Museum Management and Curatorship

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The construction of national identity and the

curation of difficult knowledge at the Canadian
Museum for Human Rights

S. Anderson

To cite this article: S. Anderson (2018) The construction of national identity and the curation
of difficult knowledge at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Museum Management and
Curatorship, 33:4, 320-343, DOI: 10.1080/09647775.2018.1466351

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09647775.2018.1466351

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MUSEUM MANAGEMENT AND CURATORSHIP
2018, VOL. 33, NO. 4, 320–343
https://doi.org/10.1080/09647775.2018.1466351

The construction of national identity and the curation of

difficult knowledge at the Canadian Museum for Human
Rights
S. Anderson
Penn Design, The University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

The curatorial function of the relatively new human rights museum Received 10 November 2017
is to act as an intermediary between past atrocity and present social Accepted 15 April 2018
justice. However, as entrusted agencies of the state, national
KEYWORDS
museums function as authorities on history through selective Museology; national identity;
recollections that strategically define the parameters of their historical consciousness;
nations and citizenry. Through the analysis of two exhibits at the difficult knowledge; sites of
newly inaugurated Canadian Museum for Human Rights, this pedagogy; museum
article explores how museums act as sites of historical education; public history;
consciousness through narratives that convey past, present and critical heritage studies
future visions of nationhood. It illustrates an innovative research
approach that problematizes state visions that exclude or silence
particular individual, or group identities, and offers insights into
the practice and implications of Simon’s notion of a curatorial
pedagogy of difficult knowledge. This article is pertinent not only
to museum studies, but also more generally to the fields of public
history and critical heritage studies.

Introduction
Since their inception, museums have had a dedicated pedagogical imperative (Bennett
1995; Hein 2006; Hooper-Greenhill 1992; Rydell 2006). As state agencies, national
museums have typically been entrusted to construct and communicate a national
vision through the expression of a common historical experience (Anderson 1983, 1996;
Duncan and Wallach 2006; Giebelhausen 2006; Macdonald 2003, 2006). Hence, national
museums, like other sites of pedagogy such as classrooms, textbooks, monuments,
news media, memorials, national historic sites, architectural spaces, arbitrated cityscapes,
and public performances, both preserve and define nations and their collectives through
national narratives (Donald 2009; Ellsworth 2005; Macdonald 2008; Nora 1996). These
national narratives combine history, collective memory, and myth into teleological com-
munications about a nation’s past, present, and future—what Hobsbawm (1990, 6)
termed ‘the nation’s programmatic mythology’. Often, they promote state visions that rep-
resent citizens part of a more expansive ‘imagined community’ of the nation-state (Ander-
son 1996).

CONTACT S. Anderson stephaniebar@shaw.ca The University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA; 5371 Dunbar
Street, Vancouver, BC, Canada
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 MUSEUM MANAGEMENT AND CURATORSHIP 321

Increasingly, however, within the contexts of millennial globalization, transnational citi-

zenship, and decolonization movements, static identities and storylines of the past are
being called into question. In Canada, the recent work of leading scholars, cultural produ-
cers, and artists has troubled and challenged the country’s national narratives (see Ander-
son, 2017; Ashley 2011; Clark 2007; Dion 2007; Donald 2009; Francis 1997; Logan 2014;
Neatby and Hodgins 2012; Schick and St. Denis 2005; Stanley 2006, 2012, 2014; Yu
2007/2008). Adding to this, in June 2015 the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of
Canada (TRC) released its final report specifying the country’s history of cultural genocide
against Indigenous peoples through state-sponsored educational programmes like the
Indian Residential Schooling system (Truth and Reconciliation Report 2015, 1).
Within this milieu, Canada recently (2014) inaugurated its sixth national museum, the
Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Designed by US
architect Antoine Predock, this massive limestone and glass edifice has become a cele-
brated icon of the Winnipeg skyline. From its outset, the CMHR has embodied a global
movement towards memorial or human rights institutions whose primary curatorial func-
tion is to act as intermediaries between the remembered past and the public through exhi-
bitions aimed to communicate a national social consciousness. At the same time, its
mission statement specifies three principal tasks: (1) to preserve and promote Canadian
heritage, (2) to contribute to Canadian collective memory, and (3) to inspire research
and learning (Canadian Museum for Human Rights 2016). Thus, as a government-
funded agency of the state, the CMHR defines Canadian nationhood and citizenry
through the selective histories it tells. However, in a country like Canada, whose society
does not share a common religion, language, or ethnicity, and which is currently confront-
ing moral dilemmas associated with its colonial legacy, such definitions are frequently con-
troversial. Consequently, since its official opening in September 2014, the CMHR has
received much criticism about the stories it chooses to tell and those it does not.
This article draws on a case study of two exhibits at the CMHR and is situated within the
context of these debates. It recognizes that the curatorial function of the human rights
museum is to act as an intermediary between past atrocities and present social justice,
while also acknowledging that as entrusted agencies of the state, national museums func-
tion as authorities on history whose selective spatial and representational narratives stra-
tegically define the parameters of citizenship and nationhood.
Hence, through the analysis of the CMHR exhibits Migrant Farm Workers and Human
Rights and Chinese Canadians and Immigration Policy, this article explores how museums
act as sites of historical consciousness through the construction and communication of
narratives that convey past, present, and future visions of the state. This study not only
illustrates an approach to the identification and analysis of national narratives in
museums and other pedagogical sites, it also offers insights into the practice and impli-
cations of Simon’s notion of difficult knowledge (2011, 2014). The conclusions in this
article are pertinent not only to museum studies, but also more generally to the
growing fields of public history and critical heritage studies.

Museums, national identities, and curating difficult knowledge

Historically, museums have evolved from curiosity cabinets filled with static objects to
showcase state riches and disseminate stories of progress and nationhood to critical
322 S. ANDERSON

spaces for public engagement, where audiences are considered active interpreters of
meaning who decode exhibitions in discriminate ways (Bal 1996, 2006; Dicks 2000; Ells-
worth 2005; Gregory and Witcomb 2007; Macdonald 2003, 2006; Smith 2006). Contem-
porary museum practices have moved from being content-driven to being ideas-driven,
espousing the creation of experiential pedagogical spaces in response to calls for social
accountability for urgent contemporary issues such as human rights, the environment,
and immigration (Busby 2015; Carter 2015, 2016; Simon 2005, 2011; Trofanenko 2016).
The curatorial function of these museums is to act as intermediaries between an unjust
past and a more just present. This trend began with memorial museums such as Yad
Vashem in Jerusalem (1953) and has continued into the present, with several new
human rights museums including the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh,
Cambodia (1980); the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
(1993); the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa (2001); and the Kigali Gen-
ocide Memorial Centre in Rwanda (2004). While the CMHR embodies this global insti-
tutional movement, it also aims to adhere to its mandate of preserving and
promoting Canadian heritage and contributing to Canadian collective memory. How
then, have other Canadian institutions addressed Canadian identities, previously
silenced histories, and calls for social justice?

