Further to my earlier post on the fears of Victor Rabinovitch, former director of the Canadian Museum of Civilization, an alternate more relaxed perspective by Christopher Dummit of Trent University, following the unveiling of the plans for the rebranded Canadian Museum of History:
David Morrison, the head of the team putting together the new Canada Hall, revealed that the main stories to be told were the relations between aboriginal peoples and European settlers, French — English relations, and the experiences of new immigrants. Political history would give structure to the exhibit but “the real content is the consequences of political history …. What did this mean to ordinary people?” He got out ahead of the critics by asserting that the museum would include many troubled aspects of the nation’s history including “residential schools, the imprisonment of Ukrainian Canadians during the First World War, anti-potlatch laws and the forced relocation of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War.”
Where were the swords and scythes, the royalists with machine guns, the mock lynching-in-absentia of Lester Pearson? Absent. For now, anyway. Perhaps between now and the opening, Harper’s history apparatchiks will descend to wreak their havoc. Maybe. More likely, the new museum will give us a benign version of Canada’s history — a museumified Canadian Studies 101.
No devil in Museum of History details.
Multicultural Meanderings 