From Object Base to Multicultural Place to Digital Space: The Toronto Museum Project

Diverse Spaces: Identity, Heritage and Community in Canadian Public Culture

Edited by

Susan L.T. Ashley

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS P U B L I S H I N G

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Diverse Spaces: Identity, Heritage and Community in Canadian Public Culture, Edited by Susan L.T. Ashley This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing

List of Illustrations

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Acknowledgements

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Introduction Diverse Spaces in Canadian Public Culture Susan L.T. Ashley

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12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

Part One: Contested and Exclusionary Places British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2013 by Susan L.T. Ashley and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5147-7, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5147-3

Chapter One The Process of Chop Suey: Rethinking Multicultural Nationalism at the Royal Alberta Museum Caitlin Gordon-Walker

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Chapter Two 39 The Underground Railroad Monument and its Position within a Visible Multicultural Discourse Brittney Anne Bos Chapter Three 61 From Object Base to Multicultural Place to Digital Space: The Toronto Museum Project Andrea Terry Chapter Four (Re)inscribing Mi'kmaq Presence through Public Petition, Performance and Art Laura-Lee Kearns & Nancy Peters Chapter Five Grounds for Exclusion: Canada's Pier 21 and its Shadow Archive Jay Dolmage

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Part Two: Remapping Spaces of Voice and Community Chapter Six Mapping CBC ArtSpots Mary Elizabeth Luka

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Chapter Seven 148 Pluralism, Migration, Space and Song: Ismaili Arrangements of Public and Private Spheres Karim H. Karim Chapter Eight When Old Becomes New and the Telling is Re-Told: Sikh Stories within Museum Walls Satwinder Kaur Bains

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Chapter Nine Charting Indigenous Stories of Place: An Alternate Cartography through the Visual Narrative of Jeff Thomas Julie Nagam

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Chapter Ten Performing Sidewalk Chalk Politics: A Memorial for Jack Layton in Nathan Phillips Square, Toronto Brittany Ross-Fichtner

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Contributors

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Index...

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Fig. 1-1: Chop Suey on the Prairies, Bentley, Alberta. Fig. 2-1: Underground Railroad Monument in Windsor, Ontario looking north towards Detroit. Fig. 3-1: "Sharing Stories: Prayer Rug - Toronto: the City without Borders." City of Toronto, Museum Services Fig. 4-1: Alan Syliboy, Dream Canoe, 2011. Reproduced with permission. Fig. 4-2: Alan Syliboy, Dream Canoe, 2011, detail. Reproduced with permission. Fig. 7-1: An artist's rendering of an aerial view of the Ismaili Centre and the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto. Image courtesy Imara Wynford Drive. Fig. 8-1: The National Historic Site Gur Sikh Temple built 1911 in Abbotsford, B.C. Fig. 9-1: Jeff Thomas, Peace Chief in Toronto, Ontario CNE Tower, 2002. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 9-2: Buffalo Dancer at Bathurst Street. Thomas, Jeff. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 9-3: The Delegate Stops at the Junction. Thomas, Jeff. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 9-4: The Delegate at Baby Point. Thomas, Jeff. Courtesy of the artist Fig. 10-1: Remembering Jack Layton, Nathan Phillips Square, Toronto. Photo courtesy of Jackman Chiu. Fig. 10-2: A woman writes a message to Jack Layton on the one-year anniversary of his death.

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Prepared for the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada: Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada. —. 1999. "Commemorating the Underground Railroad in Canada." Cultural Resource Management 22 (5): 33-34. Russell, Hilary. 1996. The Underground Railroad. Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada Agenda Paper 1996-11, 303-72. Silver, Lionel. 1938. "Escape From Slavery Recalled in Essex and Kent: Fugitives' Descendants Describe Hazards on Underground Railroad." Windsor Daily Star, January 15, 5. Stanley, Timothy J. 2006. "Whose Public? Whose Memory? Racisms, Grand Narratives and Canadian History." In To the Past: History, Education, Public Memory and Citizenship in Canada, edited by Ruth Sandwell, 32-49. Toronto: University of Toronto. Swyripa, Frances. 2010. Storied Landscapes: Ethno-Religious Identity and the Canadian Prairies. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press. Taylor, Marc. 2012. "Garbage Bins Block Monument." The Windsor Star, July 10, A4. United States Department of the Interior National Parks Service. 1998. Underground Railroad Resources in the United States Theme Study. National Historic Landmarks Survey 1-49. Walcott, Rinaldo. 2003. Black Like Who? Writing Black Canada. 2nd Edition. Toronto: Insomniac.