The Canadian context

Since the 1990s, museums in Canada have sought to include historically racialized or
silenced groups in Canadian society in more socially just exhibitions that address past injus-
tices. However, such attempts have often been critiqued for collapsing minority groups into
representations of an official ‘multicultural’ Canadian national identity in a way that reveals
the cultural blindness of white privilege in the upper echelons of museum curation (Ashley
2011, 2016; Henry, Tator, and Mastis 1998; Mackey 2012; Phillips 2012).
Coupled with this, Canada has an extensive and ongoing history of disrespectful treat-
ment towards Indigenous peoples, and this mistreatment has often been facilitated
through museums. Historically, Canadian museal institutions have used the contributions
and presence of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples in particular ways, frequently adopt-
ing a salvage paradigm in exhibitions that serve to remember a ‘vanishing race’. Museums
have also been key in crafting a visual technology that emphasizes the superiority of Euro-
Western culture over others. Several scholars have pointed out that too often, the domi-
nant narratives communicated in the museums of colonial societies such as Canada are
state-orchestrated storylines of an idealized reconciliation (Busby, Muller, and Woolford
2015; Dion 2009; Logan 2014; Mackey 2012; Phillips 2012). Because this article addresses
how the CMHR acts as a site of historical consciousness by expressing national Canadian
narratives, a more rigorous exploration of how Canadian national identity has and con-
tinues to be expressed in pedagogical sites such as museums is necessary.

Constructions of Canadian national identity

The ways in which Canadian national identity has been constructed and communicated in
Canada’s pedagogical sites is summarized in the Framework of Canadian National Narra-
tives, (Anderson 2017)1 shown in Figure 1.
 MUSEUM MANAGEMENT AND CURATORSHIP 323

Figure 1. A Framework of Canadian National Narratives (Anderson 2017).

The first two dimensions of this framework, Master National Narrative Template 1.0 (NN
1.0) and Master National Narrative Template 2.0 (NN 2.0), correspond to what Wertsch
(2004) has termed ‘schematic narrative templates’—underlying abstract structures
belonging ‘to particular narrative traditions that can be expected to differ from one cul-
tural setting to another … [and] are not readily available to conscious reflection’ (2004,
57). Such templates are often undetected or overlooked, yet they act as ‘very powerful
coauthors when we attempt to tell “what really happened”’ (2008, 142), They are fre-
quently problematic in excluding and silencing citizens considered to be outside the
main cultural project (e.g., Indigenous and ethnocultural minorities). For example,
Wertsch (2004) identifies the two American schematic narrative templates of ‘Manifest
Destiny’ and the ‘Quest for Freedom’ (58). The third dimension of the Framework of
Canadian National Narratives, Counter-National Narratives 3.0 (NN 3.0) is not a narrative
template. Rather, it conveys the competing, omitted, or silenced aspects of Canadian
history through national narratives that trouble the storylines of NN 1.0 and NN 2.0.
Although partially shaped by historiography, and despite the chronological emergence
of each, NN 1.0, NN 2.0, and NN 3.0 are not rigidly isolated from one another. Instead, they
324 S. ANDERSON

are overlapping, malleable, and continually evolving as we move forward in the current
historical moment. For clarity, however, I describe each one briefly below.

Master National Narrative 1.0 (NN 1.0)

Master National Narrative 1.0 communicates a progressive, Euro-Western, colony-to-nation
storyline of Canada. This template, which emerged from the nineteenth and early twenti-
eth centuries in Canada, when history was primarily responsible for communicating
romantic notions about national identities, continues to be imparted today. NN 1.0
adheres to a meta-narrative of history that communicates the struggle and progressive
triumph of early European settlers in taming the Canadian wilderness, while highlighting
Canada’s seamless transition from British colony to ally in the imperial enterprise as an
independent nation (see Berton 1970; Creighton 1959; Lower 1977). Within this perspec-
tive, key protagonists typically include mostly Euro-Western male politicians, settlers, war
heroes, and industrialists. Consequently, NN 1.0 frequently positions ethno-cultural,
Indigenous, Québécois, and French-Canadian minority populations as lesser ‘others’
through omission, marginalization, and racialization (Berger 1986; Clark 2007; Donald
2009; Francis 1997).

Master National Narrative 2.0 (NN 2.0)

Master National Narrative 2.0 represents Canada as a progressive, tolerant, and multicul-
tural mosaic. This template emerged in the mid-twentieth century amidst modernist epis-
temologies of nationality within the field of history, whereby national identities came to be
known as social constructions and invented traditions (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). Also
contributing to NN 2.0’s emergence were the new social movements of the 1960s, in
which previously excluded groups (e.g., women, the working class, homosexuals, Indigen-
ous peoples, and ethno-cultural minorities) received increasing representation and recog-
nition (see Ng 2005; Thobani 2007). Like NN 1.0, its colony-to-nation storyline references
many of the same historical markers and marches forward in a meta-narrative of
success. However, 2.0 does not omit, silence, or racialize the stories of Indigenous and
ethno-cultural minorities; rather, it includes them through a storyline of appropriation,
reconciliation, and redemption. NN 2.0, therefore, offers a compelling storyline of social
cohesion that includes tying present-day Canada to a longer course of events linked to
a trajectory of human rights.

