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Canadian (Re)Presentation

Media, First Peoples, and Liveness in the Museum

Miranda J. Brady

Large-scale, centralized museums for general audiences in settler societies have been shifting due to new museological understandings, norms, and practices, where the question of participation has become central. National museum projects dedicated to Indigenous topics around the world have been shaped by this transformation from New Zealand to Canada. “Active collaboration and a sharing of authority” have become the norm in many Indigenous exhibitions (Clifford, 1997, p. 210). While mostly non-Native curators and anthropologists possessed the cultural legitimacy to interpret Native histories in large-scale museums of the past, Indigenous people themselves now play a greater role in the curatorial process in many contemporary museums; place-based media have increasingly been central in evidencing their participation (Brady, 2011a, 2011b). Over the past 30 years, developments in place-based media technologies and shifts in Indigenous representational practices have facilitated new relationships between Indigenous identity construction, media, and the idea of active participation on behalf of both non-Native visitors and Indigenous subjects.

The Canadian Museum of Civilization (CMC, 1989), a revamped version of the Canadian Museum of Man, and its First Peoples Hall (FPH, 2003) emerged amongst the debates centered on issues of Indigenous representation, and they were products of their time. Increases in Indigenous consultation and pedagogic discourses promoting active learning greatly influenced the CMC, along with pressures to stay competitive with other social institutions. Each of these factors justified the adoption of new media technologies in the museum. CMC founders attempted to push the museum into the twenty-first century through exhibition practices and cultural policies that were seen as progressive for the 1980s and 1990s, and planners were highly motivated to demonstrate the museum's relevance as a modern institution through the integration of new representational approaches and technological trends. In particular, museum leaders were fixated on the idea of liveness and the pedagogic potential of interactivity.¹

The enthusiasm about the liveness enabled by new media in the 1980s and 1990s, though reinvigorated by contemporary technologies, was not new. As Jeffrey Sconce (2000) suggests, such discourses date back to the mid-nineteenth century with the advent of the telegraph, the telephone, and wireless communication. The television was discussed in similar terms (Spigel, 1992, 2001). The idea of liveness was a way of imagining the West's ingenuity and the conquest of space. The ideals of achieving “global presence” and simultaneity continued to be important during the Cold War and the Space Race, especially in discourses constituting the satellite (Parks, 2005, p. 23). While simultaneity had been a popular concept in the 1960s with Telstar I's first live trans-Atlantic broadcast (Parks, 2005), the same idea was popular in museums of the 1980s as satellite use and the computer became more accessible. In museums of the 1990s, discussions about the World Wide Web reproduced the ideals of global presence and what can be characterized as the “rhetoric of the electrical sublime,” which suggests that “communication, exchange, motion brings humanity, enlightenment, progress” (Schivelbusch, 1978, cited in Carey, 1989, p. 208). Canadian museum professionals in particular were influenced by icon Marshall McLuhan (1964) and the notion that media could facilitate a global village (MacDonald & Alsford, 1989).

The concept of liveness maps onto Indigenous museum representations in particularly interesting ways. In older museum forms, this meant a highly contained bringing to life (Wakeham, 2008) while newer museums have extended this idea to include live communication. Museums have a long history of utilizing media in attempts to create a live experience for visitors as they learn about Indigenous peoples and cultures. In natural history museums of the past, this liveness was presented through the (re)animation found in life-sized dioramas, mannequins, and taxidermic animals, where Indigenous people were suspended in historic live-action poses, but with the assumption that they had been pacified or driven to extinction. Pauline Wakeham (2008) discusses this tradition in Taxidermic Signs. According to Wakeham, museums of the early twentieth century self-fashioned as benevolent salvagers who preserved Indigenous cultures to save them from apparent imminent oblivion. They did so by locating Indigenous people in the past alongside the reanimated carcasses of deceased animals and appropriated cultural patrimony. Wakeham identifies the imperialist nostalgia and perverse colonial voyeurism in freezing colonial subjects in a pre-contact, “suspended pastness” (2008, p. 17). Museums demonstrated colonial power and the “purportedly inevitable extinction of an inferior race” through the act of representation itself, by reanimating Indigenous people under Eurocentric terms (Wakeham, 2008, p. 20). Wakeham suggests that taxidermic semiosis carried over to Indigenous representation in other cultural forms like cinema, which also has a history of salvage impulses in early documentary, where Indigenous people were staged outside of technological, Western contexts (Raheja, 2007).

Museums like the CMC seek to avoid colonial voyeurism though Indigenous participation and by placing Indigenous people in modern contexts. However, the question remains whether efforts to recreate liveness for mostly non-Native audiences through static, prerecorded testimonials from disembodied constituents are really that different from past attempts at reanimation. In both cases, the focus is on creating a live experience for a general audience in accordance with normative museological practices and with the limitations of popular place-based media. In both cases, the focus is on the experience of the visitor.

Regardless of attempts to break away from outmoded museum practices, the contemporary Indigenous museum has been criticized for continuing a number of long-standing and problematic traditions. According to critics like Eva Mackey (2002), Indigenous identity is used instrumentally in state institutions like the CMC where “officially sanctioned self-representation” helps to reaffirm national identity (p. 83). Mackey writes, “Aboriginal people are necessary players in nationalist myths: they are the colourful recipients of benevolence, the necessary ‘others’ who reflect back white Canada's self-image of tolerance” (2002, p. 2). Mackey suggests that such self-affirming mythos distracts focus from the ongoing problems faced by Indigenous people and the state's responsibility to intervene.