CHAPTER THREE FROM OBJECT BASE To MULTICULTURAL PLACE TO DIGITAL SPACE: THE TORONTO MUSEUM PROJECT ANDREA TERRY Over the course of the twenty-first century, government officials, urban planners, and cultural administrators have increasingly looked to museums as a means through which to enhance the cultural profile of particular spaces, places and regions (Shoval and Strom 2009; Message 2006). Some projects have had grand ambitions, like the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which opened in 1997 and propelled cultural theorists and art historians to interrogate the consequent "Bilbao effect"the degree to which the construction of museums boost a region's economic outlook (Zulaika 2003). More recently, urban centres such as Toronto, Canada, have developed various cultural initiatives to establish themselves as "global cities" or "command centres in the world economy" through a renaissance of cultural institutions (Carmichael 2002; Florida 2002; Sassen 1991). On a smaller scale there are schemes like the Toronto Museum Project (TMP), a proposed institution that has been in various planning stages since the 1970s, and still hopeful of eventual opening in 2017. Cultural administrators have spent decades negotiating the purpose, representation and display of Toronto's extant material culture in light of the proposed museum's ever evolving socio-political circumstances. What began as a plan to bring together and protect historical objects representing the lives of Torontonians, became a social policy tool to promote civic identity, then a branding exercise for economic development, a creative node and currently a virtual space within a federal drive for digital content. The evolution of the TMP and Toronto museums offers an interesting lens from which to explore how administrators strive to use museum spaces in diverse historical contexts. But further, the current manifestation of the

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TMP enables an inspection of what is perceived as the useful form and function of the museum-making paradigm today—as an online, virtual space for first-person narratives. The idea of culture seen as a resource, and the utility of heritage and museums, builds on the work of Laurajane Smith (2006) and George Yiidice (2003). Smith details how our society defines heritage materially, as a product or object or architectural remains, thus a physical asset to be used for various social, cultural, economic or political purposes. Yudice suggests that in the age of globalization culture is no longer an autonomous idea synonymous with the arts, but instead is perceived as a resource for economic expediency. For Yudice, the significance of the cultural content—be it actual or virtual—recedes while, conversely, "the usefulness of the claim to difference as a warrant gains legitimacy" (2003, 23 italics in original). Both authors emphasize the expedient use of heritage and culture, depending on local contexts or historical situations. Both perspectives assist the understanding of the changing form and purpose of museums over time and in context—such as the Toronto Museum.

Euro-Canadian in nature and date from the 19th and late 18th century. In the context of a...20lh century city, how do we make this heritage relevant to the current inhabitants of a city founded by the English with earlier occupation by the French and the presence of Native cultures thousands of years old?" (1990, 1). Accordingly, in 1972 the idea of a museum that would illustrate the progress of the city "from time of founding to the present day, and indeed, to project its future goals" was proposed by Board members (Civic Museums Task Force, 1986, 1). But the project's realization came about over three decades later in a venue far different from that which was originally anticipated. During the 1970s the Toronto Historical Board also re-evaluated the function of existing city-owned and operated heritage sites in order to sustain the community's interest in its heritage resources and ensure their long-term survival and operations. The city's museum staff thus began working to find ways to make the past relevant to Torontonians. At the same time, the Canadian government adopted a multiculturalism policy, representing a change in nation-building strategy that emphasized the cultivation of nationalism based on the concept of "unity-in-diversity." In 1978, then-managing Board director J. A. McGinnis expressed the Board's intention develop programs that would both recognize and represent those aspects of Canada's national identity endorsed by the state. As thenToronto Historical Board chairman Andrew Gregorovich put it in 1982, "We can no longer consider the City's history as the preserve of an elite group of British origin. Our history belongs to all Torontonians of all ethnic origins" (1982, 2). The Board continued reviewing proposals for a civic museum that would "display the contributions different ethnic groups have made to Toronto," thereby aiming to memorialize Toronto's cultural diversity. Thus Toronto museums were drawn into the expediency of nation-building, in this case aimed at promoting multiculturalism-asidentity as an immaterial form of heritage. Heritage practitioners began collaborating with various agencies and developed in partnership different projects that displayed Toronto's history of cultural diversity, such as the 1979 travelling exhibition program entitled The Torontonians, which explored the "multicultural history of Toronto" (McManus 1986, 29). Panels describing the achievements of different ethnic groups on 24 double-sided panels were erected at different locations throughout the Toronto region. Travelling throughout the geographical domain of the Board's jurisdiction, the exhibition showcased the "contribution of many immigrant groups to the growth and development of Toronto" (McManus 1986, 28).