Counter-National Narratives 3.0 (NN 3.0)

Counter-National Narratives 3.0 is not a master national narrative template. Rather, it pre-
sents storylines of competing, forgotten, or silenced aspects of Canada’s past and present
through alternative forms of Canadian identity that contest, rebuke, or intervene against
NN 1.0 and 2.0. NN 3.0 throws into question taken-for-granted notions around the con-
cepts of nationhood and national identity through narratives grounded in land, place,
or global forces. NN 3.0 is rooted in a historiography that sees identities as complex,
multi-layered, and ever-changing. Communications of NN 3.0 are shaped by (a) new
global identities, (b) new historiographies, (c) the postmodernist critique of history, and
(d) decolonization and Indigenous epistemologies and knowledges.
 MUSEUM MANAGEMENT AND CURATORSHIP 325

New global identities. New global societies are, more than ever, characterized by dispa-
rate flows of people, technology, information, ideas, ideologies, and money (Appadurai
1996; Cahoone 1996). In Canada, globalization is evidenced through migration (e.g., immi-
gration and refugees), migratory networks (e.g., international workforces), and other
factors such as economic and cultural integration. As a result, parallel or alternative
national identities are rapidly emerging. Communications of NN 3.0 that capture this emer-
gence typically raise questions about the ‘nation’ by pointing to other diasporic, hybrid, or
transcultural identities and citizens within the country’s borders.

New historiographies. In contrast to NN 2.0, which uses historiography to weave less-pala-

table aspects of Canada’s past into narratives of progressive redemption or reconciliation,
expressions of NN 3.0 use new historiographies to throw into question innate, taken-for-
granted notions around the concepts of national identity and nationhood (Anderson 1996;
Billig 1995; Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Smith 1991). Influenced by new his-
toriographies, NN 3.0 often uses historical evidence and oral histories (Llewellyn, Freund,
and Reilly 2015) to contradict or disrupt the progressive storylines of NN 1.0 and NN 2.0,
frequently demonstrating how national pasts are linked to current-day inequities for
women, ethno-cultural minorities, and Indigenous peoples (see Carstairs and Janovicek
2013; Stanley 2014; Yu 2007/2008).

The postmodernist critique of history. Through the lens of postmodernism, national nar-
ratives as interpretations of the past are viewed as mediated and unreliable. The postmo-
dernist critique of history therefore throws into question narrative constructions, notions
of progress, and the impartiality of historians (Parkes 2011). Hence, communications of NN
3.0 as influenced by postmodernism disrupt meta-narratives of national progress and
improvement.

Decolonization and Indigenous epistemologies and knowledges. Certain communi-

cations of NN 3.0 are also sometimes influenced by decolonization or reflect specific Indigen-
ous epistemologies and knowledges. This includes communications about Canadian and
American national and provincial/state borders in terms of the evolutionary view of Indigen-
ous displacement and/or assertions of the self-determination and treaty rights of individual
Indigenous communities in Canada (Marker 2015). Sites of pedagogy such as monuments or
museums that communicate NN 3.0 as influenced by decolonization and Indigenous epis-
temologies and knowledges are often transformed into sites of Indigenous protest.
The framework of Canadian National Narratives (Anderson 2017) has contributed to the
identification and analysis of national narratives in the two CMHR exhibits analysed.
However, because this paper also explores the museum as a site of historical conscious-
ness and offers insights into the practice and ramifications of Simon’s idea of difficult
knowledge, a synopsis follows of how historical consciousness is linked to museums
and the curation of difficult knowledge.

Historical consciousness and museums

The theoretical stance of historical consciousness differentiates between knowing history
and understanding how it is used for various purposes. German hermeneutical
326 S. ANDERSON

philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer defined historical consciousness as ‘the privilege of

modern man to have a full awareness of the historicity of everything present and the rela-
tivity of all opinions’ (1987, 89).
History education theorist Jörn Rüsen (2004), scrutinized how individuals compre-
hend history as positioned within a temporal relationship between the past, present,
and future, arguing that historical consciousness ‘bestows upon actuality a temporal
direction, an orientation that can guide action intentionally by the agency of historical
memory’ (68). Since visitors bring their historical consciousness with them into
museums as a package of both accumulated life experiences and constantly changing
notions of their communal and personal identities (Crane 2006), how then has historical
consciousness been explored with reference to museums?
Roger Simon’s body of work (2000, 2004, 2005, 2014), which further grappled with how
historical consciousness might be linked to injustice, testimony, public memory, and
ethical imperatives, has direct implications for museums. Simon (1995) was concerned
that disciplinary approaches to historical accounts of remembrance, especially of systemic
mass violence, lacked enough ethical imperative to be truly disruptive of current-day
inequities. He conceived and advocated for a form of critical pedagogy he called a ‘peda-
gogy of transactive memory’ to facilitate an encounter in which one’s memories of the past
are juxtaposed with potentially opposing narratives through testimonial accounts or the
recounting of ‘public memories’. According to Simon (2000, 62), a ‘pedagogy of transactive
memory’ allows the possibility that one’s own stories might be shifted by the stories of
others. Simon (2004) contended that it is problematic when testimony is approached
simply for its historiographical value, as static text or historical evidence, and argued
that testimonial accounts could do more. He hoped that bearing witness to recounted tes-
timony would cause individuals to ‘pose questions to ourselves about our questions, inter-
rogating why the information and explanations we seek are important and necessary to us’
(195). According to Simon (2005), ethical forms of remembrance are vital to living together
across difference, reconstructing a public sphere, and ensuring ‘social forms and insti-
tutional structures that will initiate a life-sustaining non-subordinate interdependency’
(25). They teach us how ‘to take the memories of others (memories formed in other
times and spaces) into our lives and so live as though the lives of others mattered’
(2005, 9) and to be attentive to others in creating our collective future. Historical con-
sciousness is thus seen as a practice of ethical remembrance that exceeds contemporary
frames of cognitive reasoning and judgement and has the potential to lead to action
(Simon 2014).

Historical consciousness and Simon’s difficult knowledge

In The Touch of the Past: Remembrance, Learning and Ethics, Simon (2005) further probed
his ‘pedagogy of transactive memory’ through a specific exploration of systemic mass vio-
lence and its ties to ethical public remembrance. The volume’s essays explore how testi-
monies of historic events influence learning about ‘difficult histories’, and the
consequences of passing on difficult memories through differences in time, space, and cul-
tural frameworks (4). Educational theorist Britzman (1998, 2003) first theorized that ‘diffi-
cult knowledge’ is triggered when people encounter interpretive content that reveals
histories of atrocity, violence, racism, genocide, and war that throw into question the
 MUSEUM MANAGEMENT AND CURATORSHIP 327

viewer’s self-identity as an innocent and good person. Simon (2011) further argued that
the relatively new memorial or human rights museums attempt to present difficult knowl-
edge by
confront[ing] visitors with significant challenges to their expectations and interpretive abil-
ities. This may occur when an exhibition offers multiple, conflicting perspectives on historical
events, resulting in narratives whose conclusions remain complex and uncertain. In the face of
such a demand; a specific exhibition may be contested or refused while provoking degrees of
anxiety, anger, and disappointment. (194).