Similarly, other national museums like the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian (2004) have been criticized for their efforts to reach mostly non-Native audiences, rather than Native “constituents” (Brady, 2008, 2009), and some scholars have questioned whether large-scale, centralized museums actually benefit Indigenous people (Boast, Bravo, & Srinivasan, 2007). Scholars have also pointed out that prerecordings of oral traditions do not allow for audience adaptability, which is central to oral performance (Verran & Christie, 2007), while others cite the problems occurring when Indigenous people lose control over interpretive contexts as their cultures are being presented to general audiences (Isaac, 2007).

Museums adopt place-based media in attempts to represent Indigenous identities to general audiences and to articulate a sense of Indigenous liveness, which is a way of self-fashioning in juxtaposition with older museum forms, a phenomenon Wakeham describes as the “meta-museum” (2008, p. 65). As Raymond Williams (1974) argued, the cultural forms of media help to shape and guide the ways in which they are used and understood. As the following passages argue, there are limitations and opportunities for media use in articulating Indigeneity. While the inclusion of new media technologies can suggest that museums are in tune technologically and that Indigenous identities are contemporary rather than trapped in the past, there are broader implications to their use and the technocratic impulses prescribing them. While the FPH was a response to problematized museum practices of the past, the implications of new Indigenous representational technologies demand further consideration. Also worthy of reflection is the priority placed on representation itself and the degree to which other important issues go unaddressed (see Isaac, 2007; Lonetree, 2006).

The following passages explore such issues within the context of the CMC by providing an overview of the conditions shaping the museum's opening in 1989, FPH planning, and media adoption. A study of FPH media will demonstrate the ways in which planners conflated discourses of representation, pedagogy, and competition. A brief discussion about the exhibit's reception by the popular press, Indigenous newspapers, and academic journals will provide further insight into the ways in which these discourses were reproduced and experienced in the museum. Finally, this chapter will conclude by addressing the implications of new media adoption and the focus on visitor experience and representation in Indigenous exhibitions as well as the relationships between Indigenous identity construction, the ideal of liveness, and the use of place-based media in the CMC and its First Peoples Hall.

Fashioning a “Museum for the Twenty-First Century”: From Artifact Collection to Information Utility

As media technologies saw increased use in public spaces of the 1980s and early 1990s, Canadian museums and other heritage institutions faced a crisis (MacDonald & Alsford, 1994). Nonprofit institutions like national museums had limited budgets, and the increasing digital divide created by new educational technologies threatened obsolescence for those left behind. Leaders at the Canadian Museum of Civilization embraced the technological zeitgeist as they planned the opening of their “museum for the twenty-first century” across the Ottawa River from Canada's capital city and Parliament Hill (CMC, “Written in the Stone”). Taking their cue from other museums and commercial institutions like Disney's Epcot Center as well as popular philosophies in communication and pedagogy, they envisioned a media-rich museum (MacDonald & Alsford, 1989).²

Leading the technological development for the CMC was special projects manager Stephen Alsford, who wrote and spoke prolifically on the topic of media technologies and museums along with inaugural CMC director George MacDonald. Alsford was a strong proponent of new media acquisition, and he suggested it would help the CMC keep pace with the many other institutions vying for the attention of potential visitors (Alsford, 1991). The inclusion of technology was in line with the museum's modernizing attempts, including the construction of its new facilities in Gatineau, Quebec, and the institution's renaming from The Museum of Man to the less gender-biased Museum of Civilization. The CMC's opening provided the opportunity for the institution to transform its identity and, as a national museum, it would reflect broadly on Canadian identity as well. Indigenous themes were closely tied with nation throughout the museum, from the curvilinear building itself, designed by the Blackfoot/Métis architect Douglas Cardinal, to the exhibits, including the Grand Hall, which showcased a number of traditional Indigenous cultures. Plans also began for the First Peoples Hall, which would address more contemporary Indigenous topics, but they were postponed until after the museum's opening.

Both MacDonald and Alsford were determined to push the CMC into the next century through technology. However, it was difficult for CMC staff to make decisions about the newly available and costly media with which they had limited knowledge. There were a number of new devices being marketed for exhibition and data management, including early interactive computer kiosks, community networks and satellite connections with other cultural institutions, videodiscs as well as the technologies for creating them, and lasers capable of producing digital models. The wow factor was high, and shiny vendor brochures promised “interactivity” and improvement of “problem-solving skills.”³ One company boasted that with its kiosks, “a student's ability to interact directly and immediately with the ‘source’ of instruction more closely parallels ‘live’ education.”⁴ The same kind of language about interactive education was mirrored in the discourse of museum planners, who made pedagogic justifications for technology adoption. For example, CMC staff wrote, “What is especially interesting with these products is the ability of the viewer to control and direct the course of a given scenario and realize its outcome based on his or her earlier decisions.”⁵ Stephen Alsford collected information on such interactive devices and referenced their use in the British Museum of Mankind's Living Arctic exhibit, through which visitors determined the fate of Indigenous Arctic and sub-Arctic hunters by making a series of choices via digital kiosks. Prerecorded, edited video footage of Indigenous actors helped to create a more realistic feel for the educational tool (Interactive Video, 1988).

