There are moments when there can be no objective divorce between the politics of the present and the study of the past. This is one such moment in the political present where the world we live in cannot be removed from the politics of the past, nor the graduate-level public history assignment.
For Canadians who woke up on November 9th, 2016 to a world they no longer comprehend, it is important, now more than ever, to understand the public historian’s role in civil society, consider our responsibilities by virtue of it, and work to assure the Canadian public does not succumb to demagogic narratives of isolationism, fear, and hate.
Our Role
Public history serves the public — a collection of peoples cohabiting spaces with memory and history. Public historians aspire to honest, context and evidence-based truth-telling. This can be achieved by employing diligent historical analysis, championing multiple manifestations of remembering and using evidence-based storytelling to maintain accountability. Done right, public history can engender learning, healing, and individual and collective development. Done wrong, it can contribute to misinformation, suffering, and painful reminders of our shared colonial pasts.
Our Challenges
There are several stories in Canadian public history professionals need to thoughtfully consider before pursuing future projects. Historicization of public history shows the discipline has authored its own uncomfortable chapters in the ongoing colonial narrative. The field needs to adopt a generous and unflinching reflexivity to see it’s own power in shaping public discourses. Andersen puts it eloquently: “spaces of cultural representation— like museums and national historic sites—can be spaces of mutual recognition rather than mere manifestations of colonial power.” Here are some suggestions on how to do that.
What Not To Do
- Do not confine identities in history, as it is in the Batoche National Historic Site in Batoche, Saskachewan. Chris Andersen points to telling “three-dimensional,” high “density” stories of that champion both the Metis’ peoples modern complexities and and historical celebrations as a way to move forward instead.
- Do not work in insolation, as the infamous failure of an exhibit, Into the Heart of Africa at the Royal Ontario Museum, mistakenly did. The curators did not fully consider their audiences and the way they might receive the exhibit. Eva Mackey discourages the use of universal claims to truth, especially in such a “powerful agent in defining public culture.”
- Do not sanitize violent histories, as former Prime Minister Stephen Harper inadvertently does in a speech during the 2009 G20 meeting in Pittsburg by saying “We have no history of colonialism”. We should not be exempt from remembering traumas 1 year, 1 decade, or 1 century after the highly orchestrated public apology for Canada’s role in residential schools. Healing from traumatic pasts requires remembering with as much deference to truth as possible.
What To Do
- Share authority. As Andersen writes, public historians should strive for a “history in between.” Narratives should be situated in between structure and agency; local, regional and global; indigenous and white, commemorative, scholarly and community based remembering. Public historians can look to the c̓əsnaʔəm, the city before the city exhibit at the Museum of Vancouver as a step forward into shared authority and respectfully indigenized history. This in-betweeness also exists between times. Public historians need to recognize what Sharon Macdonald calls the multi-temporal nature of public remembering, that “wrong done in a time marked is recognized as such” but also exists in a present orientated to future. One of the greatest challenges is deciding what to choose
- Recognize power and poverty. Museums and monuments hold significant social capital as institutions. Public historians need to recognize the privilege and responsibility that come with storytelling for publics, which inadvertently creates spaces of belonging and exclusion.
- Listen. Researches and practitioners in Canada need to adopt the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls To Action as much as it is feasible. Canadians need to read the TRC adopt it into schools, museums, books and popular culture. In the history of public history, certain narratives were told over the silences of others. To move forward towards reconciliation, we need to hear the quieted truths from quieted voices.
Jenn Leah Ko 