Abstract

ROCA, Andrea. Indigenous heritage and national histories: the exhibition Speaking to Memory and the Canadian case. Etnográfica [online]. 2018, vol.22, n.3, pp.503-529. ISSN 0873-6561.  https://doi.org/10.4000/etnografica.5854.

This paper is an analysis of the content, and of the patrimonial and political dimensions of the exhibit Speaking to Memory: Images and Voices of Saint Michael’s Residential School, on display in 2013/2014 at the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology (Vancouver, Canada). The first part of the text is a brief history of Residential Schools in Canada. In the second part I follow the trajectories of the last three decades of indigenous contest and opposition to the Canadian government, and the diverse types of demands for reparation for the suffering caused by those institutions. In the third part of the paper I describe how this exhibition came to be, its contents and its organization. Finally, I analyze the materiality of the photographs that structure this show, classifying these images as “objects in becoming” that, by means of the visitor’s interaction, bring new dimensions to the museum as a social, cultural and political agent.

Keywords : Indigenous Residential Schools; Canada; University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology; photography; materiality; museum practices.

        · abstract in Portuguese     · text in Portuguese     · Portuguese ( pdf )