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Toronto Museums The idea of a Toronto museum had its origins in the late 1950s, when public concern regarding the state of Toronto's architectural heritage had become particularly pronounced. The eradication of various historic structures to make way for newer buildings, factories and urban planning strategies generated a heightened interest in and concern for the city's architectural legacies (Arthur 1964). On July 1, 1960, Toronto City Council established the Toronto Historical Board, an administrative body charged with managing the city's heritage sites and museums. The Board assumed ownership and management of sites like the William Lyon Mackenzie House, a historic house reincarnated as a museum by a local heritage advocacy group known as the William Lyon Mackenzie Foundation. Board members also updated displays at Fort York and the Marine Museum of Upper Canada. The focus on the physical remains of the past—buildings and memorable objects in particular—dominated museum concerns in this era (Luno 1990). The Board also had to contend with socio-political issues, including the complexity of Toronto's social history and the diversity of its audiences. As Board chairman Christine Caroppo Clarence explained at the time of her tenure, "In Toronto, we have the special challenge to interpret the story of Toronto through our museums, which are largely

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While the Board aimed to celebrate Toronto's ethnic diversity, the program failed to memorialize the concept. More to the point, the exhibition existed as a travelling one with no permanent residence. One such destination for "The Torontonians" was the garden area of the Mackenzie House property. Here it remained clearly outside of and thus distinctly separate from—to use the Board's conceptualization—the "house proper" (Toronto Historical Board 1961, 1). The Board thus continued to use "hard" object-based displays to memorialize the past and, by way of contrast, mounted "soft" temporary displays—dedicated to the representation of ethnic diversity—to represent the present. The 1980s witnessed the expansion of The Torontonians program, but it abated in the 1990s. For example, in 1984, this exhibition travelled to nineteen different locations- the most ever in the program's history - and, two years later, organizers included six more ethnic groups not identified or represented in the previous tours.1 At the same time, different ethnic groups began to petition the Board, asking that memorials be erected to recognize their achievements. The Board, however, citing anticipated incurrence of maintenance and repair costs as an "aspect of concern," deemed it "inappropriate for these commemorative pieces to be erected in the City of Toronto" (McManus 1986, 29-30, emphasis added). Budgetary concerns in the early 1990s subsequently became a dominant source of concern for the Board, and City Council cutbacks to the Board's operating budget forced the Board to discontinue The Torontonians. Moreover, the possibility of forming a new civic museum also dissipated in the wake of the City's announcement of a "series of severe belt-tightening measures" to the Board's operating budget (Burnside and James 1991). By 2000 a new view of the expediency of museums, and the TMP, had entered Toronto politics. What was billed locally as a 'cultural renaissance' emerged in Toronto, which included a new municipal Culture Plan for the Creative City in 2003, and the concurrent construction or renovation of eight large cultural institutions in the city involving hundreds of millions of private and senior government dollars. The products of the cultural renaissance—museums and performing art centres redone as signature buildings designed by internationally renowned architects—sought to announce the area's cultural refinement (Jenkins 2005). The cumulative impression conveyed by news media at the time was these cultural institutions would propel Toronto to greatness on the world stage (Ross 2006; Ashley 2011). The city's Culture Plan, according to their website, "aimed at positioning Toronto as an international cultural capital and placing culture at the heart of the city's economic and social agenda."

Municipal administrators looked to use its existing museological resources and develop new ones to distinguish the city based on its ethnically diverse constituency and its "creativity"' (City of Toronto 2003). Taking into account the objectives, goals and priorities of the cultural renaissance, Toronto Culture—the civic department now responsible for the operation of the city's museums—began exploring how it might too work to "reinvent" Toronto as a global city. They considered how it might utilize the city's museums to "reinvent...the old industrial Toronto...as a global, Creative City, a leading international cultural capital" (Toronto Culture 2001, 3). They looked to Torontonians as the "most diverse population of any city in the world" and thus proposed to engage citizens in what it described as the "retelling of our various pasts" (Toronto Culture 2001, 15). To do so, it proposed a series of both shortand long-term goals, the former which included developing programs that would brand Toronto's historic museums as culturally diverse and the latter being the exploration of the creation of a "new cultural facility, a place where the whole Toronto story can be told, which will complement and revitalize the City's existing museum infrastructure." Ultimately, both goals aimed to address gaps in the history it presented and represent the histories of ethnic groups that settled in Toronto in the twentieth-century (City of Toronto 2003, 15). As Yudice foretold, Toronto Culture sought ways to turn their heritage sites into resources that would brand Toronto as a multicultural global city and foster economic expansion. This initiative also makes evident, following Abu-Laban and Gabriel, how heritage policy makers worked to "sell diversity" to enhance Toronto's stature in the global marketplace (2002, 12).

