Jason Chalmers

Heritage professionals across Canada and around the world are beginning to
explore how decolonization can be applied to museum exhibits, collections, and programing. The Montreal Holocaust Museum (MHM), which was founded by survivors in 1979 and launched its current permanent exhibit in 2003, recently announced that it will be relocating to a new building and updating its exhibit. As such, this is an ideal time to consider how the MHM can respond to the changing landscape of museum practice in the twenty-first century. Is decolonization a process that can be meaningfully applied to Holocaust museums and, if so, how can the MHM’s permanent exhibit critically engage with issues surrounding settler colonialism and Indigeneity? This article explores three narrative themes within the museum: Canadian history; human rights; and Palestine/Israel. While the exhibit reinscribes settler colonial narratives and ideologies, it also contains multiple entry points that curators can use to deploy decolonial museum practices. A decolonial MHM can retain its specific focus on the genocide of European Jewry while also illuminating the colonial structures that visitors, museum content, and Holocaust memory are entwined within.

This article explores how Canadian Jewish community archives are responding to and engaging with reconciliation. Reconciliation, which entered national public discourse largely through the activities of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC), is a process that restores or repairs relationships between settler society and Indigenous peoples. Based on a survey of nine archives, I identify how Jewish organizations are responding to the TRC, critically engaging with Canada’s ongoing history of settler colonialism, and building relationships with Indigenous nations. Canadian Jewish archives do this in various ways: Formal statements of reconciliation; presenting history in a way that includes Indigenous peoples and illuminates settler colonialism; acknowledging Indigenous peoples, lands, and treaties; programming that builds relationships or facilitates dialogue; and decolonizing or Indigenizing projects related to archival collections. I demonstrate that Canadian Jewish archives have begun to engage with reconciliation in substantial ways, although many of these responses are still nascent. Furthermore, the majority of these practices focus on educating Jewish audiences rather than building relationships with Indigenous communities, thus signalling the need for more collaborative approaches. Approaching reconciliation in a way that is rooted in the history and experiences of a particular settler group, rather than the premise of state supremacy, may be a productive way to avoid the colonial politics of recognition and facilitate social change in the place now called Canada.

Local and national contexts shape the way people commemorate the Jewish Holocaust. In settler colonial contexts, Holocaust memory has a tendency to marginalise Indigenous peoples and obscure histories of colonial violence. In 2017, Canada unveiled its first national site dedicated exclusively to the Holocaust – the National Holocaust Monument (NHM) – several blocks away from the federal Parliament buildings in downtown Ottawa. I contend that, while the monument ostensibly commemorates the genocide of European Jewry, it also reflects Canada’s ongoing history as a settler state founded on the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands. Proponents of the NHM – monument designers, spokespersons, and political supporters – engage with themes that are central to Canada’s national myth. They frame civilisational progress as the overarching narrative of both human and national history, and identify contemporary Canada as a the culmination of this history. This narrative marginalises Indigenous peoples in mutually reinforcing ways: it erases Indigenous peoples from the landscape while, at the same time, constructing settler society as newly “indigenised” inhabitants. In this way, the Canadian state uses the NHM to legitimise the theft of land while also suppressing Indigenous claims to land.

There is conceptual confusion in academic scholarship regarding Indigenous research methodologies and decolonising research methodologies. Scholars view these paradigms as similar yet distinct, but very few seek to define that distinction. In this article, I explore the relationship between these approaches to academic research. Both paradigms emphasise the need to transform the academy because of its tendency to marginalise non-Western epistemologies. Transformation requires the interconnection and coordination of many paradigms including Indigenous, feminist, and antiracist approaches to research. I propose viewing Indigenous and decolonising research methodologies as a relationship, and suggest both are dynamic practices that do not exist outside of the people who use them. What they look like and how they relate to one another will depend upon who uses them, why they are used, and where they are practiced.

Genocide and settler colonialism are conceptually related ideas, although the specific relationship remains unclear. Whereas some scholars develop subcategories of 'colonial genocide' or examine the historical origins of these concepts, I address the signification of 'genocide' and 'indigeneity.' I explore the system of meanings underlying each concept to suggest that both are paradoxically rooted in otherness. The category of indigeneity reveals a basic paradox: the colonizer and Indigenous other are separate from but, simultaneously, dependent upon one another. Likewise, with genocide the perpetrator and othered victim are separate but at the same time dependent on each other. Genocide and indigeneity are conceptually related so that one can consider them as two aspects of the same phenomenon. I propose conceptualizing the relationship between indigeneity and genocide as a two-stage process of erasure in settler societies, with imposition of the category of indigeneity as a preliminary genocide that precedes a formal act of genocide.

This  paper  addresses  Canada’s  first  national  monument  to  the  Holocaust:  the  National  Holocaust Monument (NHM) in Ottawa. I examine how public discourse surrounding the NHM constructs the Holocaust as a Canadian memory. Political spokespersons create connections  between  the  Holocaust  and  Canadian  history  by  drawing  on  themes  of  Canada’s Allied role during the war, post-war Jewish immigration, and the narrative of None Is too Many. The discourse frames Canada as both a hero and villain in respect to the Holocaust. Whereas some nations seek to resolve such conflicting memories, Canadians seem content to remember their nation in both ways.