He maintained (2011, 195), that ‘“difficult knowledge” does not reside within particular
artifacts, images and discourses,’ but rather between the affective force of uncertainty pro-
voked by the experience of an exhibition and the sense one might make of this experience
and its relation to one’s understanding of the exhibition’s contents.
Simon (2014) offered three frameworks for a curatorial pedagogy of difficult knowledge
to foster hope, not as a wish for an abstract better future, but as a pedagogically structured
‘affective driven force’ (5) that would ‘inculcate a singular sense of responsibility in and for
the unfinished state of the present and its possible forms of futurity’ (208, 205). The first
framework calls for exhibitions that counter the politics of recognition and closure by
encouraging visitors to examine and reflect critically on their own roles in perpetuating
injustice in society (210). The second aims to mobilize grief and shame about one’s com-
plicity with processes of systemic violence. The third framework emphasizes inheritance as
an active mode of using the educative legacies of testimonies about difficult pasts in
pursuit of social justice.
In the analysis that follows, Simon’s ideas around the curation of difficult knowledge are
further explored in relation to the two exhibits Migrant Farm Workers and Human Rights
and Chinese Canadians and Immigration Policy at the CMHR. However, it is important to
first situate these exhibits in relationship to the museum’s galleries and space as a
whole (Figures 2 and 3).

Situating the two exhibits

Migrant Farm Workers and Human Rights and Chinese Canadians and Immigration Policy are
housed in the largest gallery of the CMHR, the Canadian Journeys Gallery. This 9500-square-
foot space contains (1) 17 exhibit halls, which (like small museums unto themselves) each
showcase a thematic historic Canadian human rights issues; (2) a Share Your Story booth,

Figure 2 and 3. Two views of the Canadian Journeys Gallery (author photographs).
328 S. ANDERSON

where visitors can record their own personal human rights narratives; (3) a glass-enclosed
theatre that plays two films in rotation; (4) a 29-metre screen that relays different digital
stories and an image grid of close to 30 stories; (5) an interactive floor exhibit and youth-
focused games centred on social inclusion; and (6) three interactive digital stations that
highlight and expand upon the stories found throughout the gallery. Canadian Journey’s
circular layout eschews a prescribed walking path through the space, allowing visitors to
choose which exhibits they will and will not engage with, and in what order.
The analysis that follows considers how two of these 17 exhibits, Migrant Farm Workers
and Human Rights and Chinese Canadians and Immigration Policy, construct and commu-
nicate Canadian national identity, act as sites of historical consciousness, and offer insights
into the practice and implications of Simon’s (2011, 2014) ideas of difficult knowledge
(Figure 4).

The exhibit Migrant Farm Workers and Human Rights

A brief history
The exhibit Migrant Farm Workers and Human Rights considers the lives of those classified
by Human Resources and Skills Development Canada as Agricultural Workers, in the Sea-
sonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP).2 SAWP provides labourers to work in Cana-
dian fields, orchards, greenhouses, meat-processing plants, and dairy farms. Although
these workers are meant to be protected by the International Convention on the Protec-
tion of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families (CMW), the Cana-
dian government has yet to ratify the CMW.

The introductory text panel

Migrant Farm Workers and Human Rights’ introductory text panel, ‘Uncertain Harvest’,
offers museumgoers an overview of the exhibit’s featured topic:

Figure 4. The Migrant Farm Workers and Human Rights exhibit (author photograph).
 MUSEUM MANAGEMENT AND CURATORSHIP 329

Every year, Canada brings in thousands of migrant farm workers from places like Asia, the Car-
ibbean and Latin America. Their labour is essential to Canadian agriculture. These temporary
foreign workers are entitled to protection of their human rights. Some are treated well and
have no grievances. But others endure exploitation or unsafe working conditions. They may
fear being sent home if they speak up. Migrant farm workers often face language barriers
and may lack understanding of labour laws. Concerned Canadians are working to make
sure their rights are enforced.

Thus, the copy first situates migrant farm workers as a global diasporic segment of Cana-
dian society and then says that many of these labourers suffer exploitation in present-day
Canada.
Since the human rights violations endured by many migrant workers in Canada are not
widely known, this introductory panel has the potential to reveal knowledge that might
otherwise be absent from, or beyond the historical purview of, museumgoers, thereby dis-
rupting one of Canada’s most pervasive national narrative templates: Canada as a pro-
gressive, tolerant, multicultural mosaic of human rights. In this way, it offers difficult
knowledge by ‘confront[ing] visitors with significant challenges to their expectations
and interpretive abilities … resulting in narratives whose conclusions remain complex
and uncertain’ (Simon 2011, 194). This information in the first panel has the power to
summon resistance to what Reid (2014) describes as histories that we view as ‘not ours’
or ‘not our fault’ (173). It also has the potential to trigger, especially in Canadians, guilt
by association or inheritance and feelings of doubt around questions of identity related
to ideas of self-innocence and self-goodness (Britzman 1998, 2003).
The last statement of the panel, however, potentially nullifies this difficult knowledge.
Moreover, the curatorial decision here to highlight the work of concerned citizens
suggests that by association, Canada is a generous and benevolent nation.
Simon (2014) hoped that when confronted with difficult knowledge, museumgoers
might be provoked to ethical remembrance and to take action on behalf of others.
Failler and Simon (2015) argued that difficult knowledge is more than simply the aware-
ness of ‘terrible facts’: it is an obligation that requires people to figure out what to do
with such knowledge and how to learn from it, especially when it triggers our fears, defen-
siveness, aggression, and feelings of hopelessness, and it threatens to undo our funda-
mental frameworks for making sense of ourselves and the world around us (173).
The final portion of the introductory text panel associates a benevolent Canada with a
socially active citizenry, thus upholding NN 1.0 and 2.0 and offering viewers a roadmap
towards social action and change (Figure 5).