Similarly, Alsford collected information on the JASON Project, another interactive program that offered a sense of liveness, connecting scientists and educational institutions via satellite. The JASON project used robots to film underwater sites like sunken ships from the Battle of 1812. The images were downlinked to Turner Broadcasting Systems (TBS) in Atlanta, where they were made into a final production, which was broadcast simultaneously to subscribers. The effect of liveness offered by JASON excited museum planners. Not only would visitors connect with underwater sites via “telepresence,” but JASON would also provide networking possibilities with other institutions across Canada and the United States.⁶

The adoption of such technologies was justified by a popular pedagogical turn toward active, experiential learning philosophies. The idea of real-time technologies, which facilitated interaction with visitors, was grafted onto such ideals. For example, CMC consultant Tom Sherman, an artist/performer who utilized electronic media in his work, encouraged the museum to adopt technologies to enable a live exchange of information with visitors. He argued,

Regardless of the celebration of dialogic models of pedagogy and communication amongst museum administrators, there was palpable reticence amongst CMC staff, who did not have the expertise to operate or maintain new educational devices. The rate at which first-generation technologies like interactive touch screens would become obsolete was also unclear, leading to further hesitation. Alsford was frustrated with sluggish attitudes toward technology adoption as the CMC's debut neared, and he wrote to MacDonald,

As Alsford's comments suggest, he, like many in the museum industry, were feeling the pressures to make museums more appealing to general audiences through new media. Limited funding factored into building concerns over the museum's distracted audience, and Alsford and MacDonald worried about the tendency of museums to act as followers when compared with other institutions and the “commercial marketplace” (Alsford, 1991, p. 13). Like Marshall McLuhan (Playboy Interview, 1969), they believed that resistance to new media was futile, and the only way to succeed was to accept, if not embrace, the maelstrom. “21st century audiences” encountered high-technology devices routinely, not only in theme parks but in banal spaces in their “schooling, recreation, and work experiences” and had come to expect them in public places (MacDonald & Alsford, n.d.). MacDonald and Alsford saw the “entertainment industry” as a “competitor with the museum world for the discretionary leisure time of the public,” and the “power of television, film and video to inform, sway opinions and shape cultural consensus” was “enormous” (MacDonald & Alsford, 1991, p. 308). They wrote,

Surely, such a philosophy about the education/entertainment crossover justified the inclusion of the IMAX theater, which would help to supplement the CMC's federal funding (Riley, 1996).⁹ The museum was the first in the world to integrate a dome with IMAX screens measuring seven stories, allowing for 180 degrees of vision and including 13,000 watts of power (CMC, “About the Theatre”).

In addition to gee-whiz technologies like the IMAX theater, the “tools and techniques” of competition consisted of the commercial model in which the museum now saw itself. In that vein, CMC leaders suggested that museums consider information, rather than artifacts, as their “primary resource, or commodity” (MacDonald & Alsford, 1991). They argued that this perspective positioned museums centrally within the information age, “in which information-based services are expected to be a key to economic prosperity and to social status – two things necessary, in the real world, to museums to ensure their effectiveness, if not their survival” (MacDonald & Alsford, 1991, p. 307). The museum, or “information utility” (MacDonald & Alsford, 1991), was more than just a public service, according to the museum's leaders; it would need to compete for audiences.

The discourse of competition occurred frequently in planning documents and reflected the CMC's desperate efforts to remain relevant amongst very different types of institutions. While the CMC certainly took its cues from other museums, it also compared itself with profit-driven players with much larger budgets. In a 1983 meeting, CMC staff noted that Disney's Epcot Center had 127 media units, five of which were interactive, or touch screen.¹⁰ While many US institutions enjoyed the financial support of corporate sponsors, and the differences in orientation between the institutions were obvious, CMC leaders believed they were fighting the good fight for the hearts and minds of the visiting public. If the Epcot Center symbolized the American dream, the CMC would have to prove that Canada had not been left behind. However, as will be discussed in the next section, the CMC's priorities shifted as debates over Indigenous representation transformed the museum landscape.

Museum Practice and Indigenous (Re)presentation

Discussions about the CMC's First Peoples Hall (FPH) began as the Museum of Man was making its transition into the Museum of Civilization (McGhee, cited in McCarthy, 2000a), though it would be nearly 14 years after the opening in 1989 before the FPH was completed. Around the same time, controversy over Indigenous exhibition came to a head with the infamous Glenbow Museum exhibit, The Spirit Sings: Artistic Traditions of Canada's First Peoples. Contention over the exhibit along with global trends greatly influenced plans for the FPH, and the CMC decided to scrap initial ideas begun in the 1980s, deeming them “too traditional” (Lofaro, 2003).

The Spirit Sings was part of the 1988 Winter Olympic art program and featured a historical theme relating to the “cultural and artistic heritage of Canada,” in which Indigenous artifacts and cultures were on display (Wilson, 1992, p. 6). None of the six guest curators involved in the exhibit were themselves Indigenous. Although response amongst museum professionals centered on the exhibit's lack of Indigenous consultation, a number of other issues had actually fueled tensions with Indigenous groups. The Alberta Lubicon Lake Band of Cree was in a long-standing struggle with the Canadian and Alberta governments over recognition of their ancestral lands, while Shell Oil, which had been a major corporate sponsor of The Spirit Sings, was exploring the same contested lands for natural resources (Wilson, 1992, p. 6). The band protested the exhibit to draw attention to their claim and concerns over health and environmental degradation. The Spirit Sings came to stand for all that was wrong in the world of Indigenous exhibition. However, while response to the exhibit in the museum community addressed complaints about Indigenous participation in curation, it overlooked the original grievances of the Lubicon about their land claims and Shell Oil. The focus shifted primarily to issues of representation rather than the other major underlying concerns.¹¹

The CMC was heavily involved in shifting museological practices as employees like archaeologist Robert McGhee worked with Indigenous groups to rethink collaborative models, and the museum sponsored a symposium on Indigenous curation. A related Task Force on Museums and First Peoples sponsored by the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) and the Canadian Museums Association (CMA) worked from 1989 to 1991 on potential curatorial solutions. Its mission was to “develop an ethical framework and strategies by which Aboriginal peoples and cultural institutions can work together to represent Aboriginal history and culture” (Task Force on Museums and First Peoples, 1992, p. 1). A number of recommendations resulted from the symposium and the AFN/CMA Task Force and were outlined in a book titled Turning the Page. The Task Force strongly recommended that there be (1) increased “involvement of Aboriginal peoples in the interpretation of their culture and history by cultural institutions” (2) “improved access to museum collections by Aboriginal peoples”; and (3) “the repatriation of artifacts and human remains” (Task Force on Museums and First Peoples, 1992, p. 1). In addition, the Task Force recommended “consultation be considered a necessary part of the development process of any exhibition or representation of First Peoples in museums” (p. 19).

