At the ROM, a ‘great beginning’
Museum’s newly refurbished Indigenous galleries, now free, strive to bridge rift between communities
A pea-sized pebble, earthy brown and polished smooth, sits next to my keyboard as I write this, alongside a pinch of tobacco, bound in bright yellow fabric and tied up with ribbon.
They’re gifts from a group of Indigenous children, who passed them out to everyone who came to the Royal Ontario Museum’s grand reopening of its Canadian galleries Wednesday morning and, for me, the generosity astounds: a people from whom so much was taken, still willing to give.
To not take it personally seems to miss the point. Just before the crowd settled into its seat, Louise Profeit-LeBlanc, who is Tlingit, and Clayton Shirt, who is Anishinaabe, led the group in a smudging ceremony in the museum’s new space. We formed a circle, at ProfeitLeBlanc’s request, and Shirt walked slowly around, a thatch of smouldering sweetgrass in his hand, offered to each one of us as a purifying rite.
This was not an off-the-rack institutional procedural — the ribbon-cutting, handshaking photo op that these things have most often been.
“There are teachings among the Indigenous people about humility,” ProfeitLeBlanc said, her voice quiet but clear as she addressed the circle.
“Humility is required to acquire knowledge. For a long time, people made assumptions about us. Now, we can all learn together.”
Josh Basseches, the ROM’s director, had come with something to give, too. After a performance by the Bear Creek Drummers under the gilded mosaic ceiling of the museum’s original grand entrance off Queen’s Park, Basseches announced that the renewed Canadian galleries would be free, permanently, to anyone. “What does it mean to be a museum in the 21st century?” he said, as an array of leaders, both Indigenous and otherwise, looked on. “It means innovation and learning, linking our past to our present and, critically, it means removing barriers to collections for Indigenous people.”
It was a tacit acknowledgment of the rift still to be closed between Indigenous communities and mainstream society, both socially and economically. The ROM, to its credit, is doing its part to sustain the conversation, though a major promise made at last year’s Anishinaabeg: Art & Power, to install a perma- nent staff curator of Indigenous art, remains unfulfilled (the museum says it’s actively searching for candidates, though it can’t offer a timeline).
The reopening is timely. After a swell of interest in Indigenous culture last year brought on by Canada 150, the wave seemed to have crested. At the ROM, Basseches reaffirmed the museum’s commitment.
“Today’s announcement is a promise; a promise to Indigenous people to be able to craft their own narratives, so when they come to see this collection they will not only see themselves but be heard.”
The reopening stands as a symbol of years of consultation between the museum and its Indigenous advisory council, and the changes in the galleries, though subtle, are profound in their shared authority.
“Today’s announcement is a promise; a promise to Indigenous people to be able to craft their own narratives.” JOSH BASSECHES DIRECTOR, ROM
Objects are paired not with dry curatorial text but, often, with personal remarks from Indigenous cultural leaders.
Paul Kane, the much-mythologized painter of patronizing new-world Indigenous exotica, remains, though juxtaposed with a new section: “A Living Culture.” (In a refreshingly cheeky moment, the old-guard ethnographic display convention, a diorama of mannequins frozen in a stilted demonstration of “daily life” in a Mohawk village, is facetiously torqued to include a man in a breechcloth plugged into his iPhone and a woman taking photos with a digital camera.)
Now it would seem an obvious inclusion. For most museums like the ROM, though, which came to be in the early 20thcentury swell of colonially driven ethnography, deadening Indigenous culture under glass has been a hard habit to break.
Shirt, whose parents founded the Wandering Spirit Survival School in the 1970s — no hyperbole there after decades of residential schools, a federally sponsored assimilation effort to wipe Indigenous culture away — remembers avoiding the Canadian galleries at the ROM as a child.
“I loved the dinosaurs,” he said, “but the Indigenous objects — all that beautiful art, the war shirts, the canoes — looked to me like they were in prison.”
Worse, maybe, was the fact that they had been preserved as relics of a culture breathing its last. “It said to me that the culture was dead, that it’s not here anymore,” Shirt said. “I knew that wasn’t true.”
Just before, the drummers’ song echoed off the museum’s stone walls and affirmed Shirt’s belief.
Sentinels of the foreign culture rooted in their land surrounded them, high on pedestals in the museum’s walls: the headless classical form of a female nude; a Venetian urn; a Buddha; the Indian god Vishnu. It’s a not-so-subtle reminder that these things were brought here to replace Indigenous culture with an acquisitive European object fetish, in a building built for just that purpose.
They didn’t, though they came close. It’s a long road back, but the journey has at least begun.
“Tobacco was given to us by the creator; it’s the first medicine,” Shirt told the crowd. “It’s our link to the creator and, when we struggle, we hold it and we pray.”
As the children went row to row, passing out their tiny parcels from woven baskets, headbands woven from sweetgrass around their heads, he continued.
“The Creator gave us a power that’s unique in the universe: the power to choose,” he said. “Today, we’re choosing to move forward, to heal and to talk, together. This is a great beginning.”
Afterwards, Shirt offered a shrug. “It’s a baby step,” he said. “But it’s important for the young people to be able to have that conversation: that we’re still here, we’re thriving and that it matters. That wematter.”
The Royal Ontario Museum’s Daphne Cockwell Gallery of Canada: First Peoples is free to the public all opening hours. See rom.on.ca for information.