Chapter 4 Colonial Mythmaking in Canadian Police Museums on the Prairies

Conceptual Encounters

Before examining our data, we review relevant literature on museums and representation. The museum is a place where versions of national identity and belonging are on display (Sutherland 2014). As a place in which knowledge is communicated, the museum is one location where imagined national communities (Anderson 1991) and who belongs to them are negotiated (Douglas 2017). Part of the fostering of nationalism in the museum (Drzewiecka 2014; Velmet 2011; Mittner 2000) involves depicting some persons as authentic citizens and other people as worthy of exclusion (McLean 1998). To the extent Indigenous peoples are not included in Canadian museums, they are not treated as part of Canada’s historical record. Drawing on this literature, our conceptual approach treats the museum as a realm of meaning making that is inherently political and reflective of power relations. Although there are exceptions (Fiander et al. 2016), Canadian museums have often not included or have diminished the voices and perspectives of Indigenous peoples (McLoughlin 1993). The same can be said for police museums.

Smith (2006) has argued that heritage is political since it is always used to advance partial narratives that leave out aspects of the past, which has implications for how people understand the present. As she notes, “the idea of heritage is used to construct, reconstruct, and negotiate a range of identities and social and cultural values and meanings in the present” (Smith 2006, 3). Heritage displays and discourses become authorized knowledges advancing truth claims viewers and tourists encounter, which are difficult to contest. From this perspective, police museums not only provide limited, partial views of the history of social control in Canada, they also gloss over the injustices and violence that police have perpetrated (Ferguson, Piché, and Walby 2019). The police museum positions itself as a holder of the truth about policing in a given jurisdiction. Canadian police museums tend to mute understandings of injustices and violence that police have perpetrated against First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples in Canada. Smith (2006, 287) goes on to suggest that authorized heritage discourses such as those found in state museums are sites where the stories about the history of colonialism are manipulated. Police museums displace First Nations, Inuit, and Métis histories of colonialism and knowledges concerning the territories now called Canada. As our analysis of partial “establishment narratives” (Wilson 2008) in police museums demonstrates, it is time for these sites to cede space for representations created and communicated by First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples.

Onciul (2014) argues that museums and heritage spaces must be decolonized to work toward reconciliation. This means representing “hard truths” about colonialism such as the genocide perpetrated against First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples in Canada (Woolford 2009). Police museums are crucial to examine in the context of literature on colonialism and the Canadian state (e.g., Chartrand 2019; Monchalin 2016; Hinton, Woolford, and Benvenuto 2014), since police have been primary agents of the genocide against Indigenous peoples in Canada. From this perspective, police need to learn from First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples about colonialism and let this inform representations found in police museums. Museum spaces must become forums where Indigenous groups are able to claim part of history and articulate their own understandings of the role of police in colonial state practices. As we suggest in the discussion, decolonizing police museums in Canada will likely be a challenging and jarring process.

Findings and Analysis

As part of a larger research project on policing, courthouse, and prison museums in Canada, we have conducted interviews and observations at dozens of museums pertaining to “criminal justice.” In our work, we follow Dickinson and colleagues (2006) in undertaking a critical analysis of the myths perpetuated in these museums by examining what is present in heritage sites and “tracing absence[s]” (Meyer 2012). For this chapter, we focus on data from the Winnipeg Police Museum, the Shoal Lake Mounted Police Museum, the Saskatoon Police Museum, Russell Hanson’s Mounted Police Museum (in Duck Lake), the Duck Lake Regional Interpretive Centre, the Rotary Museum of Police and Corrections (in Prince Albert), and the YouthLink Calgary Police Interpretive Centre. We do not examine the RCMP Heritage Centre in Regina much here, although we do so elsewhere (Ferguson, Piché, and Walby 2020). Research team members made observations in a focused manner using observation grids, while also conducting semi-structured interviews with staff in museums where possible that were recorded and transcribed. Photographs of relics and displays were taken. We analyzed these materials from the above-mentioned sites with focus on displays of colonialism, as well as those depicting First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples.

