An image from the music video for “How to Steal a Canoe” (2016) by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, directed by Amanda Strong (Spotted Fawn Productions)

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson presents an ethical framework around consent that challenges the way museums currently handle material culture. Oral history presents one way to navigate these challenges and to preserve the relationship between object and community.

In the museum world, histories and their meanings are conveyed through objects or material culture. Anchoring stories in physical objects is what differentiates museums from other institutional sites of history making. Through objects, curators tell stories. And through this process, history is taken out of the theater of the mind and brought into the physical museum space, providing visitors with a tangible connection to the past.

Objects hold many stories; stories imbued by the hands that shape them and the bodies that use them. These stories cannot be separated from context: from the relationships that give them meaning. Often, instead of examining what stories an object contains already, we look for ways to use the object to tell our own stories. We, as museum professionals, must keep in mind that there are worlds of meaning attached to the object(s) that might not fit the particular stories we wish to share. The stories told by objects are determined by what questions are asked and who is doing the asking. In a recent workshop given by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Simpson’s discussion of relationality and consent within Nishnaabeg culture caused me to think about what this ethical framework means for storytelling in a museum context. How can objects be understood once removed from the consensual relationship built with the communities who made and used them?

During the workshop Simpson shared the music video for a track from her 2016 album f(l)ight — “How to Steal a Canoe” is a deeply moving piece which implicates museums as mechanisms of settler colonialism that remove objects from their relational orbit. She characterizes the de-contextualization of native artifacts and cultural practices as a continuation of the theft of native lands, identity and bodies. “How to Steal a Canoe” was born out of Simpson’s experience reclaiming a canoe originally created and used by Mississauga Nishnaabeg people but being held by the Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough, Ontario, on Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg land. The canoe had recently come to the museum following the death of a private collector in England.

Simpson also spoke about the Nishnaabeg conception of consent, which extends to all things (human, nonhuman, natural and spiritual) and begins with a deep, reciprocal relationship. Consent, in the Nishnaabeg context, is “continually generated” through a set of land-based practices and rituals. In other words, the Nishnaabeg way of life itself produces the ethical framework for consent as well as the conditions for consent to be shared.[1] In the film, Simpson explores this concept through the experience of two characters, kwe and akiwenzii, who visit the storage space of the Canoe Museum. Looking at the canoes neatly stored in the warehouse, akiwenzii describes the space as a “canoe jail” and says to the museum, “Oh, you’re so proud of your collection of Indians. Good job, zhaaganash, good job.”

Beyond subverting the assumption that objects of indigenous people’s lives are historical artifacts to be used for educational purposes, “How to Steal A Canoe” illustrates that the preservation model that museums practice strips objects of their meaning by extracting them from everything they existed in relationship with. Extraction without concern or awareness for the impact that an object’s removal will have on other people and beings or on the environment is a violation of Nishnaabeg conceptions of consent. While museums believe they are safeguarding artifacts for posterity by isolating them away, the film illustrates that objects cannot be understood in isolation. Further, the film begs the question, what must change when preservation is experienced as violence? In the song, kwe uses her fingers to wet the canoes with water from her bottle to reconnect them with the water they were meant to be in relationship with. 

Nishnaabeg conceptions of relationality and consent present important challenges to museums which place an emphasis on extractive legal ownership. Oral history may be one way to address this dislocation and disconnection while providing a more holistic understanding of collections. Oral histories concerned with locating objects in the lives of community members may preserve some of that relational context. Keeping an object in relationship with the people and communities it came from could be a way to more accurately and ethically engage with material culture. Instead of using objects to tell our stories, we must engage with the stories the object has to tell.

Simpson reminds us that praxis and methodology generate the future: we are living in the world we have created and simultaneously creating the world we will inhabit. While collecting oral histories for each new accession presents issues for current collecting (significantly slowing the collecting process, costing more money, etc.), it also presents us with the opportunity to leave future curators with objects that can be used more ethically to tell stories. If this is our goal, it will require a paradigm shift. Museums must operate in such a way that they are bringing about a future where objects not only connect people to history, but connect them to the universe around that object: to the people, the community, the place, and the meanings generated therein. 

how to start a fire, after Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

by kristine smith

in my dreams we are together
sharing vast lands
and love and lust

we do not offer up our pain
or our pleasure to men
museums or those who lead with harm

we acknowledge consent as sacred
women and children as sacred
our bodies as stories and portals and gods

we see empire in its death-throes and we do not rush to save it
we start a revolution a rebellion
burn it all down to build something better

we ask questions
demand action
we wake up and we do it again

[1] Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 27-28.

[2] Simpson, As We Have Always Done, 75.

Max Peterson is a part of the 2020-2021 cohort at OHMA. Though he was born and raised in New Hampshire, Max currently lives in Washington, D.C. where he works with high school students through the Real World History program and is an oral history assistant at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. He is passionate about extra-curricular learning and facilitating broader engagement with history both within and outside of museums.

Kristine Smith is a poet and essayist primarily concerned with the ways women and femmes reclaim collective and personal power through pleasure and storytelling. Her work is scattered across the internet in various forms including written, visual and performance art. She is angry, hopeful and unrelenting.