Several CMC employees, who had been involved in the AFN/CMA Task Force, were also key to the planning of the FPH, which not surprisingly reflected many of the recommendations laid out in Turning the Page. In 1991 CMC Director George MacDonald dedicated the 20,000-square-foot space behind the museum's Grand Hall to the FPH (Harrison, 2003).¹² The Grand Hall, one of the museum's inaugural exhibits, showcased Indigenous cultures, while the FPH would cover more contemporary topics. The latter exhibit would reflect newer museological trends, demonstrating both ideological and technological updates to the museum. As recommended by the AFN/CMA Task Force, Indigenous consultation was key to FPH planning, and Indigenous participants served on several committees including the Architectural Team, the Curatorial Team, the Support Team, the Advisory Committee, and the Consultation Committee, which was assembled based on suggestions from curators (McGhee, cited in McCarthy, 2000a, p. 19). In addition, Indigenous employees like Plains Cree/Blackfoot artist Gerald McMaster, who served as a co-chair early in the process, were key to the shaping of the FPH. Planning would take more than 10 years, and while a core group of Indigenous consultants would maintain a fairly consistent presence throughout its development, the involvement of several CMC employees was more erratic as some, like McMaster, left the museum for other opportunities (Harrison, 2003; Phillips, 2006).

The Consultation Committee assisted with content themes, principles, and architectural guidelines.¹³ “Principles for Development” reflected the focus on representation and Indigenous participation and suggested, “The Hall will present the history, culture, and current realities of aboriginal peoples in the voice(s) of aboriginal peoples.”¹⁴

The FPH had very ambitious representational goals and, according to Consultation Committee notes, planned to represent “All First Peoples of Canada [...] including those following traditional and contemporary paths, and living in both rural and urban environments.”¹⁵ In addition, the CMC was quite concerned with disrupting misconceptions about aboriginal people such as the idea that they are “remnants of an obsolete way of life.”¹⁶ Media technologies played a central role in serving the goals outlined by consultation committee members, especially the articulation of a sense of Indigenous voice and the use of contemporary Indigenous testimonials to disrupt stereotypes, many of which had been developed through popular media.

The FPH Master Plan suggested that media would be central to representing Indigenous people in contemporary lifestyles, starting with the Welcome Area into the exhibit. It suggested that the Welcome Area “should be heavily dependent on electronic audio-visual elements, which are appropriate for an exhibit stressing the contemporary nature of First Peoples societies.”¹⁷ Moreover, the document suggested that the inclusion of media would make for convenient updating to include topical issues. Similarly, Mohawk Consultation Committee member Wendell Beauvais suggested this area would “affect the mood” of the visitor and “should provide the visitor with a tactile experience that will set them up for the visit through the hall proper.”¹⁸

The use of media was consistent with the visions laid out by CMC leaders George MacDonald and Stephen Alsford (1989), who clearly celebrated new media and the pedagogic and technological discourses of liveness and interactivity. As the next section will discuss, these technological foundations were conflated with Indigenous representational goals in the FPH, which were centered on demonstrating participation in representation and contemporary lifeways.

Media Technologies and the First Peoples Hall

The CMC's focus on liveness, experience, and Indigenous (self-)representation is apparent beginning with the FPH Welcome Area. When compared with the Grand Hall, which visitors must traverse before entering the newer exhibit, the space is much darker, and this becomes immediately clear as visitors move through the entrance. While the Grand Hall is lined with 365 ft × 50 ft floor to ceiling windows, allowing for views of the Ottawa River and Parliament Hill and for ambient lighting to flood its open spaces, the FPH is much more cavernous and curves into a number of winding, partitioned-off areas (CMC, “Grand Hall”). While the Grand Hall is more structured around life-sized props, including totem poles and six replicas of Northwest Coast homes built from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, new media technologies are more central in the First Peoples Hall for creating the sense of liveness discussed in earlier planning. According to Alsford (1991), such props or “environmental reconstruction” encouraged “role-playing” amongst visitors, which he believed promoted cultural understanding. The Grand Hall's focus on traditional culture and its inclusion of very few updated media devices juxtapose with the flashing images of the FPH's screens, which feature testimonials from contemporary Indigenous people against the backdrops of their homelands. One of the important functions of the FPH's mediated texts is to demonstrate Indigenous participation in narrating the exhibit in the first person.

A large screen lining the dim FPH Welcome Area is one of the first features coming into view through the entrance, and a film's aural cues and flashing visuals draw the attention of visitors in that direction. The film features Indigenous people from several communities commenting on tradition and their contemporary lifestyles. Each clip is filmed in the individual's respective community or place of work, from a medical clinic to a First Nations school. The film assumes an interview style in which the interviewees appear to be responding to the question, “What do you want people to understand about being an Aboriginal person in Canada today?” (Phillips & Phillips, 2005, p. 62). However, the interviewer is not present in the shots, and the questions prompting the responses are never heard. Therefore, it appears as though the individuals featured in the film are speaking directly to the visitor. Although the statements are prerecorded, visitors are captured in a live communicative act by assuming the position of the intended recipient as they move through the Welcome Area space. The realism achieved through this style of film helps to disguise the editorial process involved in its creation. Moreover, because the Indigenous participants are seen in fairly contemporary contexts, filmed in the early 2000s, the screen provides a sense of liveness when compared with the otherwise inanimate objects included throughout the museum.

