Heritage as reconciliation: Critical perspectives on the culture of redress

One of the first objects any visitor to the recently opened Canadian Museum of Human Rights (CMHR) in Winnipeg, Canada sees is an intricately carved bentwood box. On loan from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, which examined the impact of government supported residential schools on Canadian Indigenous peoples, the box contains the offerings and prayers of residential school survivors and their descendants from across Canada. To understand the significance of the box and its contents would require knowing the history of Indian residential schools, the 2006 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, the 2008 House of Commons apology to Aboriginal peoples, and then Prime Minister Stephen Harpers statement at the 2009 G-20 Pittsburgh Summit that Canada has “no history of colonialism. ” Without a broad context, the bentwood box tells the viewer little about human rights, reconciliation and apology, and the role of heritage. The current focus on redress and human rights in Canada is one where the tension between the social and political mechanisms to redress human rights violations and other wrongs done to indigenous, diasporic, and immigrant communities is pressed up again the mandates and public expectations of cultural heritage institutions. The tension results from the commitment to institutional directives while disrupting the “dominant logical of multiculturalist pluralism,” that is, that every redress case needs to be included in an institution like the CMHR dedicated to human rights and justice. But the role cultural heritage institutions undertake raises questions of how it remains “a political instrument to promote the interests of the State” while acting as a forum for dialogue to enrich civil society. In the instance of the CMHR, how does it engage with the larger issue of redress without context of government involvement? The purpose of this paper is to examine how heritage is embroiled in the politics and culture of redress in Canada. As an institution that is an interested observer of Canada’s human rights narrative, the CMHR is one node in a complex network of institutions and practices that together serve to give shape to and reinforce the public’s idea of what it means to be Canadian. I draw from Duncan and Wallach’s idea of cultural heritage institutions being “transactional” spaces and “the site of a symbolic transaction between the visitor and the state, ” with the latter investing its actual and symbolic capital in exchange for the production of an identity (i.e. “Canadian” as well as “indigenous”) and an idea of civic virtue. How easy is it for Canadians to feel good about themselves, their history with indigenous peoples, and their government when the contestation between the State and Indigenous peoples remain absent in the very institution dedicated to human rights issues? Through a case study method, I will examine how in their efforts to represent historic and ongoing human rights violations against Indigenous peoples, the CMHR also faces the challenge of decolonizing its own practices. The paradox lies in the fact that as a museum, it remains complicit in disrupting the transmission of Indigenous knowledge through their appropriation and display of artifacts. Yet, it has also played an important role in the ongoing processes of political empowerment. This paper will contribute to advancing scholarship examining one cultural heritage institution’s collaborative and critical tasks specific to restorative justice.