In recent decades, ‘the Holocaust’ has become a freefloating symbolic signifier that can be applied to a variety of subjects regardless of their (dis)similarity to the Nazi persecution of European Jewry. This means that, while the ostensible purpose of Holocaust commemoration is to honour the dead, a community’s decision to remember the Holocaust is compelled by a variety of interests. In 2011, the federal government of Canada announced that it would construct its own national memorial to the Holocaust – the National Holocaust Monument (NHM) – thereby raising the question of what interests have provoked this memorial. In the present study, I analyse the discourse surrounding this memorial to understand some of the primary motivations underlying the NHM. After establishing a theoretical framework for the study of Holocaust memorials, I discuss two major themes that have emerged from the discourse: the ethical and the global. Both themes frame the monument as an embodiment of ‘Canadian’ values, but each does so for a different audience; in one instance the NHM acts as a mirror that reflects Canadian values towards Canadians, while the other is a beacon that projects these values to global society. Based on these related functions, I argue that Holocaust memory and the NHM are being used to broadcast Canadian values in multiple directions in an attempt to shape the nation’s domestic and international identities.

The truth commission has emerged in the last thirty years as a distinct juridical form that views the production of truth as necessary, and in some cases sufficient, for achieving justice. In his history of truth-telling in juridical forms, Michel Foucault conducts a genealogy of avowal (or confession) in western judicial practice; critical to his definition of avowal is that the truth-teller and wrong-doer must be the same individual. In my analysis, I consider avowal in light of a relatively recent judicial innovation: the truth commission. This is carried out through use of Canada's Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as a particular case study. The TRC's emphasis on the testimony of victims rather than perpetrators means that truth-telling and wrongdoing are decoupled in this juridical form, suggesting that avowal is not a function of truth commissions according to Foucault's criteria. Does this mean that truth commissions are not involved in truth production? Or perhaps that they are not a juridical form in the lineage of those examined by Foucault? The truth commission is a juridical form that Foucault was unable to address because it developed after his death. It is possible that the truth commission challenges his core understanding of avowal; however, the truth commission also appears to be consistent with trends that he predicted about the role of truth-telling in the modern judicial system.

This dissertation examines myth and memory in settler colonial contexts. In particular, it explores the way Canadians engage with national mythology at sites of genocide commemoration. It focuses on three national sites that together constitute a memorial network: the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR), which opened in Winnipeg in 2014; the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which released its final report in 2015; and the National Holocaust Monument (NHM), which was unveiled in Ottawa in 2017. These sites are ideal case studies because each addresses the history and memory of the Holocaust or Residential Schools. The history and memory of genocide, and especially Indigenous genocide, is an integral part of settler colonialism and settler mythology. In this dissertation, I ask how sites of genocide memory reproduce – or resist – settler colonialism in Canada. I consider how memory functions as an aspect of settler colonialism and, especially, how Canadians use commemoration to reinscribe settler mythologies, identities, and relationships. Furthermore, I address how these memories can become sites of resistance that destabilise settler colonialism.

My analysis is guided by the framework of difficult knowledge. The theory of difficult knowledge posits that learning occurs when marginalised narratives (difficult knowledge) disrupt dominant ones (lovely knowledge). This study considers how the CMHR, TRC, and NHM frame histories of genocide as difficult and/or lovely knowledge. I demonstrate that, while the NHM reproduces lovely knowledge, the TRC and CMHR both generate potentially difficult knowledge, albeit in limited ways. However, they use different techniques to do so: the TRC promotes a subversive counter-narrative whereas the CMHR encourages visitors to engage in the interpretation of national history. I contend that they are likely to produce difficult knowledge about Canadian history and myth when they engage with Indigenous peoples and perspectives. Furthermore, I argue that the framework of difficult knowledge can work as a critical – and potentially decolonising – research methodology.

This study offers several findings regarding the relationship between settler colonialism and memorial networks. I argue that, while Holocaust memory and the memory of Residential Schools can – and do – inform one another, both memories emerge from and are shaped by settler mythology. In other words, settler colonialism plays a significant role in the production of genocide memory in Canada. Furthermore, I argue that the CMHR, TRC, and NHM are points of rupture that force Canadians to confront the myths and memories that undergird settler society. That is, these sites cultivate identity by enabling people to engage with, re-enact, and institutionalise myth and memory. At the same time, however, memorial sites are places of resistance that can disrupt national myth and destabilise settler colonialism.

Holocaust monuments are often catalysts in the "nationalization" of the Holocaust – the process by which Holocaust memory is shaped by its national milieu. Between 2009 and 2011, the Parliament of Canada debated a bill which set out the guidelines for the establishment of a National Holocaust Monument (NHM), which ultimately became a federal Act of Parliament in early 2011. I examine the discourse generated by this bill to understand how the memory of the Holocaust is being integrated into the Canadian identity, and argue that the debate surrounding the NHM has been instrumental in the "Canadianisation" of the Holocaust. I summarise my findings by placing them into dialogue with other national memories of the Holocaust, and identify three distinct features of Holocaust memory in Canada: a centrifugal trajectory originating in the Jewish community, a particular-universal tension rooted in multiculturalism, and a multifaceted memory comprising several conflicting – though not competing – narratives.