Something to be remembered

Once when I was in my early 20s and my sister was still in her early teens she came to visit me in Calgary.  I had all sorts of exciting shenanigans planned for her visit, but knowing we couldn't possibly fit them all in I decided to give her the opportunity to choose an activity from among them.

"So, what would you rather do this weekend - ," I asked, "go to the museum or zoo?" Yeah, my shenanigans were that exciting. I had a secret wager with myself that she was going to pick the zoo, after all - cute, cuddly animals that you don't have the opportunity to see every day - how could you not?  In truth I really wanted to go to the museum but I seriously doubted how a feature exhibit on the building the trans-Pacific railway could possibly stimulate a 14 year old brain.  My sister surprised me though when she picked the museum, almost without a second thought.  Oh yeah, I remembered, we are sisters.  Strange things like preferring museums to zoos must run in the family.

When I was travelling in Eastern Canada I had the opportunity to visit my fair share of museums. In fact, at one point in Montreal I reached a point of museum overload when we visited the Place de Calliere, Planetarium, Biodome, Musee de Marguerite Bouregoys, Centre d'Histoire de Montreal, Bank of Montreal money museum, Chateau Ramezay and a few other places I have already forgotten all in the matter of a couple days!  My journal entry from October 1st reads, "Yesterday: too many museums."  That's it.  That's all the energy I had to write!  My brain was so fried that by the time we got to the Musee des Hospitaliares I was doing that thing where you read a sentence, get halfway through and realize you don't have any clue what it is saying so you start reading from the beginning again only to get 1/2 a dozen words in before you realize you can't even recall what they were, so you start again and the vicious cycle repeats itself.  I ended up giving up at that point.  Apparently there can be too much of a good thing.  The good news is: I recovered.  By Ottawa I was prepared to visit museums again, only no more than one a day this time.

The thing about going to so many museums is that you begin to see how they have a tendency to be all the same.  Take First Nations exhibits, for example.  By the end of my trip I was getting seriously annoyed with them.  I voice my frustrations in my journal:

"Canadians seem to think that this is our history, but the truth is that it is us trying to record the vestiges of a dying culture because our ancestors nearly stamped them out of existence.  How many museums have I entered that have told me what the First Nations did, what they wore, how they survived, but have never told me who they were? There is almost never a story of a person, of a soul that represents the soul of his or her people, and that is the real tragedy of these museum exhibits.  History remains a white man thing - with the remnants of the civilizations we have conquered displayed in our halls."

There were exhibits, however, that offered a fresh perspective that I really appreciated.  In the Canadian Museum of History I went through an exhibit entitled "1867: Rebellion and Confederation."  This exhibit told the story of the context surrounding Canada's confederation, about how the American revolution to the south had pushed up the British loyalists who had a superiority complex over the French Acadians and the only reason these two cultures completely at odds with each other came together was because they were worried about being annexed by the States. I found it extraordinarily amusing that the origin of Canadian identity was in the desire to NOT be American.  Despite our close ties to the US today, this one fact remains a pivotal expression of Canadian identity.

What I really pulled away from the 1867 exhibit, however, was the fact that when Canada became a nation, it was in fact not a nation.  People in Canada still thought about themselves as British subjects.  They still carried British Passports.  It wasn't until World War I, as I learned later at the Canadian War Museum, that Canada was recognized on an international stage as its own unique country.  It was because of World War I that Canadians decided to take over their own international affairs, that we began to take pride in saying that we were Canadian and began to seek out symbols of our cultural identity. 

A few days ago we celebrated November 11th, Remembrance Day here in Canada.  That day I had the opportunity to help my church serve coffee and hot chocolate to the hundreds of people who came to participate in the ceremonial process of remembrance and I did not hesitate to take a few pictures.  War is a tragedy.  It has a huge toll in the cost of life that it demands.  And yet, I feel so grateful for those soldiers and people who have represented Canada in war.  At the museums I visited on my trip I learned that the adversity of war is what helped birth our national identity.  We are not a warlike people; we have not sought conflict as the Americans have throughout their revolutionary history.  But it is through the fires of war that we have discovered who we are and what we believe in as a nation.  It is because of the sacrifices of these people that we can have pride in being Canadian.

For that, soldiers and veterans, I thank you.