The segments were shot by several Indigenous video producers throughout Canada, who asked the same scripted interview questions of participants but attempted to prompt a “spontaneous” response by encouraging participants to talk about themselves.¹⁹ Importantly, the filmic style used in the Welcome Video is unlike the documentary style of films often included in outmoded natural history museums; these older films were treated as scientific or anthropological research instruments and generally depicted Native people in their natural contexts while their behaviors were interpreted by non-Native narrators. In such films, Indigenous people were generally not allowed to speak directly to viewers without expert framing and interpretation. The videos in the FPH are self-referential to former museum practice because they display a new genre of filmic museum texts, demonstrating one of the ways in which the CMC signifies its reflexivity about older forms of museum representation.

While many of the themes in the exhibit are contemporary, planners were careful to illustrate the ways in which traditions and connection with environment continue in modern contexts through the use of media. For example, as visitors move past the introductory section of the museum, a longer video titled Relationship to the Land plays in a quiet corner, where seating is provided. In this living room-like area, designed as a “contemplative space,” members from Indigenous communities throughout Canada make statements about “the relationship of aboriginal identity to the ‘land.’”²⁰ Like the Welcome Video, a central communicative intent for this film was to “Involve aboriginal people in the creation of the product.”²¹ Indigenous participation itself is also on exhibit in this area as interviewees speak directly to viewers without a narrator interpreting or speaking on their behalf.²²

Contemporary Indigenous connections with tradition are further demonstrated in the Diversity and Origins section of the FPH. In this area, oral traditions are articulated via several forms of media including text panels, an art installation, film, and an audio storytelling booth. It includes one of the FPH's two theaters, in which a film recounts the Mi'kmaq creation story, “Where We Come From,” as told by Stephen Augustine of Big Cove, New Brunswick. This film depicts a male elder sitting around a campfire with several companions, who listen attentively as he recounts the creation story. As it is told by a narrative voiceover, which actually speaks over the elder, the film is acted out in several shifting scenes. Periodically, the film returns to the campfire and its occupants. The theater is dark and circular, and because its seating faces the semicircle of the campfire, viewers are positioned as though they are sitting there with the actors. Therefore, it is as though visitors are either closely observing the event or are part of the group to which the story is being told. In addition, because the actors in the campfire scene are dressed in contemporary clothing, unlike the actors playing out the oral tradition, the point of departure could be the present moment. Due to the temporal moment and narration, a sense of liveness is conveyed with “Where We Come From,” as with the Relationship to the Land and Welcome videos.

Visitors are again part of a communicative act in an audio storytelling booth where they can listen to stories from various Indigenous oral traditions via earphones. They include themes about the Mortal World, the Sky World, and the Under World from different groups.²³ Curators opted to “Use aboriginal readers whenever possible” and aimed “for grassroots rather than trained voices.”²⁴ The effect is another performance in which listeners are positioned as the direct receivers of first-person narratives from Indigenous participants, and the interpretive intermediary and frameworks appear to be absent. The medium appears to be appropriate for the content, as a reviewer in the Ottawa Citizen suggested:

As the reviewer suggests, the visitor experiences this section of the exhibit through a number of aural and affective cues, or live mediation.

While the first two zones of the FPH are much more focused on contemporary themes, Zone 3 focuses on Survival and Cooperation in Ancient History. However, the historical themes addressed therein are also placed in modern contexts. Five themes organize the space into different “environments.”²⁵ Combining lighting, architecture, artifacts, life-sized objects, and diorama-like settings with projections, aural cues, and short films, this space recreates several regions in which Indigenous people lived historically and continue to reside in contemporary times. Large screens are used for projecting changing landscapes in the background, setting the stage for an Arctic village, a plains bull run, a maritime campground, and an Iroquois long-house. The backgrounds for the first four areas change simultaneously with the seasons, as do the sounds heard overhead. For example, when the projected images show snow on the ground in four of the environments, the sound of wind whines through the exhibit, providing a multi-sensory experience for the visitor. Spring brings with it different images for each space as well as the new sounds of chirping birds and the hum of insects. Though text panels explaining historical migratory patterns and activities accompany each of the five spaces, the changing environments in this section of the exhibit play an important role in facilitating the feeling of a dynamic and live space.

In addition to its historical background and transforming spaces, this section includes short films placing each of the environments in more contemporary contexts via five television monitors with earphones. The short films shown in this area address controversial topics such as the famous 1990 Oka standoff between Mohawks and authorities over land. Another video discusses the legal battles faced by Inuit Arctic hunters for their whaling rights, and shows footage from the 1990s in which a group harvested its first bowhead whale after the courts ruled in their favor. The five areas present long, historical backdrops while at the same time allowing for critical commentary on the effects of colonization and ongoing struggles over sovereignty and the revival of traditions. Though a narrator interprets the short videos, a number of interviews are included in which Indigenous participants speak directly to the camera, and the views presented are more sympathetic to the Indigenous agents involved in the conflicts.