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New Paradigm In 2007, the TMP again emerged, this time as with a proposal to open in 2017. Intended to focus on the area's post-WWII development, plans indicated that it would chronicle the city's "social, cultural and economic diversity," thus showcasing, in the words of Toronto Mayor David Miller in 2008, what makes "the Toronto story so compelling in the eyes of the world" (Toronto Culture 2008; Fenlon 2009). Initially, it was recommended that the museum be built alongside the Canadian Malting Silos, located at the foot of Bathurst Street at Queen Quay West, built in 1928 to supply Ontario's barley market. However, due to the prohibitive costs required to renovate the silos, and a location that prohibited foot traffic during the winter months, organizers decided instead to use

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Toronto's Old City Hall, which housed the provincial courts (Carter 2012). Given the industrial nature of the former and the legislative function of the latter, it becomes evident that organizers were bent on choosing regional, well-known, and, by extension, iconic architectural sites. In 2007, Toronto City Council announced its commitment of $20 million (Can.) to this museum proposal. Three years later, in the wake of the 2008 recession, a newly-elected city council put this project indefinitely on hold (Lorinc 2011). Museums administrator Karen Carter—described in the local press as being "tired of waiting for money to build a museum of Toronto"—secured a $305,000 (Can.) grant from the Department of Canadian Heritage under the auspices of the Canadian Culture Online program, to develop instead a Toronto Museum Project website (Balkisoon 2010). The move took the beleaguered museum concept into a new realm of form and utility. As Carter (2012) stated,

narrative (Carter 2012), and the communicative technologies enlarged this democratization of the interpretation, access to, and representation of museum artifacts.

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I thought [the website was] fantastic because we would actually be able to animate this idea online, and the goal after that was supposed to be design some short-term exhibits that would drive traffic offline and online that would continue to raise the momentum and the public interest and the public consciousness around this idea of the Museum of Toronto, because everyone in this city would love to see something that says something about their place in the city. Being so young a city, a lot of people have come here...[having] contributed to the city being what it is like today.

Launched on March 6, 2010, the website was designed to showcase 100 artifacts from the city's historical collection, which consists of approximately 150,000 objects, but to also enrich the objects through a narration that conveyed the memories of a diverse group of Torontonians. According to the website, people shared "a wide range of impressions about Toronto and being a Torontonian," reminiscences that express what it meant to them personally to be a Torontonian (City of Toronto Museum Services 2010). More specifically, as Carter explained, site workers consulted the city's municipal newsletter that listed the most spoken languages in the city, used that list as a roadmap to navigate and access cultural communities, and thereby made the "most impact possible" (2012). Workers identified particular communities and then consulted different cultural associations linked to those communities. In some cases, workers took artifacts held by the City to various centres and asked people what came to mind when looking at the artifacts. In other instances, these participants themselves showed the municipal employees what objects they held in their collections that they deemed iconic. The site's development thus employed a particular triad of artifact, people, and

T »*t

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Jl :lfl:P M U S E U M PROJECT

Fig. 1 "Sharing Stories: Prayer Rug - Toronto: the City without Borders," accessed at http://www.torontomuseumproject.ca/Home/Volunteer.aspx?ID=18 on September 9, 2012. Credit: City of Toronto, Museum Services

The website was designed so that the visitor could click on a thumbnail of an object, and be taken to a page displaying a photograph and an overview of the object, a curatorial comment, and an interview with a TORONTONIAN, so-labelled and referred to by only their first name and last initial, which related a story about the artifact. The website also featured a page for people to offer exhibition proposals for a museum that might that might be developed further in a "virtual environment or in a physical place" and portray Toronto as a "dynamic, liveable and fascinating place."

Digital Objects, Digital Spaces The TMP's latest incarnation offers a fascinating insight into the advantages and shortcomings of the turn to digital representations as an expedient form of heritage. Digitized museums provide a relatively lowcost but highly visible presence for a cultural institution. While they make

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resources universally accessible, their content oftentimes remains connected a specific place. Significantly, the online institution, unlike its concrete predecessors, is user-focussed. Museum organizations and online contributors have the opportunity to speak to and about objects of their own selection, but the digital format also allows viewers and participants to speak about and with objects. Furthermore, the space-less and time-less digital mode enables people in the present to reach forward into the future with its testimony or gift of memory (Simon 2006). Digitized objects serve a useful function as mnemonic devices connected to the living memories of people, more so than artifacts invested with inherent meaning. But as Stephen Conn warns, the objects then become memorials whose efficacy "wanes as those memories fade and the number of people with an actual connection to the event [or object] declines" (2010, 44). This can be seen as a paradigm shift, one in which the object/artifact becomes secondary to the message (Bayne et al. 2009, 112). Within this paradigm, objects are liberated from the ideological and institutional constraints of material epistemology developed within museum culture, thereby affording the digital object a fluid status of an entity in its own right (Parry 2007). Ross Parry explains that digitized museum objects have been recontextualized and relocated on the World Wide Web and so are recognized by viewers/visitors as being in a state of motion—one that is a familiar part of the contemporary human experience —migrating through different states, browsers and media. Framed as an "e-tangible," Parry writes, "these new objects....can be reliant on tangibles (a digital surrogate, for example), or they can be entirely independent of other objects in the collection (such as a piece of digital or Net Art)" (2007, 68-9). Accordingly, the interpretive potential of digital objects is no longer fixed or contingent upon its properties as a sign of the progressing advancement of material culture, and so they encourage the "remediation of cultural narratives and experiences" (Cameron 2007, 54; Cameron and Kenerdine 2007, 8). In the context of the TMP, the digital object exists as a creative work in its own right, with a provenance, history and function as a trigger for an intrinsically personal and ideally relatable narrative (Cameron 2007, 66). Further, these objects as yet are not on display—no institution yet exists to materially exhibit a so-called "original." While one might suggest that the digital object's materiality remains perpetually elusive (Knell 2003, 140), Fiona Cameron points out that this type of conceptualization makes evident the limitations of the "traditional conventions of an object-centered museum culture" or, more broadly, the materialist epistemology in museums that is decisively Western in scope (Cameron 2007, 53).

