Radical change with a sense of humour
When the Royal Ontario Museum reopened its Daphne Cockwell Gallery devoted to First Peoples culture and art last month, it was with appropriate gravitas. Peace offerings were the order of the day: a smudging ceremony, performances, a promise of inclusion from both sides.
Well, of course: Historically, museums such as the ROM, which have folded ethnographic practice into their broad mandates, have always stood as sentinels for the priorities of colonial forces determined to portray their roughshod arrival on unceded territories — that would be pretty much all of them — as both welcome and necessary, a civilizing influence on a savage people and land.
Times, of course, have changed, however slowly, and over the past couple of decades, the ROM has changed with them. The reopening of the Cockwell Gallery, despite the ceremonious sense of occasion, was the culmination of many years’ work with Indigenous groups across the country. The museum has now moved to make the space an ongoing collaboration with the people it represented. It’s the most basic logic now, perhaps, but for most of the past 100 years it was a radical idea as Indigenous life in museums was preserved like any specimen: rigidly frozen in time, a relic like any other artifact in its collection. The fact that governments the world over came close to achieving that as an explicit goal — through residential schools here and countless other brutalities across the globe — gives such displays the chilling edge of a memorial not quite fulfilled, and a reminder of how gruesome assumptions can easily become normalized.
Well, no more, the ROM finally said, as it remade the Cockwell Gallery less as a dust-gathering history lesson than a dynamically fluid collaborative space.
And, in a change as radical as any here, and for both sides, there’s room for a little humour.
In the “Mohawk Family Life Group,” a long-time cringeworthy diorama designed for the ROM in 1917 by the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., an Indigenous man with long hair wearing a breechcloth adjusts a playlist on his iPhone while a woman in a fringed suit takes a photo with a digital camera. Another man, his hair in braids, reaches for a cordless drill.
It makes its point. For decades, the family in question was engaged in cornpeeling and fire-building, embodying every element of the bad old days: a static human zoo, void of cultural underpinning, no less frozen in time than the dinosaur fossils upstairs.
That the diorama uses the very same mannequins, and in the same poses, is a particularly poignant takeback, despite the cheekiness: the puppets free of their age-old puppeteer, telling their own story.
As a symbol of change, it’s a remarkable thing as it acknowledges an ugly past with a generous view toward the future. The past can’t be changed, it seems to say, but there’s still time to fix this thing if we move forward together.
The Daphne Cockwell Gallery dedicated to First Peoples art and culture is free to the public during all museum opening hours. See rom.on.ca for more information.
That the diorama uses the very same mannequins, and in the same poses, is a particularly poignant takeback, despite the cheekiness: the puppets free of their age-old puppeteer, telling their own story