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Decolonizing Curatorial Pedagogies, the title of the Thinking Through the Museum (TTTM) team’s 2^nd workshop held in Ottawa on April 15-16, 2016, was a mouthful to utter and a brain-full to unpack. The three-day workshop brought us to the Canadian Museum of History, Âjagemô gallery at the Canada Council for the Arts and an indigenous walking tour of Ottawa. In her keynote lecture, Dr. Amy Lonetree challenged us to think about how museums can become decolonizing sites by centering indigenous worldviews (such the inclusion of the “Blood Memory” gallery at the Ziibiwing Center of Anishanabe Culture and Lifeways) and incorporating the difficult history of colonialism into contemporary exhibition practice. Roundtable discussions at Carleton University invited faculty, students, curators, and community to grapple with decolonizing theory and practice in and beyond classrooms, museums and galleries. From the enthusiastic participation of everyone involved, it was evident that the workshop was a successful endeavor in conversation with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s final report.

We call upon the federal government to provide funding to the Canadian Museums Association to undertake, in collaboration with Aboriginal people, a national review of museum polices and best practices to determine the level of compliance with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and to make recommendations.
(Article 67, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada Final Report and Calls to Action, 8).

Decolonization is not a Metaphor

Throughout the workshop I wondered at the use of the term “decolonizing”. While the workshop focused on the settler-colonial context of Canada, Drs. Erica Lehrer, Ming Tiampo and Monica Patterson reminded us that decolonizing is one subset of a critical museology that should also build solidarity between activist curators engaging with historical trauma in multiple locations. Decolonization historically involves violent forms of resistance and the formation of independent nation states that themselves create new systems of oppression and thus should be seriously contemplated and clarified when applied to pedagogy in educational institutions.

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