F.5.1 Unsettling Pioneer Museums in Alberta: What Happens When Senior Volunteers Help Indigenous and Settler Scholars Transform a Local Museum?

• Lianne McTavish & Skye Haggerty, University of Alberta

There are over 315 museums currently operating in Alberta, and 168 of them are devoted to pioneers. Often located in small towns and rural areas, pioneer museums are grassroots organizations that celebrate settler colonialism. In Alberta, their exhibition spaces feature the material culture used by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century (mostly but not exclusively white) settlers. Accompanying texts relate stories of pioneers who traveled west to “civilize” a desolate terrain. This narrative is nevertheless undermined by references in both the museums’ written records and material collections to violent possession and Indigenous resistance. Unsettling Pioneer Museums in Alberta is a SSHRC-funded project that brings together Indigenous and settler scholars to locate, interrogate, and highlight such disruptions of pioneer narratives. This process requires collaboration between multiple groups with diverse knowledges, including museum staff, which at such small museums is primarily composed of skilled retirees who lack “official” museum training.

For the past year, a team of Indigenous and settler scholars has been working with volunteer staff to intervene in and reshape the Camrose and District Centennial Museum. In the proposed conference presentation, two members of that team will discuss how our process challenges conventional assumptions about heritage preservation, authenticity, and museum expertise. What happens when volunteer staff members who have built the museum and hold a thorough knowledge of its contents enable academic “outsiders” to bring much needed funding into their organization with the aim of contesting the museum’s founding narrative? What happens when a Métis graduate student knows far more about Indigenous history and culture than does her settler “supervisor?” Our collaborative conference presentation will consider how various hierarchies are being challenged and renegotiated within the museum in Camrose, while offering suggestions about how to think about, but probably never fully resolve, inequalities in the ongoing transformation of pioneer museums.

keywords: Indigenous curating, pioneer museums, collaboration, museum volunteers, expertise

F.5.2 Sharing expertise and success with the community

• Carla Ayukawa & Fiona Wright, Carleton University Art Gallery

Institutions have been moving the needle forward in serving diverse communities in their access to, and inclusion in, GLAMs. This case study shares the recent experiences of Carleton University Art Gallery (CUAG) as exhibition designer Carla Ayukawa and educator Fiona Wright addressed barriers to holistic access and inclusion for visitors with blindness or vision impairments through the creation of an audio description tour for Drift: Art and Dark Matter, an Agnes Etherington Art Centre touring exhibition featuring international and interdisciplinary contemporary artists, installed at CUAG in winter 2022.

This paper describes the collaborative, participatory, and iterative process in creating the audio description tour that took place over a six-month period. Community members were engaged as paid consultants who developed the project alongside CUAG. It leveraged the expertise of members of the low vision community to facilitate multi-sensory and multi-modal engagement, taking into consideration spatial orientation, technology and visitor independence. The case study describes how CUAG embarked on a collaborative process development, designed the tour to complement an existing curatorial narrative, and worked within defined labour and budget considerations. It shares solutions for community consultant recruitment, focus group discussion and analysis, and a framework for an iterative process. Here, the process was just as important (if not more!) than the final result.

Through our case study presentation, we hope to demonstrate that the knowledge gained through our experience can help other small GLAMs build relationships that can improve accessibility and inclusion with marginalised communities, along with tips and tricks in actualizing an audio descriptive product. It models how others can identify and then minimise barriers to access and inclusion, leverage community expertise, value different experiences, and develop collaborative strategies to offer an enriched visitor-centred approach and improved engagement with the content.

keywords: collaboration, participation, accessibility, audio description, low vision

F.5.3 Everyday Experts in the Kitchen: Reflections on Designing Domestic Dining

• Michael Windover, Carleton University
• Dorothy Stern, Algonquin College

In 2020, Ingenium: Canada’s Museums of Science and Innovation partnered with Carleton University and Algonquin College on the project Designing Domestic Dining. The project aimed to engage with communities who are underrepresented in the national collections. The team narrowed in on domestic technology and interior spaces associated with food and connected with members of the Anatolian diaspora in Ottawa and Montreal for its case study. As a multi-institutional project involving a national museum, university, college, and community members, the experience of Designing Domestic Dining can add to the conversation about collaboration and expertise with GLAMs.

In this paper, we will discuss the evolving methodology for this project, which was originally planned for an in-person event at the Agriculture and Food Museum in March of 2020 but, due to COVID restrictions, moved to a digital platform. In reflecting on our process, we’ll highlight the ways different perspectives, skillsets, and backgrounds of members of our team as well as community participants helped to shape the contours of the project over two years. What began as an institutionally based community centered research project evolved into one in which knowledge mobilization turned out to be key, as we sought to learn about food as a set of embodied, heritage practices from participants in the study. Participants invited us into their homes via Zoom and shared their knowledge and experience with food, while providing glimpses into their everyday lives and domestic interiors. As we redesigned our study, we drew from skills of students, researchers, and curators across a variety of disciplines, from public history and the history and theory of architecture to sociology and interior design. We will also discuss some of our dissemination activities (e.g., exhibit, website, recipe/memory book), which continue to engender themes of collaboration and community around the seemingly mundane experience of sharing food together.

key workds: science and technology museum; Anatolian community; food; public history; interior design