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Abstract
In order for all citizens to fully belong to a nation or a community, they must have membership in that society’s institutions, systems and social relations on both the formal and everyday levels. Heritage sites are public institutions of formal cultural presentation and informal social encounters where society demonstrates community membership. But in a country such as Canada where global economics and popular culture combine with an unprecedented influx of immigrants, how a community imagines itself and articulates its heritage is changing radically. Canada’s National Historic Sites (NHS) is among the important public institutions devoted to both the presentation of heritage and demonstration of citizen membership. This paper describes how this institution is adapting to changes in imaginings about citizenship, on both the formal and informal level. It looks at how NHS is expanding the involvement of all citizens in the why, what, how and to whom of heritage presentation, evolving its practices to include ethic minorities in its imaginings of Canadianness. Using as an example a new NHS exhibit and designations related to the Underground Railroad and African‐Canadians, the paper considers how historic sites, as formal instruments of the state, can be re‐tuned as informal sites of discourse and negotiation about identity, citizenship and belonging.
Notes
[1] Ku, ‘Revisiting the Notion of “Public” in Habermas’s Theory’, 235. See also Anderson, Imagined Communities.
[2] As well as Ku, see Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere’; Bernard, Social Cohesion.
[3] See Bannerji, The Dark Side of the Nation; Henry, ‘Canada’s Contribution to the “Management” of Ethno‐cultural Diversity’, 231–42; Baeker, ‘Sharpening the Lens’, 179–96.
[4] For example: Dicks, Heritage, Place and Community; Hooper‐Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge; Katriel, ‘Our Future is where our Past is’, 69–75; Weil, ‘From Being about Something to Being for Somebody’, 229–58.
[5] Rottenberg, ‘Museums, Information and the Public Sphere’, 25.
[6] Bennett, ‘Pedagogic Objects, Clean Eyes, and Popular Instruction’, 345–71.
[7] Sandell, ‘Social Inclusion, the Museum and the Dynamics of Sectoral Change’, 45–62.
[8] Osborne, ‘From Native Pines to Diasporic Geese’, 148–49.
[9] Baeker, ‘Sharpening the Lens’.
[10] Several Parks Canada managers were interviewed in 2004–2005, including superintendents, planning and marketing specialists and project managers. Parks Canada policies and reports include: National Historic Sites System Plan, 2000; Parks Canada Agency Corporate Plan 2004/2005—2008/2009; State of Protected Heritage Areas Report, 1999.
[11] See Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship.
[12] Parks Canada, Parks Canada Agency Corporate Plan 2004/2005—2008/2009.
[13] S. J. Faulkner‐Fayle, ‘Thriving, Not Surviving: Developing an Entrepreneurial Approach for the Management of Canadian National Historic Sites’, unpublished research paper, Museum Studies Program, University of Toronto, 1997.
[14] This article follows from a study of the planning, production, and reception of the UGRR exhibit. Research involved archival research, an analysis of the exhibit as text, and interviews with planning and design staff, committee members, and visitor survey and informal observation over two five‐day periods. Relevant Parks Canada reports include: The Underground Railroad and the Urban Experience in Canada: Proposed Exhibit, 1998; Interpretation Concept Plan: Toronto UGRR Presentation, 2000.
[15] Aspects of the visitor research have been reported elsewhere in Susan Ashley, ‘Power and Presentation: The Visual Effects of Museum Display’, paper presented at the Canadian Communications Association Conference, Winnipeg, 3 June 2004.
[16] Ricketts, ‘Commemorating the Underground Railroad in Canada’, 33–34.
[17] Weil, ‘From Being about Something to Being for Somebody’, 229–58.