While the digital objects have been liberated, the "story-tellers" encounter constraints: the participants' stories and identities are subtly yet firmly contained within a distinctly regionalist and multicultural discourse. Significantly, however, these people are identified and labelled as being TORONTONIANS, which recalls the fact that they assume a specific subject-position within this virtual exhibition. The reliance of visible indicators of ethnicity in their selection of participants in the virtual museum set the stage for a "multiculturalism" framing of subject position for these contributors. Because Canada's multiculturalism positions ethnic groups within a particular nationalistic framework, Western cultural hegemony is reinforced (Mackey 1999, 163). Neil Bissoondath explains that official multiculturalism demands that a person position herself as unchanged despite her migration, an experience that effects its own change; the demands of multiculturalism "stultify the personality, creating stereotype, stripping the individual of uniqueness: you are not yourself, you are your group" (2002, 211). Canada's multiculturalism recognizes and upholds the concept of diversity in order to construct a particular national image, one that is, as Himani Bannerji writes, "predicated upon the existence of a homogeneous national, that is, a Canadian cultural self with its multiple and different others," that is, an unmarked whiteness of the core culture as the standard by which to identify or measure citizens of other ethnic backgrounds (2000, 37). In the case of TMP, the digital cultural interpretation, while freed from the constraints of a material culture epistemology, remains contained within the locality of Toronto and thus more broadly within the matrix of multiculturalist discourse and Canadian nationhood (Dissanayake 2006, 41). Museum administrator Karen Carter argues, however, that British colonialism, the one common thread revealed by the 100 stories featured on the TMP website, in fact links people. The Commonwealth connection, in her mind, provided people with the ability to not only settle in a new home but also bond with others. Those common stories, she states, reveal "how much that does connect us and how many immigrants to the city have been touched by British colonialism and imperial rule. And so those common stories— those common threads—help with making the city not such a difficult tapestry to weave together" (Carter 2012). While ways in which digital audiences of the TMP receive and interpret these official intentions within their own responses is not known, the fluid digital environment might facilitate a multiplicity of subject positions in response to official address (Parry 2009). Communicative forms, such as digital museum exhibition, function as social spaces, providing places for audiences to gather, navigate and interact with

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knowledge systems. Virtual museum websites deploy artifacts, memories, experiences and technologies in order to refocus on the viewer/visitor— using objects to draw people in virtually, as well as physically (HooperGreenhill 2003; Russo et al. 2008). In the case of the TMP, I would argue that by constructing a digital space, one that allows for increased access to cultural artifacts, and using the objects to solicit the memories of the region's citizenry, these artifacts, although dumb, gave people a voice, venue and platform (Jessup 2002, xxi). This platform and the audience's interaction with it upon visitation enable different parties—both storytellers and visitors—to construct meaning based on their respective experiences (Russo et al. 2009). Viewing a digital exhibition allows for audiences to engage in a two-way conversation with the institution, a communication exchange that relies on both the content, as well as the visitors' response to the site. Online audiences can co-create meaning while interacting with these remediated networks; their experiences are as "real" as the objects that inspired them (Russo et al. 2009). The digital museum thus does away with the "real" object and so the social imaginary inspires a collective memory of a place or event that might not have occurred but resonates with visitors. In short, the passive audience instead becomes an active one within the online environment. Other Toronto museums and historic sites took this active engagement further into the realm of social media—broadly defined as software, platforms and networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube, which facilitate online communication, networking and/or collaboration. Social media applications used by museums, including blogs, podcasts, and content shares, aim to facilitate a participative cultural experience. Not only can visitors—in the case of the Brooklyn Museum, for instance— view "behind-the-scenes" videos, such as those featuring exhibition installations prior to a show's openings (Vogel, 2011), they also can and do supply museums with their own digital content, including photographs, comments and feedback on exhibitions, resulting in a "many-to-many communication" (Russo et al. 2008, 28). Such interactive results have led some administrators to abandon museum websites and turn their attention and resources instead to network communication tools (Russo et al. 2008). However, the Toronto Museum Project site had no such presence on social media platforms. Following its public launch on March 6, 2010, the TMP website, its format and content remained unchanged. This project seemed to stagnate in light of the advent and subsequent popularity of social media. Despite the intentions of TMP museum administrators, and the effects of digital environment on content and audiences, the precarious nature of

