Museums are Canada\u2019s greatest stewards of public history. But in the past decade, increasingly overbearing cultural policies have rewritten their mandates. Once dedicated to simply telling the truth, they now have an agenda to push.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s subtle, but a lot of museums are open about it nevertheless. The federal Canadian Museum of History\u2019s diversity, equity and inclusion plan states<\/a> that it will \u201callocate resources strategically to bridge gaps\u201d to \u201censure better representation of equity-deserving groups.\u201d Calgary\u2019s Glenbow Museum announced<\/a> its new land acknowledgement in September: \u201cBlackfoot land, your territory.\u201d<\/p>\n The Maritime Museum of the Atlantic believes<\/a> that it is \u201cpart of a shared heritage and must be part of the shared work for change.\u201d Saskatchewan\u2019s Western Development Museum (WDM) has set itself the following goal: \u201cIt\u2019s only when all Saskatchewan people find their histories reflected in the exhibits, programs, and activities of the WDM that we will be closer to living in a place where everyone belongs and histories matter.\u201d<\/p>\n The implication? It\u2019s not enough to tell the story of the province; the Canadian state must be decentred, and one must also tell the stories of Lesotho, Andorra and Saskatchewan\u2019s Zoroastrian community, and every other small constituent group that might have found their way to the province in the last 50 years.<\/p>\n The beauty of history is that it has a way of making people feel like they\u2019re part of a bigger story (even if they don\u2019t share a connection to the subject matter), but that should be a side effect of telling the tale of what happened and not the goal. History was my undergraduate major because it was interesting in its own right \u2014 it exposed me to new cultures without ever needing to travel; and no matter when the period or where the place, there were always interesting figures to relate to.<\/p>\n The ascendant view is that tales from history must mirror society today. It\u2019s not just about truth-telling \u2014 it\u2019s about using their platforms to create feelings of belonging and stoke what DEI directors would call social progress.<\/p>\n This is happening at the prompting of individual museums, whose boards were not immune to being swept up by the social movements of the early 2020s, and at the direction of Ottawa. Most of the country\u2019s museums are provincial, municipal or private endeavours that are not under the authority of the federal government, but many like to follow federal standards if they can, and many also like to receive federal grant money that no doubt is easier to acquire when one is on message.<\/p>\n The feds are currently updating the national museum policy, a process that began in 2022. Consultations took place late that year into 2023, and covered a series of government-chosen themes that included \u201cthe role of heritage institutions in society\u201d; \u201cadvancing reconciliation\u201d and \u201cembracing equity, diversity and inclusion.\u201d Historic institutions were among those asked, as well as the general public and, interestingly, \u201cadvocacy organizations.\u201d<\/p>\n Since I last covered<\/a> that process, summaries of the consultation results have been made public. And, well, those documents reveal exactly what you\u2019d expect: \u201cstakeholders\u201d told<\/a> the government that they\u2019d like DEI to be encouraged in museums though \u201cchanges to funding, policies, governance structure, human resources, collections\/collecting practices, exhibitions, programming.\u201d An anonymous interview participant, whose quote was featured<\/a> by a consulting firm that was hired to conduct some of these consultations, said that \u201cmuseums are absolutely implicit in genocide.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIf you look back on the history of museums in North America and other colonized countries, they are literally a part of the construct of the genocides that are practiced in order to have colonization,\u201d they added.<\/p>\n To what degree that view will be reflected in the final product remains to be seen, but the fact it\u2019s being highlighted in the first place is noteworthy; in the same way, it would be noteworthy for a government consultation for a natural history museum to display the input of a Young Earth theorist in its own final report.<\/p>\n