Museum offers glimpse of history hall plans,
The Canadian Museum of Civilization is being revamped and a major exhibit on Canada’s past is being designed for its transformation into a history museum, writes DON BUTLER.
The Canadian Museum of Civilization has pulled back the curtain on its planned new Canadian history hall, billed as the largest and most comprehensive permanent exhibit about Canada’s history yet.
In an exclusive interview with the Citizen, David Morrison, head of the 25-member museum team that has been developing content for the 44,000-square-foot exhibit, described the plan so far and revealed that the museum has just hired a Montreal firm to design the exhibit and spoke about the challenges the project presents.
The hall will be the centrepiece of the $25-million makeover of the museum into the Canadian Museum of History, announced just over a year ago by James Moore, then minister of Canadian Heritage. It will occupy half of the museum’s permanent exhibition space.
Just this week, the museum team sent a greatly expanded content package to six committees of outside experts that are advising the museum.
It’s the fruit of six months of heavy research and writing by museum staff.
“We’re really pleased with this right now,” he said. “There are literally hundreds of stories. It fills a complete banker’s box.”
Here’s a summary of how the project is shaping up.
ORGANIZATION
The history hall will tell the story of Canada from the arrival of the first humans 15,000 years ago until 2017, the year it will open. There are six time periods.
The first covers the time from the arrival of the first humans until explorer John Cabot landed in North America in 1497. The second deals with early colonial history until the British conquest in 1759.
The third period extends to the rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada in 1837. The fourth period picks up in 1838 with the Durham Report and concludes in 1885, which Morrison described as a “pivotal year” in Canada’s history.
“It was the year the CPR was completed, the year we hanged Louis Riel and the Northwest Rebellion was crushed by military force,” Morrison said.
The fifth section begins in 1885 and ends in 1945, encompassing two world wars and the Great Depression. And the sixth and final period will present Canada’s history from 1945 until 2017.
CONTENT
The presence of aboriginals and their relations with the Europeans who settled here is “probably our most important over-arching theme,” Morrison said. Another is the relationship between the country’s French- and Englishspeaking populations. A third is the impact of immigration.
“There is a sort of a backbone to the hall of political history, but most of the real content is the consequences of political history,” Morrison said. “What did this mean to ordinary people?”
The war-years exhibits are likely to focus on home-front issues, he said — disputes over conscription, rationing, the impact of having so many men overseas and how people coped.
The period from the Second World War to the present is “so big and complicated, it’s really hard to encapsulate,” Morrison admitted.
But it will include a lot of exhibits on popular culture, political history, the rise of feminism, the entry of women into the workforce in large numbers and the emergence of aboriginal rights.
DARK EPISODES
The history hall exhibit will include events that make most Canadians squirm today, such as 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.
“We would have no credibility” if such dark episodes were omitted, Morrison said. “You’ve got to do the good and the bad, and after some period of time, surely we can.”
Some of those episodes seem unfathomable today, he said. But others remain complex and contested. One way to deal with those, said Morrison, is to look at them through different lenses.
“We’re taking what we call a multi-perspective approach, because there is no single view of some of these events,” Morrison said. “Your view depends so much on who you are. We’ve got to tell a lot of these stories from the different points of view of these different communities.”
DESIGN
The museum has hired Montreal firm GSM Design to design the history hall. The company will work with Douglas Cardinal, the architect of the museum’s iconic 1989 building, who has been hired to oversee the exhibit’s overall design.
‘The government doesn’t and couldn’t and wouldn’t be allowed to get involved to that extent. It’s not something I worry about because it’s never going to happen.’
DR. DAVID MORRISON
Head of museum team
Cardinal is “going to help us realize the architectural potential of the space better,” Morrison said.
The museum wants to open it up so that it becomes “a metaphor for Canada, with a great, huge, open sky and a big, long sight line you can actually see and manoeuvre your way through.”
THE ROLE OF ARTIFACTS
Though Morrison said his team has made “very few absolutely final decisions” about content, it is an “awfully good assumption” that the final plan will showcase key parts of the museum’s collection.
That means the sinking of the Empress of Ireland in 1914 and the Dionne quintuplets are virtual locks to be part of the narrative, he said. The museum also has a “fabulous” collection about nursing in Canada.
But there are many other stories for which the museum has few if any artifacts.
That is forcing it to “get creative,” he said, by borrowing from other museums or looking for different ways to tell those stories.
The museum is actively pursuing acquisitions where they are available to fill gaps.
CHALLENGES
Morrison said he’s not really concerned about critics who charge that the Conservative government is stage-managing the project to reflect its ideological view of history.
“The government doesn’t and couldn’t and wouldn’t be allowed to get involved to that extent,” Morrison said. “It’s not something I worry about because it’s never going to happen.
“We’re just going ahead and doing this hall with our own staff and our own advisory committees in the best
way we can.”
NEXT STEPS
Morrison’s team will meet with each of the six advisory committees in January to receive their feedback to the content package and make changes.
It also must edit the plan down to something that will realistically fit the available space.
Once that has been done, the resulting content package will be shipped again to the advisory committees “for one last kick at the can,” Morrison said.
The content plan will be finalized by next summer or fall and the project will move into the design phase, with construction ramping up in 2015 and 2016.
It’s hard to be definitive about the timetable, Morrison said, though his team knows that July 1, 2017, is the history hall’s “unalterable opening date. We must meet that, or there’ll be trouble.”
On that date, David Morrison plans to retire. “I could retire right now,” he said, “but I’m having too much fun.”