The focal area

The focal area of the exhibit features four cast-iron statues of real people who are migrant
workers in Canada: Ana Maria Hernandez, Flavio Celic, Karl Colquhoun, and Diego Rodri-
guez. Directly behind the statues, leans a black bicycle—a stark reminder of the
workers’ oppression, since few (if any) can afford cars in Canada. The focal area is
backlit by a vibrant green large-scale photograph of migrant workers harvesting cauli-
flower under a bright sun, enveloped by two side-walls made of wooden slats, evocative
of the crates popular for transporting produce. The four cast-iron statues each hold a video
monitor that begins to play when motion sensors detect museumgoers.
330 S. ANDERSON

Figure 5. The focal area of the Migrant Farm Workers and Human Rights exhibit (author photograph).

The testimonies in the videos all highlight the daily human rights violations that
workers endure in Canada, including living conditions that are almost always below Cana-
dian standards, work environments that are often unsafe, and pay structures that are fre-
quently discriminatory3 (Perla 2015). For instance, Anna testifies:
For the two and a half months that I’ve been here, I’ve worked almost every day with few days
off. I understand the importance of fruit production, but there is a time in which working daily
every day from 7AM to 7PM, … Right now, we live in an old house provided by the boss. It is a
small house. We have one room in which all eight women sleep.

However, the potential for new technologies to communicate complex, multi-vocal, less
reductive histories and representations is also evidenced here when testimonies (Anna’s
and Flavio’s) complicate this dominant narrative of injustice with brief statements expres-
sing gratitude towards Canada. For example, Flavio says, ‘Back home, in Mexico, I’m doing
well because of my work here in Canada … I have bought some land and have a little
house.’
Nevertheless, curatorial decisions here have prioritized difficult testimony—the dire
working and living conditions endured by migrant workers living in Canada. Whether
emergent digital technologies offer the potential to create spaces favourable to the devel-
opment of ‘empathic communities’ that can bring visitors into a politically transformative
relationship with others is the subject of much discussion (Muller, Sinclair, and Woolford
2015, 145). Since the human rights violations endured by many migrant workers in
Canada are not widely known, the testimony featured in the focal area may bring new
awareness to viewers of issues that might otherwise be absent from or outside of their his-
torical purview, exposing them to uncertainty about Canada’s reputation as a progressive,
tolerant, innocent nation (NN 2.0). According to Simon (2000), this type of encounter
allows for the possibility that ‘one’s stories might be shifted by the stories of others’
(2000, 62). Simon (2014) also maintains that testimonial accounts cause us to ‘pose
 MUSEUM MANAGEMENT AND CURATORSHIP 331

questions to [our]selves about our questions, interrogating why the information and
explanations we seek are important and necessary to us’ (195). Thus, the testimonial
portion found in the focal area of the exhibit places a moral responsibility on individuals
that demands a response. It speaks to Simon’s (2014) first and second frameworks for a
curatorial pedagogy of difficult knowledge in that it has the potential to (a) encourage visi-
tors to examine and reflect critically on their own roles in perpetuating injustice in society,
and (b) mobilize grief and shame at their own complicity with processes of systemic
violence.

The right side-panel

The right side-panel features four photographs with corresponding text panels that each
give prominence to a different cross-section of Canadian migrant farm workers, making
visible the human rights violations they face.
For example, one features migrant worker Mike Clive crouched over in a dark and dingy
space stacking cabbage, with copy that asserts: ‘Farm work is physically difficult and unu-
sually low paid, but the income helps support families’, wile another shows Paula Murillo
Velasco and her daughter, staring sorrowfully into the camera with text that indicates that
they are holding photos of family members killed when a work van crashed in 2012.
In contrast, the fourth and final photograph features several masked labourers partici-
pating in a demonstration with copy that reads: ‘Migrant workers and their supporters
marched 50 km from Leamington to Windsor, Ontario to demand rights’.
Hence, while the first few photographs serve to communicate information that might
be unknown to museumgoers and has the potential provoke ‘anxiety, anger and disap-
pointment’ (Simon 2011), the last photograph, appears to suggest a better future
through social action. In sum, the right side-panel brings to mind Simon’s (2014) idea
that a curatorial pedagogy of difficult knowledge should foster hope, not as a wish for
some abstract better future, but as a pedagogically structured ‘affective driven force’ (5)
that ‘inculcate[s] a singular sense of responsibility in and for the unfinished state of the
present and its possible forms of futurity’ (208, 205).

The exhibit as a whole: national narratives, historical consciousness, and difficult

knowledge
Considered as a whole, the exhibit predominantly conveys Counter-National Narratives 3.0
(NN 3.0). Specifically, Migrant Farm Workers and Human Rights communicates NN 3.0 as
influenced by new global identities not only by raising questions of the ‘nation’ by
making visible ‘other’ diasporic, hybrid, or transcultural identities (Canadian migrant
farm workers), but by emphasizing the ambiguous legal status of these temporary Cana-
dian residents. The exhibit therefore acts as a site of historical consciousness by raising
questions in the viewer about how the nation and its citizens might address these pro-
blems in the future.
Migrant Farm Workers and Human Rights also recalls Simon’s (2011) assertion that diffi-
cult knowledge resides in the uncertainty an exhibit provokes in a viewer, rather than in
any of its contents. The curatorial decision to present information, images, and testimonies
emphasizing the human rights violations faced by Canadian migrant workers provokes
332 S. ANDERSON

uncertainty around one of the country’s most pervasive meta-narratives, NN 2.0: Canada as
progress-oriented, generous, tolerant, multicultural, and a leader in human rights. The
exhibit therefore speaks to Simon’s (2014) framework for a curatorial pedagogy of difficult
knowledge by encouraging visitors to examine and reflect critically on their own roles in
perpetuating injustice in society, by mobilizing their grief and shame at their own compli-
city with the processes of systemic violence, and by emphasizing inheritance as an active
mode of using the educative legacies of testimonies in pursuit of social justice.

