see all that lost, or resources shifted,” she said.
Phillips explained that one of the biggest issues is to rectify challenges with indigenous representation in Canadian museums, through programs of access creation, and, where appropriate, digitization.
“A lot of the collections have been archived and because of the technology at that time period it’s very hard for aboriginals to get access so today one of the things that needs to happen is to have that information in communities and we can do that through digitization projects,” she said.
“Aboriginal people are really in a phase of wanting to recover knowledge of traditions and to protect languages. They need that kind of access.”
Phillips began her research after an experience as a young professor and curator for the indigenous exhibition “The Spirit Sings” at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, Alta.
“A group of Cree in Alberta, who had tried to have a reserve assigned to them for decades, finally decided that, to draw international attention to their sad situation, they needed to call a boycott to the exhibition,” she said.
“I found myself as a curator realizing we had to find ways to connect with modern day representatives of the indigenous communities and to talk with them about the ways in which this heritage needed to work for them in their current lives and current goals,” she said.
“That moment set me on my path toward indigenous research and museology.”
Phillips said the the controversy was “painful and so confusing.”
“I felt the only way to come to some understanding was to try and analyze and write about it,” she said.