digital manifestations of heritage in this case lay in its subjugation to practical constraints of time and money. Financial support of digital museum projects is increasingly determined by its contribution to the economy of the place that is featured. Simon Knell points out that "the virtual Louvre is available to everyone, but it only reaps economic benefits if tourists are drawn to visit Paris" (2003, 142). The Toronto Museum Project may have been a product of participatory development, and seen by a broad range of digital visitors, but without new forms of social interactivity and clear economic impact, its "usefulness" could not be demonstrated. The expediency of virtual museums thus depends upon the local context, the historical situation, the costs of the set-up and continued maintenance, and ultimately the anticipated social and financial profitability (Smith 2006; Yiidice 2003). The significance of these factors—particularly in the case of the TMP and its (lack of) development following the launch—illustrates how the form and understanding of museums have decisively altered in the twenty-first century. In tracing the development of the Toronto Museum Project, it becomes apparent how its latest incarnation as a digital museum has liberated objects and encouraged creative curatorial and interpretive endeavours. Such sites not only make resources universally accessible, they also encourage provocative connections to be made, connections that span disciplinary, ideological and geographical boundaries. However, when these types of sites reaffirm their connection to a given place, one must bear in mind the socio-political, as well as economic factors, that call for the creation of such diverse spaces. The freedom that the Web affords museums is revelatory, but a digital space's connection to place reminds us that not all things are free.

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Notes The exhibition travelled to libraries, schools and community halls throughout Toronto; it was also set up at public events, including Toronto-based festivals (Toronto Historical Board 1984, 34; Toronto Historical Board 1986, 23; Toronto Historical Board, 1982).

References Abu-Laban, Yasmeen and Christina Gabriel. 2002. Selling Diversity: Immigration, Multiculturalism, Employment Equity and Globalisation. Peterborough: Broadview Press.

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Ashley, Susan. 2011. "Museum Renaissance? Revisioning 'Publicness' at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto." PhD diss., York University. Arthur, Eric. 1964. Toronto: No Mean City. Toronto: U of T Press. Balkisoon, Denise. 2010. "Toronto Museum 2.0." The Star [Toronto], March 4. Accessed 20 October 2011 at http://www.thestar.com/mobile/NEWS/article/775128. Bayne, Sian, Jen Ross and Zoe Williamson. 2009. "Objects, Subjects, Bits and Bytes: Learning from the Digital Collections of the National Museums." Museum and Society 7(2): 110-24. Bannerji, Himani. 2000. The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Gender. Toronto:Canadian Scholars Bissoondath, Neil. 2002. Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada. Toronto: Penguin. Burnside, David and R. Scott James, "From the Chairman and Managing Director." In Toronto Historical Board 1991 Annual Report, 1-3. Toronto: Toronto Historical Board. Cameron, Fiona. 2007. "Beyond the Cult of the Replicant - Museums and Historical Digital Objects: Traditional Concerns, New Discourses." In Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage: A Critical Discourse, edited by Fiona Cameron and Sarah Kenderdine, 49-76. Cambridge, MS, and London: MIT Press. Cameron, Fiona and Sarah Kenderdine. "Introduction." In Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage: A Critical Discourse, edited by Fiona Cameron and Sarah Kenderdine, 1-18. Cambridge, MS, and London: MIT Press. Carmichael, Barbara. 2002. "Global Competitiveness and Special Events in Cultural Tourism: The Example of the Barnes Exhibit at the Art Gallery of Toronto, Ontario." Canadian Geographer 24(4): 310-24. Caroppo Clarence, Christine. 1990. "Chairman's Report." In 1990 Annual Report, 1-2. Toronto: Toronto Historical Board. Carter, Karen. 2012. Executive Director, Heritage Toronto. Interview. Toronto, Ontario. July 10. Conn, Steven. 2010. Do Museums Still Need Objects? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. City of Toronto. 2003. Culture Plan for the Creative City. Toronto: Department of Economic Development, Culture and Tourism Division. City of Toronto Museum Services. 2010. "Stories Connect Us - Toronto Museum Project." Accessed 24 March. http://www.torontomuseumproject.ca/Stories.aspx Civic Museum Task Force. 1986. Report 1986: Civic Museums Task Force. Toronto: Toronto Historical Board.