The exhibit Chinese Canadians and Immigration Policy

A brief history
As the title of the exhibit suggests, Chinese Canadians and Immigration Policy considers the
relationship between the lives of Chinese Canadian immigrants and Canada’s immigration
policy. The first large influx of Chinese immigrants came to current-day British Columbia
in 1858 as a response to the discovery of gold, and the second migration arrived in the
1880s to build the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR). In 1884, British Columbia’s provincial gov-
ernment enacted legislation denying Chinese people the right to buy, lease, or claim Crown
lands (Roy 1989), and beginning in 1885, the federal government imposed a discriminatory
head tax on Chinese immigrants entering the country. In 1923, the head tax was replaced by
the Chinese Exclusion Act, which forbade any person of Chinese origin from entering
Canada (Roy 2003). In 1947 all discriminatory legislation against incoming Chinese was
repealed. Since 1981, over one million people have immigrated to Canada from Hong
Kong, China, and Taiwan. Thus, although many Chinese Canadians have family histories in
the country that predate the creation of Canada itself, a larger percentage have only just
arrived from China or elsewhere in the diaspora.4 Recently, and especially in British Colum-
bia, which has seen the highest influx of new Chinese in the last 20 years, there has been
heightened racial scapegoating (Yu 2015).

The introductory text panel

The introductory text panel of Chinese Canadians and Immigration Policy, ‘Overcoming
Exclusion’, offers visitors an overview of the exhibit’s subject matter:
People of Chinese heritage have enriched all of Canada. Yet there was a time when they were
officially unwelcomed as immigrants. Canada relied on Chinese workers to build the national
railway. But when it was completed in 1885, the government introduced a head tax. It was
meant to discourage any more Chinese arrivals. The Chinese were the only group charged this
costly fee to enter Canada. The tax was collected until 1923. Then the government banned
nearly all Chinese immigration until 1947. Chinese Canadians fought for redress of these six
decades of racial discrimination. In 2006, Prime Minister Stephen Harper officially apologized.

The curatorial decision to offer this narrative as a representative scope of Chinese Cana-
dian immigration history is problematic for two reasons. First, the storyline offered to
museumgoers overlooks the fact when the Canadian government offered a formal
apology to Chinese Canadians and $20,000 in compensation to living survivors or their
spouses for the head tax, many Chinese were unhappy with the settlement, feeling that
 MUSEUM MANAGEMENT AND CURATORSHIP 333

redress should extend to later generations including the children and grandchildren of
head tax payers and those who did not see their fathers for 10–15 years (Roy 2007).
Second, it silences the large and ongoing influx of Chinese immigrants to Canada that
began in 1981 and the heightened racial scapegoating and discrimination that has
ensued. Thus, although the panel highlights Canada’s historical racist immigration policies,
and viewers may empathize with the plight of these early Chinese immigrants to Canada,
the copy situates this racism in Canada’s distant past. Putting this together, the introductory
panel seems to tell visitors a progressive narrative of redemption concerning Chinese Cana-
dian immigration. Moreover, the curatorial decision to end the panel on a triumphant note,
featuring Chinese immigrant activism and the federal government’s apology, encourages
museumgoers to believe that they should not be concerned about the issues presented
since they are now behind us and that the nation, and by association the visitor, can be
absolved of any guilt or action. Thus, rather than offering difficult knowledge by ‘confront
[ing] visitors with significant challenges to their expectations and interpretive abilities’
(Simon 2011, 194) that place a moral responsibility on individuals to respond, the introductory
panel serves to inform the ‘uninformed’ visitor about how to think and feel about Chinese
immigration to Canada, presenting the topic as a fait accomplit rather than dynamic, unfin-
ished business. In doing so, it affirms one of the country’s most enduring master national nar-
ratives–Canada as a progressive, tolerant, multicultural nation of human rights (Figure 6).

The focal area

The focal area of the exhibit Chinese Canadians and Immigration Policy has three distinct yet
interrelated features: a bronze sculpture, a display of two head tax certificates located at
waist level, and a photographic series on the wall behind them. The following analysis con-
siders each feature separately, and then together as an entire mise-en-scène (Figures 7–9).

Figure 6. The focal area of the Chinese Canadians and Immigration Policy exhibit (author photograph).
334 S. ANDERSON

Figure 7, 8, and 9. The bronze sculpture in the focal area of the exhibit (author photograph).

The bronze sculpture

The text beneath the sculpture by Chinese artist Wang Guangyi, titled ‘Remembering the
Workers’, indicates that it ‘honour[s] the thousands of labourers from China who helped
build the Canadian Pacific Railway’. The first three figures, communicate the misery, hope-
lessness, and difficult working conditions often endured by Canada’s first Chinese immi-
grants, who helped build the CPR. The first shows an exhausted man wearing a hat and
determinedly pushing a wheelbarrow along a set of tracks. The second depicts a man
holding a crowbar, staring despairingly into the horizon, his left hand sitting on the shoulder
of the third figure, an older, emaciated man sitting hunched over a shovel, gazing downward.
In contrast, fourth figure, is significantly larger than the first three, and features a well-
muscled man holding a pick, his steely gaze set on the horizon. This final figure transform-
ing the narrative of hardship depicted in the first part of the sculpture into one of bravery
and resilience. Thus, the sculpture offers a narrative of hope, linking the hardship faced by
early Chinese men to the creation of Canada (Figures 10 and 11).

The head tax certificates

Also located in the focal area, directly beside the sculpture are the head tax certificates of
Jung Song Lee and Jung Bak Fong. The text beneath them states ‘The Canadian govern-
ment had increased the tax from $50 to $500 in 1903 to further discourage Chinese immi-
gration. … Children were not exempt from paying the head tax’. Although the head tax is a
well-known aspect of Canada’s past, the fact that young children were discriminated
against, may be beyond the visitors’ historical purview and therefore unsettle and poten-
tially provoke difficult knowledge (Figures 12–16).

The photographic series

Perhaps the most prominent feature in the focal area is a brightly lit photographic series
framed in vibrant red and located on the back wall of the exhibit. The series is numbered 1
through 12 and the images can be matched to corresponding text panels on the right
side-wall. As this montage moves from past to present, the photographs change from
black and white to colour, and from portrayals of hardship and racism, to those of inte-
gration, progress, and accomplishment.
 MUSEUM MANAGEMENT AND CURATORSHIP 335

Figures 10 and 11. The head tax certificates of Jung Song Lee and Jung Bak Fong in the focal area of
the Chinese Canadians and Immigration Policy exhibit (author photograph).

