The Politics of History in National Museums: Nation-Making in the Harper and Trudeau Governments

Umbrin Bukan, York University

Modern public museums are crucial cultural institutions of modernity; they have played a significant and constitutive role in the nation building project. National museums, particularly, have historically been recognized as the authoritative holders of the nation’s cultural and historical heritage. This paper critically examines national museums as official houses of history and argues that they shape a nation’s history and identity and (re)produce and circulate dominant norms and values. It does so by analyzing the politics of history and identity in the Canadian Museum of History under the last two Canadian governments. It first investigates the significant changes the museum underwent under the Conservative Harper government and its vision to re-frame and re-present Canadian history and identity in militaristic and monarchical terms (Aronczyk&Brady, 2015). It then examines how the current Liberal Trudeau government’s vision of a progressive post-national Canada, one with “no core identity”, as the newly elected Prime Minister declared in 2015, has impacted the museum. In this way, this paper examines the role of the museum in the nation building project and argues that national museums are more than the nation’s attic. While generally perceived as neutral institutions that substantiate the historical truth through the visible and the tangible, they disseminate a particular understanding of what the nation and belonging to it means. Museums such as the Canadian Museum of History tell the story of the nation and display its official national identity narrative. The paper goes on to explore the primary concern of this conference – trust and distrust in historical sources. Considering the role of the state in the production of history and identity in museums and the historical entanglement of museums with colonialism, it briefly questions how they can be decolonized and reimagined as truth tellers with less constructed and more inclusive and fluid narratives.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 66. The Politics of Historical Memory and Knowledge Production