As visitors exit the exhibit through the final zone of the museum, Arrival of Europeans and Modern Existence, there is one last notable media installation, a small theater featuring a 10-minute film titled “Affirmation.” As its title suggests, the themes of the film on “contemporary Aboriginal people and perspectives” are very positive and uplifting.²⁶ A number of Indigenous people such as elders, successful professionals, and schoolchildren make statements like, “you can do anything you put your mind to,” and upbeat music plays in the background. The film also takes place in a realist documentary style, and it spans a number of locations and activities with fast-action shots and montage. While the final areas in the FPH address some of the tumultuous results of colonization, the final sentiment expressed through the film's affect-evoking images and sounds suggests to visitors in the Indigenous first person that everything will be alright. It provides one last live and uplifting communicative act as visitors exit.

As the next section suggests, the CMC's emphasis on media technologies was not lost on museum reviewers. The following description of FPH reception in the local popular press reveals the ways in which the ideals of liveness, experience, and representation not only helped to constitute the FPH, but also circulated in popular discourse, which often conflated such concepts with media use and adoption. The proliferation of such ideals suggests they are powerful and commonly held values, which extended beyond museum administrators and planners to public expectations of contemporary exhibition. By identifying omissions in the coverage, we can better understand which issues were not explored with the privileging of visitor experience.

Reception of the FPH

Not surprisingly, reviews of the FPH in local popular media and Indigenous publications largely reflected a celebratory attitude toward Indigenous participation and the use of multimedia in the exhibit. While several reviews focused on visitor experience, very few mentioned the more critical issues shaping the FPH. For example, on the CBO-FM program “Ottawa Morning,” reviewer Alvina Ruprecht praised the audio storytelling booth, stating, “It was really very well conceived, so you were almost there, living the experience but also sensing what the spiritual experience might have been.”²⁷ Ruprecht cited the sense of liveness and experience facilitated by the exhibit and emphatically remarked that it was “very different” from The Spirit Sings. However, she made no mention of the conditions spawning protests of the former exhibit or whether they had been resolved.²⁸

Several popular press articles were also heavily constituted by official CMC discourse and noted the sense of Indigenous voice and environment in the exhibit. Tony Lofaro's article in the Ottawa Citizen noted the importance of “extensive planning with aboriginal groups” and provided a quotation from David Morrison, the CMC Director of Archaeology: “This is the First Peoples Hall and we wanted it to have, in part, a First Peoples voice” (Lofaro, 2003, p. D8). Similarly, another article in the National Post suggested that the museum provides a balance between Indigenous voices and scientific perspectives, and its title was appropriated from the comments of a CMC official: “Neither voice drowns out the other” (Cowan, 2003, p. AL1). Denis Armstrong of the Ottawa Sun wrote that the exhibit “inspires awe,” and noted the “eerie realism” with which “the exhibition recreates the natural environments of First Nation people” (Armstrong, 2003, p. 28). Armstrong devoted several lines to quotations from Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation President and CEO Victor Rabinovitch. Similarly, Inuit Art Quarterly included interviews with spokespeople Robert McGhee and Gerald McMaster prior to the opening (McCarthy 2000a, 2000b). The journal's case studies included celebratory statements from the cocurators on the consultation process (McGhee, cited in McCarthy, 2000a).

Very few stories mentioned the FPH's more critical omissions, including the continuing struggle of the Lubicon Lake Band of Cree over land rights and a newer conflict between the CMC and the Algonquin Kitigan Zibi First Nations, who were launching complaints against the museum for its possession of human remains from the Ottawa Valley. The museum had been reluctant to repatriate the remains because they carried “significant scientific data” (“Tonight on Citydesk,” 2003, p. B4). Though coverage in the Indigenous newspaper Windspeaker on the opening of the First Peoples Hall was very celebratory (Andrews Miller, 2003, p. 25), another article on the same page of that issue discussed the Kitigan Zibi “tug of war over remains” with the CMC (Logan, 2003, p. 25). However, Windspeaker did not disparage the exhibit for its failure to address the topic of repatriation, and it did not rehash the AFN/CMA Task Force recommendation that museums increase their efforts to repatriate human remains (Task Force on Museums and First Peoples, 1992, p. 1). Moreover, neither story noted the irony that one of the first sections of the FPH Welcome Area features a greeting from the Kitigan Zibi reminding visitors that they are standing on Algonquin land. While the exhibit is legitimated by Indigenous participation and representation through the inclusion of the Kitigan Zibi statement, it avoids the more polemical topics concerning the group.

Like the popular press, coverage of the FPH in Windspeaker was laden with quotations from the CMC. Andrea Laforet, Director of Ethnology and Cultural Studies, is cited several times, and her remarks reflect an anticipation of concerns held by Indigenous audiences. Laforet highlights the involvement of First Nations people in FPH planning, mentorship programs for Indigenous students at the CMC, outreach efforts and publications, and even a program related to “sacred material” in which “First Nations are invited to view items from their history and identify special care and handling” (Laforet, quoted in Andrews Miller, 2003, p. 25). Reviews in non-Native popular media focused more on visitor experience, gee-whiz media technology, and curatorial participation than the outreach programs directly impacting Indigenous people. However, the theme of Indigenous curatorial participation was emphasized in both Indigenous and popular media in lieu of other concerns, suggesting an overall focus on representation.

Reviews from academics in scholarly journals reflected more critical and analytical commentary on the FPH. For example, while a review from Métis scholar Olive Patricia Dickason (2004) is mostly descriptive, she notes that the exhibit fails to address current problems, “which has encouraged the criticism that politically, the overall presentation of the First Peoples Hall is ‘thin’” (p. 360). Similarly, in her review in Anthropologica, Julia Harrison (2003) noted that the museum did not take a strong position on the controversy over government boarding schools. While also congratulating the new museological paradigm demonstrated by the CMC, Ruth Phillips (2006) points out the fact that senior administration positions at the museum are not held by Indigenous people as with the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, which is managed separately from the rest of the museum complex. The numerous quotations from non-Native CMC administrators in popular and Indigenous media reviews of the FPH reflect the CMC's differing administrative structure.