The first six photographs emphasize the discriminatory immigration legislation and
racial prejudice Chinese immigrants endured and the toll these policies had on families.
For instance, one photographshows a tailor in 1900, with copy explaining that restrictive
labour laws resulted in many Chinese setting up their own businesses. Photograph 4 por-
trays Vancouver’s Shanghai Alley after the riots, and another depicts the family of Moon
Dong, with text that states ‘Separated for decades, some families were reunited when
Canada relaxed immigration restrictions in the late 1970s’.
In contrast, photos 7–9 appropriate Chinese immigrants’ experiences into the larger
imagined community of the state through the rhetoric of a shared common history of
hockey and wartime sacrifice communicating a more positive narrative of resilience. For
example, photograph 7 shows a Chinese Canadian hockey team c.1917, and photograph
8 depicts Chinese Canadian soldiers in 1945.

Figures 12, 13, 14,15, and 16. Some close-ups of photographs in the series found in the focal area of
the exhibit (author photographs).
336 S. ANDERSON

The last three photographs (10–12), which are more colourful and jubilant than prior
groupings convey the success of certain Chinese Canadians in the last half of the twentieth
century. One depicts Vivienne Poy, the first Canadian Senator of Chinese descent and
another shows Douglas Jung, the first Chinese Canadian Member of Parliament, in 1957.
Hence, while the first six photographs of the series bring into presence Canada’s histori-
cally racist immigration legislation, the final six soften this knowledge by underscoring the
eventual integration, equality, and prosperity of Chinese immigrants in Canadian society
as ‘Chinese Canadians’. This portion of the exhibit therefore repeats a widely available
trope that conveys a specific and entirely fictive narrative about how present-day
Canada came to be. It perfectly encapsulates one of Canada’s most enduring meta-narra-
tives, NN 2.0, that posits Canada as a progressive, tolerant, multicultural mosaic.
The communication of a uniform and compelling group narrative is often viewed as an
essential component in the struggle for minority recognition within a dominant culture,
and that in the case of the curation of Chinese Canadians and Immigration Policy, many
decisions were driven or vetted by Canadian Chinese community organizations and
leaders claiming authority to speak for the whole (Anderson 2017). Nevertheless, communi-
cations of national inclusion accompanied by rhetorical claims of equal citizenship and the
sharing of a common history often come at ‘the loss of other kinds of stories, and the eclipsing
of other kinds of politics’ (Yu 2007/2008, xliii). This point is evidenced in the curatorial decision
to present this photo montage (which is repeated on the right side-wall) as representative of
the sweep of Chinese Canadian immigration history. The series not only overlooks both the
struggle of Chinese Canadians for full democratic and civil rights and omits the voices of
those Chinese Canadians who were unhappy with the terms of the redress settlement, it
also silences the recent and ongoing (since 1981) immigration of Chinese people to
Canada and the heightened racial discrimination that these new Canadians experience.
Thus, instead of challenging the viewers ‘expectations and interpretive abilities’ with
this difficult knowledge (Simon 2011, 194), the photo montage conveys a set narrative
of progress that absolves the viewer of any ethical responsibility in the present by commu-
nicating that racism in Canada is a thing of the long dead past. It is a missed opportunity to
engage with a curatorial pedagogy of difficult knowledge that aims to mobilize grief and
shame at one’s own complicity with processes of systemic violence (Simon 2014).
In sum, the distinct yet interrelated features in the focal area–the bronze sculpture, the
head tax certificates, and the photographic series—mark Chinese Canadians as ‘pre-read
texts’ by appropriating them into the fold of Canadian multiculturalism through the poli-
tics of recognition. Thus, rather than engaging with Simon’s (2014) framework for a cura-
torial pedagogy of difficult knowledge that urges exhibits to counter the politics of
recognition and closure by encouraging visitors to examine and reflect critically on their
own roles in perpetuating injustice in society (210), the focal area communicates to
viewers a set narrative (NN 2.0) that absolves museumgoers of critical reflection and
moral responsibility (Figures 17 and 18).

The left side-wall

The left side-wall is painted bright red and displays a large map of Canada pinpointing
Chinese Canadian settlement across Canada from 1911 to 1923. Beneath this map is a
series of raised, bronze circles that classify these immigrants statistically by gender and
 MUSEUM MANAGEMENT AND CURATORSHIP 337

occupation with copy that notes the determination of Chinese male immigrants in settling
beyond urban Chinatowns despite the race-based head tax.
Beyond highlighting the resolve of Chinese immigrants in the face of discriminatory
government-imposed legislation, however this left side-wall’s large map seemingly visual-
izes the absorption of Chinese immigrants into the larger Canadian landscape a Mari usque
ad Mare – marking Canada as a land of cultural and racial diversity and multicultural tol-
erance. The curatorial decision to devote an entire wall of the exhibit is devoted to Chinese
immigration pre-1923 is problematic given that over one million people have immigrated
to Canada from Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan in the last 30 years. The left side-wall there-
fore serves to communicate Chinese immigration, and the racism that accompanied it, as
part of Canada’s distant past, solidify in the minds of visitors that modern-day Canada is a
tolerant, multicultural mosaic.

The right side-panel

Like the photo montage in the focal area, the right side-panel features photographs with cor-
responding captions. The first depicts immigrants on a railway bridge in 1899, with the text

Figure 17 and 18. The left side-wall of the Chinese Canadians and Immigration Policy exhibit (author
photograph).
338 S. ANDERSON

‘Despite widespread racism, many chose to stay in Canada after helping to build the Canadian
Pacific Railway’, while the last features Vancouverites Thomas Soon, and Charlie Quon, with
the copy ‘They are holding the first head tax redress payments of $20,000 from the Canadian
government’. Thus, as in all other parts of the exhibit, the Museum presents the topic of
Chinese Canadians and immigration policy as a pre-read text. It once again communicates
a link between the bravery and determination of Chinese immigrants who built of the rail-
road—the National Dream—and their own future accomplishments and prosperity. It articu-
lates not only that racism is something only early Chinese Canadians had to endure, but that
Chinese immingration to Cnaada is finished rather than ongoing and dynamic.

