[Late last year,
I had a chance to spend a few days in Montreal, my first extended visit
to the city. Among the many reasons I loved it was the plethora of compelling
spaces and ways through which the city remembers its social, cultural, and
artistic histories. So this week I’ll CanadianStudy a few such spaces, leading
up to a special post on a few Canadian colleagues!]
On the best
exhibit at a unique social and cultural history museum, and its complicated
relationship to the whole.
Founded in 1921 by,
and initially grounded in the extensive materials of, Canadian lawyer,
politician, and collector David Ross McCord, Montreal’s McCord Museum has a unique
mission: to reflect the
city itself, to capture in a museum setting “our history, our people, our
communities.” While that mission could be paralleled to other famous history
museums, from the Smithsonian’s
National Museum of American History to the British Museum in London, the McCord
is much more purposefully and specifically linked to its particular city than
those, seeking as “a museum that mirrors a city” to “celebrate our past and
present life in Montreal.” And yet because the McCord defines its city, in that
same section of the museum’s mission statement, as “a city that mirrors the
world,” it at the same time seeks to incorporate “an openness to the world and
to issues important to Montrealers.” Achieving that balance, between the local
and the global, is a complex but certainly worthwhile goal.
To my mind, the
McCord Museum best achieves such a balance in the permanent exhibition “Wearing
Our Identity. The First Peoples Collection.” Introduced with a map of
Canada that highlights the locations of the First Peoples cultures (past and
present) across the nation, along with a looped video that continually welcomes
visitors in all of their respective languages, and featuring a separate video
inside that details the deeply troubling Indian
Act of 1876, the exhibition certainly seeks to provide a comprehensive
reflection of this vital part of Canadian identity and community. Yet in the powerfully
specific and individual items it presents, pieces of clothing and costume and
material culture collected and narrated with the help of Algonquin artist and guest curator Nadia Myre
and an Aboriginal Advisory Committee, the exhibition makes clear that neither
First Peoples nor identity can be reduced to any overarching image or idea. For
this visitor, at least, the exhibition offered both specific knowledge and an
invitation to enter a much broader conversation, details about dozens of
communities and cultures and an understanding that the histories and stories of
these First Peoples and their world go far beyond the exhibition’s walls.
Just beyond
those walls, of course, is the rest of the McCord Museum. Any individual museum
exhibition has its own distinct identity from the space as a whole, but in this
particular case I found Wearing Our Identity to be (or at least to feel) more
separate from the museum than might be ideal. Part of that is simply location
and the building’s floorplan: the museum’s upper floors included at least a
couple exhibitions each, while putting Wearing Our Identity on the first floor
(quite possibly to prioritize it) isolated it from the rest of the collection. Yet
the separation was also reflected in other exhibitions, such as those on the
second floor: “Montreal—Points
of View,” which “explores 10 different facets of the history of Montreal”
but features at best a minimal (and nearly invisible) First Peoples presence; and
the fun “Mister
Rabbit’s Circus,” which offers children a glimpse into “traditional toys”
but once again includes (to my memory, and as always correct me if you have
other info!) little to no engagement with First Peoples materials. Here in the
United States, even when we remember Native American histories we tend to treat
them as entirely separate from our narratives of “America” more broadly, and
the Montreal and Canadian history reflected at the McCord seems to create the
same split.
Next memory
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Sites of collective memory you’d highlight?
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