Regardless of such critiques by academics, overall reception of the FPH in local media was celebratory. The exhibit largely escaped criticism while reproducing the discourses of museum leaders themselves, including notions of self-representation through a focus on collaboration and the ideals of liveness and visitor experience.

Conclusion

At the same time museums faced the problematization of Indigenous representational practices in the 1980s and 1990s, CMC administrators were intrigued with innovations in place-based media. New media adoption would help the museum facilitate an experience of liveness for visitors, and pedagogic discourses celebrating interactivity justified their inclusion. Museum leaders believed that the “tools and techniques” of the entertainment industry might help renew visitor interest, and they adopted the discourse of competition through which they compared themselves with market-driven, media-laden sites (MacDonald & Alsford, 1991, p. 308). This combination meant that the troubles of representational practices and institutional relevance were conflated, and concerns with colonial ideology were pinned on obsolete representational media. In this way, new media were conveniently touted as solutions to representational, economic, and pedagogic troubles in the CMC and First Peoples Hall. Indigenous concerns such as the land claims of the Lubicon Cree were omitted as outmoded forms of representation were problematized and visitor experience became central.

As Indigenous collaboration became a priority in exhibitionary practice, representation and Indigenous participation themselves became the subjects of exhibition and, along with visitor experience, were the teloi of museum media. FPH planners used new media in attempts to bring disembodied Indigenous peoples and cultures to life in a contemporary and interactive manner for the benefit of general audiences and in order to signify the museum's reflexive approach. Indigenous people speak in the first person to the audience about their cultures via FPH media, and this approach facilitates the experience of liveness for the visitor. Media appear to enable seamless communication from Indigenous participants to visitors, making them feel as though they are “almost there, living the experience.”²⁹ In many ways, the FPH achieves media immediacy or transparency, which Bolter and Grusin (2000) describe as “ignoring or denying the presence of the medium and act of mediation” (p. 11). At the same time, the FPH expresses the “desire to get past the limits of representation and to achieve the real,” which becomes “the viewer's experience” (Bolter & Grusin, 2000, p. 53). The real for FPH visitors is the experience of taking part in what appears to be a live communicative act with Indigenous participants.

However, as David Turnbull (2000) suggests, representational devices are “necessarily selective” (p. 99). Both the museum and its media mask the silences created through their use. Reviews in popular and Indigenous newspapers continued these silences as they celebrated the opening of the FPH, but the struggles over the repatriation of human remains and Indigenous homelands, which had spanned decades and first inspired the AFN/CMA Task Force, were long forgotten. Indigenous representation and visitor experience became the foci of news stories just as they were central to the exhibit.

Moreover, regardless of celebratory discourses, new media in museums can still lock Indigenous people into static contexts. Some of the reasons include the rapid rate at which new media devices obsolesce and the slow pace at which museums adapt due to their bureaucratic nature. Museums must strategize and budget years in advance for exhibits, and it is difficult to make anything look contemporary under such circumstances. In this time, staff members and priorities change. Take, for example, the Origins Theatre where the Mi'kmaq creation story, “Where We Come From,” still plays, nearly a decade after the opening of the exhibit. The same collections of objects are still on exhibit in glass cases outside of the theater as well, regardless of the intention to show a “diversity of origin/creation stories” and to rotate associated artifacts at least once a year.³⁰ If the idea of using media is to avoid locking Native people into one static context, the “Where We Come From” example indicates that such efforts can be abandoned once an exhibit is functional, especially in light of budgetary constraints.

FPH planning documents indicate that curators believed media productions could frequently rotate, making for dynamic representations of Indigenous cultures. However, the exchange and updating, which would ostensibly depict Indigenous cultures as less static, never occurred. Each of the media productions, which largely address topics from the early 1990s, remains the same. Prerecordings are static by nature and contradict the goals of articulating Native identity as contemporary and fluid. Moreover, museum media can feel comfortable for non-Native visitors experiencing a twinge of White guilt, but interpretive context and knowledge can also be more closely monitored by Indigenous people within the context of tribal museums (Isaac, 2007; Verran & Christie, 2007).

With each new permutation, media technologies are heralded for their democratizing potential, but they obsolesce very quickly. In addition, each new media adaptation brings its own representational issues, and there will always be trouble in bounding Indigenous representation so closely with new media. While Pauline Wakeham (2008) suggests that taxidermic semiosis extended beyond the diorama to early cinema, new media in exhibits like the FPH share some similar problems. There are of course important distinctions in that Indigenous people were not invited to share authority over interpretations of their cultures in museums of the past. However, dioramas, mannequins, and taxidermic animals, like new media in museums today, were similarly meant to evoke a sense of liveness and to create an experience for non-Native visitors. While today's new media use is justified through discourses of pedagogy and competition, it shares similar goals, which privilege visitor experience while overlooking other contemporary concerns such as the reasons the exhibit The Spirit Sings was protested by the First Peoples to begin with.

This chapter was not designed to minimize the importance of representing Indigenous people in contemporary contexts. The FPH demonstrates some opportunities for Indigenous people to address struggles with authorities over land rights, the lasting effects of colonization, and environmental concern (Brady, 2011b). There are also important lessons that can still be taken away from conflicts like the 1990 Oka standoff. However, such political issues tend to be rooted firmly in the past through dated footage rather than addressed in the contemporary moment in the FPH. These articulations have remained the same since the museum's opening in 2003. Media texts were considered by museum planners to be more adaptable to changing issues and conducive to a sense of liveness, but have remained static, even in this “museum for the twenty-first century.” Museum professionals will undoubtedly continue their quest for the latest in communication technologies, but as the FPH demonstrates, the focus on liveness and representation itself can distract from other important issues and silence the longer stories and problems inherent in such ambitious sites.