The exhibit as a whole: national narratives, historical consciousness, and difficult

knowledge
Considered as a whole, Chinese Canadians and Immigration Policy tells a story of temporal
advancement that begins by tying Chinese immigrants to one of the central storylines of
English-Canadian nationalism—the building of the CPR (Berton 1970). This narrative then
acknowledges Canada’s historically racist immigration legislation, yet repeatedly under-
scores the eventual settlement with Chinese Canadians. Moreover, by continually high-
lighting the Canadian government’s apology and its settlement package, the exhibit
portrays the nation as generous and innocent.
The exhibit’s storyline is part of ongoing nationalizing project that attempts to create an
imagined community (Anderson 1996) by relying upon articulating racialized Canadians
(in this case, Chinese Canadian immigrants) as ‘already-read texts’. The exhibit thereby
communicates Canada’s NN 2.0—the portrayal of Canada as a progressive, generous, tol-
erant, multicultural mosaic of human rights. Hence, the exhibit Chinese Canadians and
Immigration Policy weaves a temporal narrative linking the past, present, and future experi-
ences of Chinese immigrants. The storyline of their progress is used to reshape moral
values over time by using the future success of once discriminated-against Chinese immi-
grants and the government’s apology to redeem Canada for its past wrongs and project it
as a society shaped by human rights.
Thus, the Museum’s curatorial decision to avoid presenting potentially unsettling diffi-
cult knowledge in this exhibit by omitting several aspects of Chinese Canadian immigra-
tion history, (the long struggle of Chinese Canadians for full democratic and civil rights, the
voices of those who were unhappy with the terms of the redress settlement, the recent
and ongoing (since 1981) immigration of Chinese people to Canada, and the heightened
racial discrimination these new Canadians experience) constitutes modern-day Canada as
racism-free. This leaves visitors with a self-affirming sense that racism is a thing of the
departed past, and thereby enables it to persist in the present. Thus, the exhibit
negates Simon’s (2014) hope that engaging representations of the past might encourage
intervention in the present.

Conclusions
The curatorial function of the relatively new human rights museum is to act as intermedi-
ary between past atrocity and present social justice. At the same time, as entrusted
agencies of the state, national museums function as authorities on history and sites of
 MUSEUM MANAGEMENT AND CURATORSHIP 339

historical consciousness through selective recollections of the past, present, and future
that strategically define the parameters of their nations and citizenry. Through its Frame-
work of Canadian National Narratives, this study has illustrated a new research approach for
the identification, deconstruction and analysis of national narratives that problematizes
state visions that exclude or silence individual or group identities.
The analysis of the two exhibits discussed here reveals that Migrant Farm Workers and
Human Rights communicates Counter-National Narratives 3.0. by raising questions about
the nation and making visible ‘diasporic, hybrid, or transcultural identities’ (Canadian
migrant farm workers) within the country, emphasizing inheritance as an active mode
of using the educative legacy of testimony in pursuit of social justice. Meanwhile,
Chinese Canadians and Immigration Policy was shown to communicate the notion of
Canada as a generous, tolerant, multicultural mosaic resulting from a longer course of
events linked to a trajectory of human rights NN 2.0. Given the desire of the CMHR to
involve its visitors in the project of human rights, an alternate reading of the exhibit
Chinese Canadians and Immigration Policy might be that it offers an example of one
case in which Canada debated and addressed historical rights violations. This exhibition
can then be viewed to demonstrate that Canadian identity includes work towards alleviat-
ing rights abuses such as those now currently suffered by Canadian migrant farm workers.
Canadian nationalists may argue that unifying narratives that place discrimination and
human rights abuses in the past are necessary to keep the country together. But do we
want a country held together by a tissue of good intentions and fabrications?
This article explored how these two exhibits embody (or not) Simon’s notion of a cur-
atorial pedagogy of difficult knowledge through their methods, implications, and ramifica-
tions, and the main conclusions are twofold. First, when curatorial decisions disrupt
practices that mark racialized and excluded groups as ‘pre-read-texts’ (as in national nar-
rative templates), they can expose visitors to experiences of uncertainty and complexity in
which ‘ones stories might be shifted by the story of others’ (Simon 2000, 62). This can
encourage ethical encounters in which museumgoers see multifaceted truths for them-
selves and may be inspired to act accordingly. Second, it infers a link between Simon’s
notions around the curation of difficult knowledge and exhibits that provoke uncertainty
by capturing competing, omitted, or silenced aspects of a nation’s past, that contest or
rebuke a country’s master national narrative templates. Indeed, museums constituted as
socially responsible and discursive should play an important role in fulfilling a new histori-
cal consciousness as a practice of ethical remembrance. Through representations of the
past, present, and future, which include the most difficult truths and silenced national nar-
ratives that exceed contemporary frames of cognitive reasoning and judgement that lead
to action by inciting visitors to examine and reflect critically on their own roles in perpe-
tuating injustice in society.
The project of human rights also inevitably raises the question of what other issues the
museum might face when considering the curation of counter narratives and negotiating
possible conflicts with federal, provincial, and perhaps even foreign governments,
museum funders, and various identity and interest groups. The urgent question is how,
specifically, might a national museum, like the CMHR, maintain a critical and activist pos-
ition, while continuing to receive federal funding under a directed mandate?
340 S. ANDERSON

Notes
1. The articulation of Québécois and French Canadian/Acadian national narratives, as communi-
cated through expressions of the political, linguistic, and cultural distinctiveness of the Quebec
nation, is beyond the purview of this framework.
2. Initiated in 1966 by the Canadian federal government, http://www.ohchr.org/EN.
3. Citizenship and Immigration Canada, Agreement for the Employment in Canada of Common-
wealth Caribbean Seasonal Agricultural Workers—2013, Section IV, http://www.hrsdc.gc.ca/
eng/workplaceskills/foreign_workers/contracts-forms/sawpcc2013.
4. See Statistics Canada, Canadian Statistics, ‘Population by selected ethnic origins, by provinces
and territories (2001 Census), http://www.40.statcan.ca/101/cst01/demo26a.htm (accessed 17
October, 2017).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
(SSHRC) grant number [756-2017-0125].

Notes on contributor
Dr. Stephanie B. Anderson is a post-doctoral scholar at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn Design), and
an instructor at the University of British Columbia. She holds a Ph.D. & M.Ed. in Curriculum and Pedagogy
(The University of British Columbia) and a B.Ed. and B.A. (Honours) in History and French (Queen’s Univer-
sity). Her research and teaching interests include museum studies, public history, critical heritage studies,
decolonization, national identities, history education, and historical consciousness.

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