The Globe and Mail (Canada)
December 12, 2009 Saturday
IT TAKES A LOT OF WRONGS TO MAKE A MUSEUM OF RIGHTS
The late Izzy Asper’s pet project has grown into a full-fledged public
institution, due to open in 2012. Its mission is to deal with some of
the most controversial abuses and injustices in Canadian and world
history. But which abuses – and injustice according to whom? The
answers are sure to upset some people, perhaps including its political
sponsors. James Bradshaw reports
by JAMES BRADSHAW
FOCUS; ANXIETY IN THE ARCHIVES; Pg. F1
Jennifer looks nervously at the strangers around the table and says
she is almost afraid to tell them what she is thinking.
The teacher in her early 30s, who works with students with learning
disabilities at an all-girls school (she requested The Globe and Mail
withhold her last name), is one of more than 100 people who have come
to a Toronto convention centre this evening to talk about what they
want – and don’t want – from the new Canadian Museum for Human Rights
when it opens in 2012.
She’s sitting with a trio of refugees from Guatemala, a retired
teacher whose family was once interned in Austrian-controlled Ukraine
and a museum-sciences student who is a former Oxfam volunteer.
She musters her courage and tells them that although she considers
herself a feminist, she disagrees with giving women the right to have
abortions. "I think the voice of someone like myself often gets shut
out," she says.
To Jennifer, a fetus is a person, with his or her own human rights –
and she is hoping the new museum will provide a serious forum to
discuss them.
So far, abortion isn’t high on the CMHR’s tentative topic list. But
what is already pencilled in is nearly as contentious, from the abuse
of aboriginal children in residential schools and the wartime
internment of Japanese Canadians to violence against women.
In principle, there’s no reason abortion should be left out: What is
the argument about if not who has what rights and how to protect them?
But imagine the outcry that might arise if even a corner of a
government-sponsored museum were devoted to exploring that question.
More plausibly, what will happen when it addresses what happened to
Armenians under the Ottoman Empire?
Canada and 19 other nations, along with many international scholarly
associations, officially recognize the campaign of forced marches,
massacres and abuse that began in 1915 as amounting to genocide. The
Republic of Turkey and many Turkish expatriates, including in Canada,
strenuously disagree. Every newspaper editor knows that stories on the
subject lead to onslaughts of enraged letters. Memorials are met by
protests and counter-protests.
That’s the challenge facing a museum whose mandate is to grapple
almost entirely with the world’s touchiest subjects.
"It is a museum of ideas. And ideas, of course, are never static,"
says Yude Henteleff, the chair of the museum’s Content Advisory
Committee.
If human rights are a human construction, a set of collective ideas,
then the public view of them will be forever shifting, amorphous and
vulnerable to attack. And a museum that tries to document that process
on its walls promises to have its combustible moments.
Some groups of people will feel shut out if their causes are not
included. Others are sure to accuse the museum of imbalance in the
exhibitions it does mount.
Jennifer’s session was part of a 12-month, cross-Canada consulting
tour by the museum’s content committee, a group of 17 specialists and
human-rights experts. It’s trying to put out fires in advance, though
it can’t douse them all.
The committee is also looking at how prickly issues are handled at
places such as the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, the
International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, the Te Papa Tongarewa
Museum of New Zealand and the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.
Most of those institutions focus on specific issues or communities,
while the CMHR promises to be "the most comprehensive human-rights
museum in the world."
It was the dream of the late CanWest founder Izzy Asper, the son of
Jewish-Ukrainian émigrés, and was brought to fruition by his daughter,
Gail. In 2008, the private project became a federal Crown corporation,
and a substantial part of its $310-million budget is made up of
federal and provincial funds. The project broke ground last year at
The Forks in Winnipeg, a locale backers have dubbed, a bit hopefully,
"the heart of the North American continent."
The CMHR will enjoy arm’s-length status, but given its dependence on
the government, how comfortable will it be with issues that make
Ottawa anxious?
Washington’s Holocaust Memorial Museum, for example, gets nearly half
of its funding from the U.S. government. Many in the American Jewish
community were enraged in 1998 when the museum extended, revoked and
then renewed an invitation to Yasser Arafat to offer the Palestine
Liberation Organization leader deeper insight into Jewish history.
Ultimately the museum’s director, Walter Reich, was forced to resign.
The Canadian museum found itself under that sort of uncomfortable
scrutiny after the federal Conservatives, in an unusual move,
hand-picked its first chief executive officer in mid-September: Stuart
Murray, the former leader of Manitoba’s Progressive Conservative
Party. Gay and lesbian groups objected that the new rights museum head
had voted against a bill to extend adoption rights to same-sex
couples.
The conscience of a curator
The job of shaping the museum’s innards weighs heaviest on Victoria
Dickenson, its Chief Knowledge Officer – in effect, its chief curator.
Every curator faces the kinds of decisions that will confront Ms.
Dickenson, the former head of Montreal’s McCord Museum, but in the
case of human rights, it’s an especially delicate dance.
"There’s no cookbook," says Alison Nordstrom, curator of photographs
at the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and
Film in Rochester, N.Y. "We have to do our best [as] responsible human
beings."
In her long career, Dr. Nordstrom has helped to present exhibitions on
genocide in Darfur and conflict in Afghanistan. She says combustible
material is best handled by sticking firmly to the intellectual
conclusions gleaned from research and resisting the temptation to
soft-pedal.
