This text is part of the special Museums section
Two things immediately strike you when you visit Indigenous voices today: knowledge, trauma, resilience, the new permanent exhibition at the McCord Museum. The first is this feeling of entering a forest, and the second is meeting people who have important things to tell us.
The exhibition, built from the three themes set out in its title, namely knowledge, trauma and resilience, was truly conceived as a meeting by its curator, Elisabeth Kaine, a Huron-Wendat researcher. To design this creation and the visitor’s journey through it, she started with the suggestions of the Aboriginals themselves, by going to collect their testimonies.
“What Elisabeth Kaine really wanted to do was encourage people to meet up,” explains Jonathan Lainey, the museum’s commissioner for indigenous affairs. She asked people from different aboriginal nations how they wanted to be presented, what they wanted the public to know. We have accumulated hundreds of audio and video testimonials. “
“Elizabeth developed the scenario for the exhibition on the premise that to reconcile better, you have to make an effort, move around, reach out to others to meet them and get to know them better. We discover people who tell us about their history, their life, their dreams. These are their words. Audiovisual is an important medium in this regard, because seeing people express themselves, the message is reinforced by the non-verbal, the language, the accent, all these means that the written word could not transmit. “
The scenario and the emotions
It is also from these testimonies that the scenario of the exhibition was developed, and its three stages are designed in such a way as to arouse reflection, but also emotions in the visitor. We enter a green and luminous forest to discover indigenous knowledge through astonishing objects, and then arrive in a dark room that represents trauma.
The contrast is striking, because after marveling at the objects, we understand better, in the second room, the extent of the devastation suffered. At the back of this second room, a large photo of the forest destroyed by fire symbolizes this destruction of cultures and traditional knowledge brought about by colonization.
The first room allows us to discover indigenous knowledge through the themes of displacement, the place of animals in the way of life and the conception of the world and the central place of the child in indigenous societies as well as design and the ingenuity of these traditional objects; the second section explains how colonization and its various policies upset this balance.
“By enjoying the first section, you better realize the drama in the second,” says Jonathan Lainey. This contrast is visually amplified in the scenography. We played with these images to create the desired feeling of being broken, of dispossession. We are in the feeling, and not in the rational. This clearly came from a request from the Aboriginals, who told Elisabeth Kaine that they did not want to be analyzed by researchers who tell them who they are, but rather express it themselves. “
The effect is successful. We then move on to the third step, which represents resilience and which ends the visit on a note of hope.
“We didn’t want to end the show on a negative note, because the second section is tough, we’re talking about extremely difficult things,” says Jonathan Lainey. We didn’t want to portray the Aboriginals as victims of history, so we end by looking to the future.
We present projects of revitalization, reconstruction, reaffirmation, and collaboration. There are collaborations between Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals, and that’s positive. We succeed in appreciating ourselves for who we are and in respecting ourselves. We can do great things together, in different areas. This section therefore shows around fifteen projects of this kind. “
For Jonathan Lainey, exhibitions like this can help change perceptions.
“You have to be lucid and not too utopian, but in a museum exhibition where people want to learn and have an experience, this contribution allows changes. People come out moved. We succeed in bringing a better understanding of Aboriginal cultures, and it is the Aboriginal people who express themselves. Everything is written to “us”. It is not the authoritarian knowledge of an institution which addresses the public, it is not from an academic and scientific source. It is the users of the territory and of these objects who speak to us. “