Museums, it has been noted, are not the best place to experience a culture. Objects placed behind glass, with limited context, often having been obtained by dubious means (to say the least). They offer the barest glimpses into other worlds of experience – and yet, sometimes, these objects manage to impart lessons that can still be heard.
At a recent visit to the Royal Ontario Museum, I found myself in the Indigenous area they had curated. Like the BC Museum here, the ROM is on its own journey of reconciliation, with much explanatory signage about their process of reviewing their attitudes and collections.
What was presented, however, was a collection of stories – coupled with clothing, household items, tools and weapons of the many tribes that inhabit what is now referred to as Ontario.
As I moved slowly through the space, I felt my ignorance keenly; not just as a settler who understood little of these cultures, but also as someone who had grown up on the West Coast. The materials I was seeing were all new to me – the use of dyed quills, of birch bark, of different woods and other plants and leathers. I’ve never seen a birch tree. Or a porcupine, for that matter.
It reminded me of how different this eastern landscape is to ours out West. It made me marvel at all the incredible ways people have utilized the gifts of the earth over the ages, and how, when living in connection to a place, we become an extension of it. We become changed by it.
It made me wonder what sort of tools and clothes my indigenous ancestors in Europe might have used; how they would have created things of beauty and value; and how little connection I have to that reality of being in connection to the land.
It’s easy, when speaking about sustainability, to get lost in the weeds of arguments about technology, or what precise steps to take, or how to “make” people care. But at the core of the problem, it seems to be an issue of connection. Do you see yourself as part of the natural world? Or seperate? Are you affected by your landscape? Are you in relationship with it?
Looking at these pieces of a society that our settler culture dealt so much damage to, I remembered that the first step should always be reconnection, in whatever way is possible. Eating the food that is offered in season. Getting to know the look of the native plants and fungi; the smell of them, the feel of them, their cycles. Watching the animals, the birds, getting curious about their ways and calls.
The more we spend time with the natural world, the harder it is to tell ourselves that we’re separate from it. And that, it feels like, it the key to putting this world back together. It’s the message that these incredible objects were projecting from behind their glass in a museum thousands of kilometres away – and one I do not want to forget.