Museum’s project has a familiar look
They are seven tales of Canada today: seven videos, each featuring an individual’s life story in his or her own words — stories of cultures, identities, battles, homes. The project was launched a couple of weeks ago for Canada’s 150th anniversary, a very human way to reflect on key issues at this stage in the country’s development.
They’re the kind of stories you could expect from a news organization. But this project is the work of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg.
It’s another example of a kind of information, perspective and storytelling that could be considered alternative journalism.
“We do a lot of different types of storytelling within the museum and we do have a lot of film-based and other digital types of content, and we do have an excellent oral history program, so that’s something we’re quite comfortable with — having people tell their own stories,” said Julia Peristerakis, the lead curator on the temporary exhibit for the 150th anniversary called Our Canada, My Story.
It took the museum about a year to pull the exhibit together, from choosing topics that “would be important to explore” in 2017, through finding low-profile people whose personal stories hadn’t been widely heard, and then working with an outside partner to produce the short films, each under five minutes.
“It was a very compressed timeline” in museum terms, Peristerakis said.
In many of Canada’s beleaguered newsrooms, a year for such a project would be an improbable luxury. But aside from that, the museum curators’ approach would sound familiar to journalists.
Once the curators had selected themes and regions of the country they wanted to reflect, they worked with organizations, news stories and people they knew to identify their storytellers.
“We did a three-hour interview and we didn’t coach, we didn’t script them,” Peristerakis said. “A lot of these folks wouldn’t necessarily explain their life experiences in human rights terms, and we were OK with that for this exhibition. We wanted the themes to be very relatable and very personal.
“We also didn’t just want to focus on the human rights issues. Our whole idea of this exhibition is that you’re getting to know somebody and you’re getting that personal connection with them so you can really understand what they’ve gone through, what they’re struggling with, and how they’ve overcome things.
“We really didn’t want any of these stories reduced to stereotypes or clichés. So we didn’t want to focus on just one part of somebody’s identity and not explore all these other parts of people’s identities. We actually opened one of the films with a line that one of our interviewees said: ‘We’re all a combination of identities.’ ”
The seven stories are full of passion, warmth and a sense of home. But because human rights are the underlying connection — through the issues of indigenous peoples, languages, refugees, disability, the North, Japanese Canadian internment, gay couples with children — they are also tales of battles, hardwon victories and ongoing efforts for reconciliation and openness.
The temporary exhibit is in a gallery that is supported by the Richardson Foundation and family. The exhibit itself has no financial sponsors and it did not receive financial support from the federal government, said Maureen Fitzhenry, media relations manager for the museum. wallace.mtl@gmail.com