Moira McLoughlin - Museums and the Representation of Native Canadians: Negotiating the Borders of Culture

INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES

edited by
JOHN R. WUNDER
CYNTHIA WILLIS ESQUEDA
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA-LINCOLN

Negotiating the Borders of Culture

Moira McLoughlin

First published 1999 by Garland Publishing, Inc.

This edition published 2014 by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 1999 Moira McLoughlin
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McLoughlin, Moira, d. 1997.
Museums and the representation of Native Canadians : negotiating the borders of culture / Moira McLoughlin.
p. cm. (Native Americans)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8153-2988-1 (alk. paper)
1. Indians of North AmericaMuseumsCanada. 2. Intercultural communication. 3. Museum techniquesCanada. 4. Indians of North AmericaCanadaPublic opinion. 5. Public opinionCanada. I. Title. II. Series: Native Americans (Garland Publishing, Inc.)
E76.85.M38 1999
305.897071'074dc21

99-12896

** A11 photographs not taken by the author are used with the permission of their respective museums.

Larry Gross

The publication of this book is an occasion for both pleasure and sorrow. The pleasure is one that will be shared by the readers, who will gain a better understanding of important questions at the heart of contemporary cultures. The sorrow is one felt by those of us who knew, admired, and loved Moira McLoughlin, and who will feel her absence in our lives as well as her presence in these pages.

Those of us who are privileged to teach in universities are accustomed to the parade of students who pass through our classrooms and offices, blending into a blur of names and faces often only vaguely recalled when encountered in yellowing papers or conference hallways. But there are those who remain brightly lit and sharply focused; players rather than extras in one's life. Moira McLoughlin was such a student; one whom I quickly came to view as a colleague in the shared enterprise of scholarship.

Tall, graceful, and beautiful, Moira was quietly witty and invariably original in her style and her thinking. Having traveled and worked both in Canada and abroad before attending Simon Fraser University, Moira was somewhat older than most of her contemporaries when she began graduate studies at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Perhaps for that reason she always seemed confident of her interests, though modest about her accomplishments. From the start of her graduate studies Moira was focused on the intersections of art and culture that I have explored in my teaching, and I was delighted to encourage her to pursue questions that many would have thought too far afield from conventional communication research.

Moira's Master's thesis took a fresh look at one of the most familiar landmarks in modern art: examining the critical discourse surrounding the Armory Show of 1913. The received version of the Armory Show is as the classic confrontation of innovative art with critical stodginess. The standard art historical discussion will introduce the Armory Show under a heading something like "An outraged public confronts modern art," and talk about the "fury and incomprehension of the academic painters and critics," while also noting that some of the lay public were impressed by the "freshness and force" of the works exhibited. Moira's work breaks with the simplified account we have all heard and read by examining the entire body of critical responses printed about the Armory Show at the time: its far from invisible or silent supporters as well as its vocal detractors. What is gained in this wider survey is the possibility of setting the debate over the show within the context of contemporary art world debates. The stakes included the status and power of artists, critics, dealers, teachers, and other art world participants. For the established rulers of the art world modern art represented a threat to their control over the selection and training of artists, their preeminence in critical acclaim, and their dominance in the art marketplace. Moira took these concerns seriously, as she assumed that the show's detractors based their responses on a profound appreciation of the threat modernism posed to contemporary aesthetic discourse and the critic's position within its boundaries. What she was also able to show, however, is the role and interests of those whose impassioned, supportive voices were raised in defense of these works. Thus, "the debate cannot be simply seen as individual differences of opinion over particular works or artists, but as power struggles over the domain in which the works should be discussed: struggles over how art is defined and by who." (Moira's article based on this study appears in a collection I edited, On The Margins of Art Worlds, published by Westview Press in 1995, pp. 17-38.)

Readers of this book will readily see the continuity of concerns between her study of the Armory Show and her dissertation research on the often-contentious relationships between the Canadian museum community and Native Canadians. In this considerably more ambitious project, Moira moved from the analysis of texts preserved in library stacks to the challenges of analyzing museum exhibits and layouts, and from interpreting the meanings critics inscribed in their writings to engaging in interviews and discussions with museum staff and other participants in often quite lively struggles over the representation of Native Canadians. Unprotected by the distance of eighty years that separated her from the Armory Show, here Moira was treading in actively contested territory and interrogating many of those engaged in the contest; threading her way through a minefield of cultural politics. Moira was armed in this quest by her honesty and modesty, acknowledging her double outsider statusas a scholar of communications and culture who was neither Native Canadian nor a museum professional, though sympathetic to both cultures.

Moira sent her completed dissertation to all of the museums she had studied, and was gratified to learn that at least one had made some changes in their exhibits after reading her work. She intended to incorporate responses of curators, directors, and educators in the book, and she planned to revisit those museums that have made substantial changes to their exhibits in response to criticisms from the Native community and scholars in this area. Moira also hoped to speak to museum visitors to get a sense of how these exhibits are being seen by the public. This, she wrote, was "in response to the criticisms (quite legitimate, I think) that this kind of work often gets: that the analysis is highly subjective and tells us nothing about how the general public might be making sense of the exhibits." Moira's caution and modesty should not, however, distract us from appreciating the clarity of her vision or the sharpness of her analyses.