
Connect via Zoom and join museum folks from across the province for an online personal development opportunity, a chance to network with other museums, to chat, ask questions, and seek advice.
Upcoming Chats
Difficult Inheritance: Telling Stories of Repair in Museums
- Wednesday April 2
- 12:00pm - 1:00pm CST
- Online (Zoom)
Orly Lael Netzer
Heritage institutions in Canada have been beneficiaries of extractive collection processes and display practices, and though significant improvement is still necessary in care for belongings and repatriation, museums have been making major strides with reparative work (CMA MTA Report, 2022). These difficult histories, realities, and relationalities have been shaping relations between Indigenous or diasporic communities and colonial institutions. However, though often left out of the story, wider visiting publics — both Indigenous and non, professional audiences and general ones — are already implicated in both histories and legacies of harm alongside the work of repair. This presentation explores what it would mean to share stories of custodianship, care, and repatriation with museum visitors. Proposing an UNDRIP-compliant storytelling framework for public education on custodianship and repatriation, this presentation asks how telling stories of repair can open difficult conversations about reconciliation, decolonization, and right relations.Â
Orly Lael Netzer is a scholar of life stories, cultural studies, and memory studies. Interlacing Indigenous, diasporic, and settler perspectives, her work is driven by questions of relations — exploring how culture shapes our ways of being with others through listening to each other’s lived experience. Specializing in testimonial cultural production, and asking how are publics invited to inherit difficult knowledge, her practice aims to foster socially responsible and care-full spaces for learning and dialogue on national narratives, histories of injury, movements of redress, and discourses of reconciliation.
Previous Community Chats
All of the Previously Recorded Chats are available on our YouTube channel!