Auidence and Content Initiating Public Conversations Through Story and Materials

_ _Stories Many Voices, Many Experiences

This project recognizes that settler perspectives, voices, and materiality have dominated public and institutional discourses of Indigenous life, settler-colonialism, and residential schools. The storytellers will be community members and museum visitors who wish to share stories of their views and experiences with residential schools and the Truth and Reconcilation exhibit.

The core content of this digital exhibit will be stories shared Indigenous peoples collected during traveling Truth and Reconciliation exhibit and museum visitors’ responses to the Childhood Denied narrative and Truth and Reconciliation museum exhibit.

Storytellers may share oral or written narratives freely or based on prompts provided by the museum specific to individual objects in the exhibits and the Childhood Denied narrative. For example, a prompt referring to the hand-painted acoustic guitar could ask storytellers to share how music relates to their own, their family’s, or their community’s / institution’s experiences with Residential Schools and/or processes of healing, or lack thereof.

Audience Challengeing Who Listens and Who Speaks

Continuing the work of Indigenous activists, scholars, and community leaders and the Canadian government since, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Looking Back, Speaking forward seeks to facilitate conversations and develop understanding between and among Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.

Preserving and presenting an expansive and dynamic dialogue with the public also means caring for stories and storytellers, so during collection storytellers will be asked if they would like their stories to be public (named or anonymous), private (stories for catharsis, but curated by the museum), or sent to Indigenous partners (named or anonymous).

The exhibit sharing these stories will be aimed at the, The exhibit is aimed at a general public because the history of Residential Schools and the goals of Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) involves all Canadians, whether Indigenous or settler, but not all in the same way. The audience viewing the objects and reading what experiences it symbolizes will be able to hear additional stories related to the object and to the experiences. By including many voices the audience will see the broad impacts of residential schools and the diverse views on reconciliation. The exhibit will encourage the audience to lend their voices to larger conversations on history, settler-colonialism, and Truth and Reconciliation work.