Dissanayake, Wimal. 2006. "Globalization and the Experience of Culture: The Resilience of Nationhood." In Globalization, Culture Identities and Media Representation, edited by Natascha Gentz and Stefan Kramer, 25-44. New York: State University of New York Press. Fenlon, Brodie. 2009. "Toronto Scraps Museum Project: Plans to Raze Site Instead." Globe and Mail [Toronto] September 1, Al. Florida, Richard. 2002. The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books. Gregorovich. 1982. "Chairman's Report." In Year Book, 1-2. Toronto: Toronto Historical Board. Hooper Greenhill, E. 2003. "Museums and Social Value: Measuring the Impact of Learning in Museums." Paper presented at the ICOM-CECA Annual Conference, Oaxaca. Knell, Simon. 2003. "The Shape of Things to Come: Museums in the Technological Landscape." Museum and Society 1(3): 132-46. Jenkins, Barbara. 2005. "Toronto's Cultural Renaissance." Canadian Journal of Communication 30(2): 169-186. Jessup, Lynda. 2002. "Hard Inclusion." In On Aboriginal Representation in the Gallery, edited by Lynda Jessup and Shannon Bagg, xiii-xxx. Hull, QC: Canadian Museum of Civilization. Lorinc, John. 2011. "Museum Project Planned for Old City Hall." Globe and Mail [Toronto], May 22. Accessed 5 March 2013. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/museum-projectplanned-for-old-city-hall/article598196/ Luno, Nancy. 1990. A Genteel: Exterior: The Domestic Life of William Lyon Mackenzie King and his Family. Toronto: Toronto Historical Board. McManus, Shirley. 1986. History of the Toronto Civic Historical Committee and the Toronto Historical Board 1949-1985. Toronto: Toronto Historical Board. Mackey, Eva. 1999. The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada. London and New York: Routledge. Message, Kylie. 2006. New Museums and the Making of Culture. Oxford and New York: Berg. Parry, Ross. 2009. "Audience Development in Museums and Cultural Sites in Difficult Times." Proceedings of the Symposium held on 5 November 2009 at the National Gallery of Ireland, Series No. 8, 25-31. Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland. Parry, Ross. 2007. Receding the Museum: Digital Heritage and the Technologies of Change. London and New York: Routledge.

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Ross, Val. 2006. "Renaissance City: The Billion-Dollar Baby." Globe and Mail [Toronto]. Saturday, April 15. Retrieved 6 October 2006. Russo, Angelina, Jerry Watkins and Susan Groundwater-Smith. 2009. "The Impact of Social Media on Informal Learning in Museums." Educational Media International 46(2): 153-66. Russo, Angelina, J. Watkins, L. Kelly, S. Chan. 2008. "Participatory Communication with Social Media." Curator 51(1): 21-31. Sassen, Saskia. 1991. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Simon, Roger. 2006. "The Terrible Gift: Museums and the Possibility of Hope Without Consolation." Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship 21(3): 187-204. Shoval, N. and L. Strom. 2009. "Inscribing Universal Values into the Urban Landscape: New York, Jerusalem and Winnipeg as case studies." Urban Geography 30(2): 143-61. Smith, Laurajane. 2006. Uses of Heritage. London and New York, Routledge. Toronto Culture. 2008. "New Museum will focus on spirit of Canada as seen through Toronto's lens." Press Release, June 24. Accessed 21 October. http://wx.toronto.ca/inter/it/newsrel.nsf/7017df2f20edbe288525661900 4e428e/d48d3dcaOea20bd285257472004a36df?OpenDocument. —. 2001. The Creative City: A Workprint. Toronto: Toronto Culture. Toronto Historical Board. 1986. Annual Report 1986. Toronto: Toronto Historical Board. —. 1984. Annual Report 1984. Toronto: Toronto Historical Board. —. 1982. Toronto's Multicultural Heritage. Toronto: Toronto Historical Board. —. 1961. "Joint Meeting Museums Committee and the Historical Sites Committee, Monday 18 September 1961." In Toronto Civic Historical Committee, 1-2. Toronto: Toronto Historical Board. Vogel, Carol. 2011. "The Spirit of Sharing." New York Times, March 16. Accessed 6 March 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/arts/design/museums-pursueengagement-with-social-media.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 Yudice, George. 2003. The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Zulaika Joseba. 2003. Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa: Museums, Architecture and City Renewal. Reno: U. of Nevada Basque Studies.

