CCI Symposium 2007 Speaking Notes:
Preserving Aboriginal Heritage: The Fusion of Technical and Traditional Approaches at
the Canadian Museum of Civilization

BY JOHN MOSES

Indigenous rights, including those involving culture and heritage, and thus conservation, continue to receive elaboration at the level of international law, as with ongoing discussions surrounding the June, 2006 proclamation of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Domestically, individual countries might enact legislation or draft national policy in these same areas. As indigenous (or “Aboriginal” rights, here in Canada) receive articulation through such means, the challenge for institutions such as museums which house collections of Aboriginal artifacts becomes expressing these in concrete form. Land claims, the Ethical Guidelines for Research published in the 1996 Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples ; and the Joint CMA/AFN Task Force Report on Museums & First Peoples ; have all influenced policy at federal institutions like the Canadian Museum of Civilization (CMC), in such areas as repatriation and human remains. Additionally, unique innovations including the incorporation of Aboriginal traditional care and other cultural protocols into museum storage and exhibition methods, and the provision of specialized collections care training tailored to the unique needs of Aboriginal interns, have been the hallmarks of CMC’s particular approach to the fusion of technical and traditional methods in artifact conservation.

The head of CMC’s Aboriginal Training Program, Jameson Brant, and myself, are speaking in much more detail later in this Symposium concerning this aspect, so I will not go into any further details right now.

But as we have seen already today, and as we shall continue to see for the rest of the coming week, the conservation profession continues to make great strides in engaging with indigenous and Aboriginal peoples at the local level and at the community level. With respect, I submit that the next great challenge lies in changing the face and the demographic of the conservation profession itself: we need to see more Aboriginal persons working as professional conservators at the mainstream institutions. Our respective institutions need to do more to hire, train, retain, and promote professional conservators of Aboriginal heritage. It’s no longer good enough that we simply engage periodically with Aboriginal groups at the community level on particular finite projects.

As a workforce equity and diversity issue if nothing else, there is a crisis of under-representation of Native people working in the range of the heritage-related disciplines, including conservation, that needs to be addressed by special measures. Our profession is too homogeneous, given the range of cultural materials that our institutions historically have presumed to collect, and which we now presume to treat. In very practical terms, our institutions need to set-aside positions as Native-only staffing, and then through a competitive process bring onboard successful Aboriginal candidates who can demonstrate an aptitude for the work. These should then be trained in-house, in a fashion similar to that undertaken here in Canada during the early 1970’s, when the effort was first made to establish the cadre of a home-grown conservation profession in this country. In Canada this means that our conservation professional organizations and advocacy groups, our training institutions, and our public sector employers, should be working in concert to craft innovative ways in which existing Employment Equity Act legislation can be applied to accomplish this.

Simply put, the minimum standard set in the legislation is that the number of Aboriginal persons gainfully employed in the combined professional/technical job classifications should reflect the availability of Aboriginal persons in the national workforce at large. Where the provision of a public service is aimed primarily at an Aboriginal audience or constituency, or where the subject matter dealt with reflects Aboriginal experience (as with museum collections of Aboriginal material culture), then the further argument is made that those providing the service be Aboriginal persons themselves.

Thus, the principle of equity in employment is simply that the diversity of any given workforce should reflect the diversity of the nation’s population at large. The practices of achieving equity include these key steps:

1. a Communications strategy to sensitize our members and our employers to the requirement to attract more indigenous conservators to the workforce;

2. a Workforce survey so that current practitioners can self-identify as to their indigenous heritage;

3. a Workforce analysis of the findings of this survey so that we can determine the percentage of current practitioners who do indeed self-identify as indigenous;

4. and finally an Employment systems review so that any systemic barriers that would account for the under-representation of practicing conservators of indigenous heritage may be identified, and special measures to remove these systemic barriers can be described and implemented, and their progress monitored.

In closing, while we need to see the emergence of a unique conservation approach that fuses both technical and traditional methods, we equally need to see the emergence of a conservation workforce which itself is representative of the cultures whose patrimony it presumes to safeguard.

John Moses
Conservator & Researcher
Canadian Museum of Civilization
Gatineau, QC

1 United Nations Human Rights Council Resolution 2006/2, United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, proclaimed 29 June 2006.
2 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1996), Appendix E, Final Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples: Ethical Guidelines for Research, available in downloadable format at <www.ainc-inac.gc.ca/ch/rcap/sg/ska5e_e.html>
3 Canadian Museums Association and the Assembly of First Nations (1991), Task Force Report on Museums and First Peoples ~ Turning the Page: Forging New Partnerships Between Museums and First Peoples, Ottawa: Canadian Museums Association.
4 Canada (1995), Employment Equity Act, Revised Statutes of Canada, Ottawa: Queen’s Printer.