Military, meaning, and tactical myopia: representations of weapons at the Royal Canadian Artillery Museum

ABSTRACT

There are several military museums located across the prairie provinces of Canada that memorialise the country’s involvement in war. Drawing from fieldwork, we explore the representational devices used to curate military museum displays. Focusing on curatorial strategies and the arrangement of weapon objects at the Royal Canadian Artillery Museum (RCAM) located at Canadian Forces Base Shilo in Manitoba, we examine how gun displays are organised to minimise the harm and suffering that guns and military interventions cause. Contributing to critical heritage studies, we show how these museums position the gun as an aesthetic object rather than as an instrument of killing. Exploring the meaning and myths communicated at RCAM, we interpret how the arrangement of weapons at the site conveys a specific form of settler-colonial nationalism while at the same time sanitising these metal devices of carnage and bloodshed. Abstracting the gunner from the violence inherent in his duties, the museum fosters an empathetic connection between the visitor and the figure of the gunner, encouraging the visitor to experience gratitude rather than guilt. In conclusion, we reflect on what our analysis adds to literature on military museums and war heritage sites.

KEYWORDS:

• Military
• museums
• weapons
• representations
• visual culture
• heritage
• silences

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The project began as a way of investigating the latent militarism in prairie Canadian culture. The sports teams in Winnipeg (the nearest large city to RCAM) all reference this prominent militarism: Winnipeg Jets (hockey), the Winnipeg Blue Bombers (football), and Winnipeg Valour (soccer). Militarism permeates Manitoba and the other prairie provinces in ways that our focus on military heritage sites makes investigable.

2. RCAM is still designed for active military personnel. One indicator of this is a table at the entrance that has arranged on it stacks of several publications meant for military personnel, such as The Western Sentinel Newsletter, The Defence Occupational Health and Safety Newsletter, The Brigade Magazine, The Maple Leaf Magazine, a catalogue called the Canadian Army Commander’s Reading List, and a special edition magazine entitled Four Centuries of Manitoba’s Military Heritage.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Haley Pauls

Haley Pauls holds an MA in Cultural Studies from University of Winnipeg. Her research involves studying material culture with a focus on affect, settler-colonial studies, and gender theory.

Kevin Walby

Kevin Walby is Associate Professor of Criminal Justice, University of Winnipeg. He is co-editor of Access to Information and Social Justice: Critical Research Strategies for Journalists, Scholars and Activists with J. Brownlee (2015, ARP Books), National Security, Surveillance, and Terror: Canada and Australia in Comparative Perspective with R.K. Lippert, I. Warren and D. Palmer (2017, Palgrave), as well as The Handbook of Prison Tourism with J. Wilson, S. Hodgkinson, and J. Piche (2017, Palgrave).