CHAPTER FOUR (RE)INSCRIBING Ml'KMAQ PRESENCE THROUGH PUBLIC PETITION, PERFORMANCE AND ART LAURA-LEE KEARNS AND NANCY PETERS Public art has been used to foster social inclusion...giving expression to multiple and shifting identities of different groups, as indicative of presence rather than absence, and of avoiding the cultural domination of particular elites or interests ~ Sharp, Pollock and Paddison 2005, 1006 Decolonization can occur when Aboriginal people and Canadians face each other across historic divides, deconstruct their shared past, and engage critically with the realization that their present and future is similarly tied together ~ Donald 2009, 5 Haig-Brown (2008) reminds us that Canadians are "citizens of a nation built on persisting colonial relations; we exist always already in relation to land and Aboriginal peoples" (16). However, within the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal relationship there is an imbalance: there is a lack of representation and inclusion of Aboriginal people in the public realm. Two tools which continue to (re)inscribe colonial domination on traditional Aboriginal territories are public naming and public art. To begin to decolonize the public realm and redress this imbalance so that there is more inclusion of Indigenous people, we need to critically engage with the legacy and absence of historical perspectives of Indigenous people and representations in public spaces. Rooted in notions of the commons, public space is generally understood to be shared locations that individuals and groups can legally access and use (Mitchell 2003; Puwar 2004). Public spaces have been defined as venues where groups can assemble freely; squares and parks, auditoriums and libraries, but also sidewalks and even places like cafes and malls that are privately owned. In theory, public

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by Syracuse University Press. His essays on rhetoric and disability studies have appeared in several journals and edited collections, including Cultural Critique and Rhetoric Review. Research for this chapter was supported by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant.

provincial funding body for the arts, and member of the Creative Nova Scotia Leadership Council, an advisory board to the government of Nova Scotia regarding the creative industries.

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CAITLIN GORDON-WALKER holds a PhD from the Frost Centre for Canadian Studies and Indigenous Studies, Trent University in Peterborough, Canada. Her current research explores the implications of various representational practices in museums, examining their relationship to hegemonic and counter-hegemonic understandings of national identity and cultural difference, as well as the capacity of museum visitors to participate in renegotiations of contested cultural identities. KARIM H. KARIM is a Professor at Carleton University in Ottawa. He has served as Director of Carleton's School of Journalism and Communication and the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London, and has been a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University. Dr. Karim holds degrees in Islamic Studies and Communication Studies from Columbia and McGill universities. He has been a distinguished lecturer at venues in North America, Europe, and Asia. His major publications are The Media of Diaspora and Islamic Peril: Media and Global Violence, for which he won the inaugural Robinson Prize. He is currently working on a series on Western-Muslim relations. LAURA-LEE KEARNS is an Assistant Professor in Education at Saint Francis Xavier University. Dr. Kearns holds a PhD and a Bachelor of Education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. She has taught in Canada and abroad. Her research and publications focus on critical literacies, marginalized youth, social justice, the arts, Metis life histories and narratives, and Aboriginal education, which includes, infusing Indigenous perspectives across the school and university curriculum, as well as advocating for greater Indigenous representation in the public realm. MARY ELIZABETH LUKA is a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholar and doctoral candidate (ABD) in the Joint Program in Communication at Concordia University. Her scholarly interests focus on production practices and creativity in cultural media, particularly the intriguing dynamics generated at the intersection of the arts, broadcasting and digital production. Luka is an award-winning television and internet documentary producer-director and a strategic planning consultant for the culture sector. She is the founding Vice-Chair of Arts Nova Scotia, an independent

JULIE NAGAM, PhD. is an Assistant Professor at OCAD University in Toronto in the Indigenous Visual Culture program. Nagam's research interests include a (re)mapping of the colonial state through creative interventions within concepts of native space. Her art practice includes working in mixed media, such as drawing, photography, painting, sound, projections, new and digital media. Her artwork has been shown both nationally and internationally. Recent published articles in publications such as the UCLA, American Indian Culture and Research Journal and Atlantis: A Women Studies Journal. NANCY PETERS is an adult educator and PhD Candidate at the University of Saskatchewan who supports groups and organizations involved in community development. Her research examines the stories white European Canadians tell about coming into 'right relationships' with Aboriginal Peoples, uncovering factors involved in the transformation of settler society. BRITTANY ROSS-FICHTNER is a Juris Doctor candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, Ontario. Brittany holds a Master of Arts in Theatre Studies from York University and a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Global Development Studies. She is keenly interested in the intersections between performance, public participation, activism and law. ANDREA TERRY is a Lecturer in the Visual Arts Department at Lakehead University and holds a PhD from the Department of Art at Queen's University. At Queen's, she received the Gray Graduate Fellowship in Canadian Art and was the Margaret Angus Research Fellow at the Museum of Health Care in Kingston. She was a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Carleton University School of Canadian Studies from 20102012. Dr. Terry's research and teaching explore modern and contemporary Western visual and material culture, critical museum studies, public history, Canadian cultural history, and intersections of multiculturalism and globalization. She has published in journals such as Gender and History, Revue d'art canadienne/ Canadian Art Review, the Journal of Heritage Tourism. Her manuscript entitled Family Ties: 'Living History' in Canadian House Museums is forthcoming.