Still, the final calls are personal. "It’s like an ethical decision in
your own life. What do you do? You talk to people you trust."
But with funding scarce, museums are increasingly preoccupied with
getting bodies through the turnstiles and do sometimes "knuckle under
to public opinion," she says.
The trend in the U.S. is to try to prepare visitors in advance for
what awaits them. The main instrument is the advisory panel, made up
of community leaders invited to discuss plans and report back to their
constituencies.
"People like surprises as long as they know they’re going to be
surprised," Dr. Nordstrom says. "The most problematic thing is when
people come to a museum [expecting] to see a picture of one thing and
they see something else. They feel hijacked."
Advisories on exhibitions are becoming more commonplace, including
parental warnings, she adds, although the initiative often comes from
marketing and education departments.
These are attempts to avoid what the Canadian War Museum went through
in 2007, when a number of veterans, backed by a Senate subcommittee,
decried a Second World War exhibition there. They complained that a
text panel had portrayed participants in the bombing of Dresden and
other German cities as war criminals. The museum resisted, but
eventually gave in and rewrote the panel to appease them.
The CMHR might take similar heat for featuring some of the more
unsavoury chapters in Canadian history, such as the 1914 Komagata Maru
incident, in which a boat carrying hundreds of Sikhs was turned away
from Vancouver because of anti-Asian public sentiment and government
exclusion orders. Returning to Calcutta, they were detained, arrested
and, in some cases, killed by colonial police.
How frankly would the museum treat the Komagata Maru? The curators
would have to put the story in historical context, but not so much
that, for example, an Indian-Canadian visitor might take it that they
were trying to excuse or explain away Canada’s actions.
To encourage dialogue, not just in the design of the CMHR but
throughout its existence, Ms. Dickenson says it might host "kitchen
tables" where thinkers could congregate to hash out conflicts face to
face. The model comes from the Philosopher’s Café at Simon Fraser
University, which philanthropist Yosef Wosk founded to discuss
"burning issues of the day" in a comfortable, informal setting.
In New Zealand, the Te Papa museum decided to tackle the country’s
history of bloodily forcing Maori populations off their lands, despite
market research that showed New Zealanders were deeply uncomfortable
with that aspect of their past. Part of what it did was to make the
exhibition its most relaxed, peaceful space, complete with soft
chairs.
"The [CMHR] has to have not just exhibits, and not just a pedagogic or
didactic flavour, but also a flavour of providing spaces for people to
rest, reflect, talk, think, meet people," Ms. Dickenson said.
Despite all these efforts to becalm, you might also argue that a
little controversy is healthy, not just to attract attention, but to
stimulate better thinking.
Monique Horth, the deputy director of the Canadian Museums
Association, points out that museums in Quebec such as the Musée de la
civilisation deliberately and routinely mount "difficult material."
For one exhibition there, about assisted-reproduction techniques such
as in-vitro fertilization, visitors entered the exhibition hall
through a space that looked like a pregnant woman’s belly. Another
exhibit, dealing with disabled people’s issues, was designed to
resemble the rooms of an apartment; in the bedroom, visitors were
confronted with the question, "How do you make love when you’re
heavily handicapped?" They could listen to testimonials by laying
their heads on the pillows of the bed.
"They do it purposely because they want public debate," Ms. Horth
says. "They’re not afraid of it – they look forward to the
controversy. For them, it’s the social role of a museum."
The importance of being ‘difficult’
In early 2008, the Canadian War Museum hosted a conference called "Is
Difficult Important?" that was attended by staff from many museums,
including the CMHR. Their collective answer to the title question was
yes.
"If museums have a purpose at all, it is to deal with the issues that
are important to us as human beings," says Dean Oliver, director of
research and exhibitions at the War Museum. "So we’re almost
duty-bound to take on things which are difficult. … If not, we’re
just sort of entertaining ourselves to death."
Already, the CMHR’s public consultations have given Canadians a forum
for some of their weightiest stories. Next to Jennifer at the Toronto
roundtable sat Maria Eugenia Molina, along with two fellow
Guatemalan-Canadian refugees, Nery Espinoza and Marta Hernandez. Ms.
Molina speaks little English, but wanted to be there to hand over her
testimonial, which took up little more than a single typed page.
In the early 1980s, she wrote, her sister, Emma, was arrested for her
role as a student leader in Guatemala and taken to a military
barracks. She was allegedly tortured, raped and denied food and water
while her captors demanded that she name other politically active
students.
Emma escaped in October of 1981, but the next day three men arrived to
search her house. Not finding her, they bundled her brother, Marco
Antonio, into the back of their truck and sped off. He was never seen
again, and is now on human-rights groups’ lists of about 50,000 such
"forced disappearances" in Guatemala. Before long, Ms. Molina’s whole
family was forced to leave the country because of death-squad threats.
Ms. Hernandez, whose sister was similarly "disappeared," asked
politely whether Guatemala could be included as "a case" in the museum
– to represent "some of the people who have immigrated to this country
because of human-rights abuses."
The CMHR’s burden – and privilege – is to choose from among thousands
of such experiences, and to try to get the telling right.
"We’re looking at them from afar," Dr. Oliver says, "thinking this may
be one of the greatest museum challenges the country has ever faced.
And wishing them good luck."
James Bradshaw is a Globe and Mail arts reporter.