NOTES

1 It is useful at this point to outline the concepts of liveness and interactivity as understood in this chapter. John Durham Peters (1999) points out that as electric media developed, they had the capacity to record and transmit life, and therefore the relationship between liveness and media like motion pictures, radio, and television was naturalized. In particular, those media capable of simultaneous broadcasting became associated with liveness, where the “contingency” of transmitting a new event was still possible (Peters, 1999, p. 218). Interactivity, in a basic sense, can be defined as “the degree to which participants in a communication process have control over, and can exchange roles in their mutual discourse” (Hanssen, Jankowski, & Etienne, 1996, p. 61, citing Williams, Rice, & Rogers, 1988).

2 Videodisc Project Meeting, September 22, 1983 [meeting notes]. Stephen Alsford Collection. MCC/CMC Archives Docs INSTIT I-409, 99-I0027 box 2f1. Gatineau. CMC Archives.

3 Interactive, n.d. [white paper]. Stephen Alsford Collection. MCC/CMC Archives Docs INSTIT I-409, 99-I0027 box 2f2, p. 1. Gatineau. CMC Archives.

4 Digital Equipment Corporation, 1983 [brochure]. Stephen Alsford Collection. MCC/CMC Archives Docs INSTIT I-409, 99-I0027 box 2f1. Gatineau. CMC Archives.

5 Travel Report: Interactive Image Technologies LTD. (I.I. T.), Toronto, n.d. [note stapled to report]. Stephen Alsford Collection. MCC/CMC Archives Docs INSTIT I-409, 99-I0027 box 2f2, p. 1. Gatineau. CMC Archives.

6 JASON Project Transmission Plan, May 1990 [JASON brochure]. Stephen Alsford Collection. MCC/CMC Archives Docs INSTIT I-409. Gatineau. CMC Archives.

7 Sherman, T., May 20, 1990. The Use of Media by the Canadian Museum of Civilization: Research and Recommendations [report]. Stephen Alsford Collection. MCC/CMC Archives Docs INSTIT I-409, 99-I0027 box 2f4, p. 21. Gatineau. CMC Archives.

8 Alsford, S., 1988. Demonstration of Museum of Mankind Interactive Video [memo]. Stephen Alsford Collection. MCC/CMC Archives Docs INSTIT I-409, 99-I0027 box 2f2. Gatineau. CMC Archives.

9 The Canadian Museum of Civilization at a Glance – 2002 [information sheet]. Vertical Files, MCC-CMC-First Peoples Hall. Gatineau. CMC Library.

10 Videodisc Project Meeting, September 22, 1983 [meeting notes]. Stephen Alsford Collection. MCC/CMC Archives Docs INSTIT I-409, 99-I0027 box 2f1. Gatineau. CMC Archives.

11 According to the Lubicon Lake Nation website, the group's concerns remain unresolved. See Lubicon Lake Nation, http://www.LubiconLakeNation.com/

12 The First Peoples Hall – Project Background, n.d. [information sheet]. Vertical Files, MCC-CMC-First Peoples Hall. Gatineau. CMC Library.

13 Draft First Peoples Hall: Committees, teams, advisory groups, consultants, August 3, 1999 [draft document]. First Peoples Hall Master Plan and Correspondence. ACQ. 2003-1-0029.G3 box 2. Gatineau. CMC Archives.

14 Canadian Museum of Civilization: First Peoples Hall – Consultation Committee Phase I Report, June 27, 1994 [report]. First Peoples Hall Master Plan and Correspondence. ACQ: 2003-1-0029.G4. Gatineau. CMC Archives.

15 Principles for Development of the First Peoples Hall, Canadian Museum of Civilization First Peoples Hall, Consultation Committee: Phase I Report, June 27, 1994 [document]. First Peoples Hall Master Plan and Correspondence. ACQ: 2003-1-0029.G4 box 2. Gatineau. CMC Archives.

16 Communication Intent for We are People of the Present World Zone 2: We Are Still Here – General, n.d. [document]. First Peoples Hall Master Plan and Correspondence. ACQ: 2003-1-0029 box 2. Gatineau. CMC Archives.

17 Exhibit Master Plan: First Peoples Hall: Canadian Museum of Civilization, September 6, 1996 [document]. First Peoples Hall Master Plan and Correspondence. ACQ: 2003-1-0029 box 2, p. 5. Gatineau. CMC Archives.

18 Preliminary Storyline – First Peoples Hall, n.d. [document]. First Peoples Hall Master Plan and Correspondence. ACQ: 2003-1-0029 box 2. Gatineau. CMC Archives.

19 FPH Audiovisual Products Report #1, April 8, 2002 [report]. ACQ: 2003-1-0029. Gatineau. CMC Archives.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid., p. 4.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid.

25 The First Peoples Hall – The Story, n.d. [information sheet]. Vertical Files, MCC-CMC-First Peoples Hall. Gatineau. CMC Library.

26 Ibid., p. 20.

27 Review of the First People Hall at Museum of Civilization, February 3, 2003. Ottawa Morning, CBO-FM, 08:22 [transcript]. CMCC Daily Press Clippings, February 7, 2003. First Peoples Hall. Gatineau. CMC Library.

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid.

30 Bridges, D., n.d. [memo]. First Peoples Hall Zone 2. ACQ: 2003-1-0029. Gatineau. CMC Archives.

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