Thinking through the Canadian Museum for Human Rights

Figure 1.

The Canadian Museum for Human Rights is shown behind a tipi on Thursday, September 18, 2014, ahead of its official opening on Friday.

Photograph: Black Powder / Red Power Media. Used with permission.

The National Museum, Distributed

“This ice you’re standing on, this is what you’ll be drinking down in Winnipeg next spring. For you, this is life. For people here, it can be death.” I am shivering along with a dozen Winnipeg-based academics and students listening to Cuyler Cotton, a policy analyst and media relations specialist, in the community of Shoal Lake No. 40 on a mid-January day, looking out across the frozen lake that separates the local band of Ojibway First Nations, inhabitants of Shoal Lake, from access to the nearest highway. One hundred years ago the Canadian government sold this portion of First Nation terrain to the city of Winnipeg to build an aqueduct to supply the urban residents with clean water. As collateral damage, the Shoal Lake No. 40 peninsula was sliced into an island. This intrusion into the landscape left the local people to drink boiled or bottled water and traverse the lake by boat or winter road—treacherous in late fall and early spring with the insufficiently frozen surface—and living amid their own trash and sewage, which leaches into their water supply.

The people of Shoal Lake No. 40 have struggled to draw attention to their community’s plight for years. They were elated—in savvy political terms—when they heard that Antoine Predock, the star architect of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR), would feature the theme of “healing waters” in the museum’s eye-catching, $351 million building, to invoke Indigenous values. Nowhere in the museum, however, is there a reference to the dark side of these “healing” waters—the life-threatening burden placed on the Shoal Lake No. 40 community so that clean water is at the fingertips of Winnipeg residents. Shoal Lake’s activists used the occasion of the CMHR’s opening weekend to highlight what they saw as rank hypocrisy. They transformed their community into a “living museum”—billed as the Museum for Canadian Human Rights Violations—welcoming visitors to see the island and its vulnerabilities firsthand, complete with a brochure, website, and Facebook page.¹

The Canadian Museum for Human Rights, the first national museum built outside Canada’s capital, opened to the public on September 20, 2014, despite having completed only four of eleven galleries.² If by three months later the permanent exhibition was complete, the museum’s best-known feature remains the controversy it has managed to generate. Shoal Lake No. 40 is not the only group to capitalize on the media coverage surrounding the museum’s fraught birthing; protesting groups have dotted the grassy grounds around the museum before and since its opening. Some of these have criticized the CMHR directly, such as the other Indigenous parties who sat by pitched tipis and tents on opening weekend, the community groups who signed an open boycott letter protesting the museum’s lack of attention to World War I internment camps, or the creators of a petition to revoke a Canadian mining company’s “friend of the museum” title because of accusations of violence perpetrated against Indigenous Mayan people.³ Others have used the museum as a staging ground to leverage visibility for their own causes, like a pro-Palestinian contingent whose July 2014 protest march began, symbolically, at the CMHR’s entrance, or anti-abortion activists who tried to engage the captive audience in the visitors’ waiting line on the museum’s opening day with signs demanding rights for the unborn.

This array was unsurprising, as the very idea of the museum had been plagued with conflict long before its doors opened. Countless press articles over the years and at least two scholarly volumes draw attention to its major detractors and take the museum to task for its many perceived flaws.⁴ Central to the fray were the intercommunity disputes that inevitably broke out over [End Page...