Police-Centred Memorialization and Anthropological Looking

Before providing our analysis of the museum content, we begin with a few general observations. During the time of our fieldwork, no police museum in our sample opened its displays or tours with a land acknowledgement, which are important because such acts provide recognition for the ancestral lands upon which “we live and work” (CAUT, n.d.) that were acquired by the Crown through duplicity in the cases where treaties were signed, but not honoured, and by force when such agreements were not sought or obtained. In cases when settler relations with First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples is addressed, one type of looking that is fostered is “anthropological” (Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki 2006, 33). That is, while there is an acknowledgement of events, albeit incomplete, they are depicted as relics belonging to a distant history, which fails to recognize legacies of the past reverberating, and continuities at work, in the present.

One such site is the Shoal Lake Mounted Police Museum, located in Shoal Lake, Manitoba north of Brandon, which focuses on the NWMP and RCMP. It is located in Treaty 2 territory, situated on the traditional homelands of the Dakota, Anishinaabe, Oji-Cree, Cree, and Métis peoples. The museum is housed in a replica of the NWMP barracks erected in 1875. There is some mention of the colonial period, but only from the point of view of settlers. In one display, the arrest, detention, and escape of Almighty Voice is represented. The display recounts that Almighty Voice murdered Colin Campbell Colebrook, who was a Sergeant with the NWMP in 1895, and noted there was a $500-dollar reward for his capture. Almighty Voice is viewed by some as a warrior but as an outlaw by others (Anderson 1971), yet the museum framing of the story uses criminality and degeneracy as the only constructs. Almighty Voice was arrested for butchering a cow that belonged to the Indian Department without a permit. Several of his family members had also been arrested and detained for months. Their movement and ability to feed themselves was constrained by Indian Agents, and the pass and permit system. His community was hungry (Shrimpton 1999). This context is rarely, if ever, mentioned in museum settings. Almighty Voice did kill Colebrook who was trying to arrest him again after the escape. A manhunt ensued, and additional NWMP officers were shot. Months later, Almighty Voice and his close friends were killed after approximately a hundred NWMP and settlers fired upon them using rifles, as well as field-guns and mortars against the Métis at Batoche (Anderson 1971). In the Shoal Lake museum, the story is straightforward. Almighty Voice is depicted as a “criminal,” as a “killer,” as a “bad Indian,” and as a problem for settlers. Such rhetoric is the vessel through which the myth of violent, well-armed Indigenous agitators is perpetuated. The context of forced deprivation and starvation is not raised. The elimination of the buffalo as a tactic of genocide (Woolford 2009) is not even alluded to. The imposition of a system of private property that benefited settlers, Indian Agents, and their families who expropriated land from First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples is not discussed. The issue of Indigenous resistance is framed as a matter of aggression by “defiant Indians” (Fetherstonhaugh 1938), as it has in many pro-NWMP and RCMP accounts. This is a striking example of how police museums in Canada bury much of the history of policing organizations by failing to acknowledge that many First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples have been injured, maimed and killed, and placed in settler colonial institutions, including residential schools (Woolford 2015) and prisons (Chartrand 2017).

At Shoal Lake Mounted Police Museum, the origins of police in Canada are depicted as benign. As a display case at the museum indicates, “In 1873 the North West Mounted Police Force was created to keep the peace and administrate Canadian Laws in the North West . . . in 1874 the Force moved west in what is known as the ‘March West’ to shut down a whiskey trading post.” This account ignores the political context and Métis quests for self-determination. The Métis had established a different system of property following the seigneurial system of New France and Government in the Red River Valley in the early to mid 1800s, but then were exiled from the Winnipeg area in the 1870s. They relocated to Batoche, Saskatchewan. The NWMP were deployed to the prairies to disperse and eliminate the Métis and Indigenous groups who were beginning to mobilize against the Canadian state due to discrimination and deprivation. Prime Minister John A. Macdonald held a grudge against Métis leader Louis Riel after the Red River Rebellion in 1869 and the execution of Thomas Scott by a military tribunal appointed by Riel. Following the 1885 resistance in Duck Lake, Fish Creek, and Batoche led by Riel, Prime Minister MacDonald ordered that he be prosecuted for high treason, an offence for which he was convicted and executed (Bumsted 2001, 2000). The most pressing issue during the early years of Confederation for the federal government was national unity, which was secured, in part, through the quelling Indigenous resistance (Nettelbeck et al. 2016, 54–55). The Shoal Lake placards and displays gloss over the direct role of police in crushing Indigenous resistance, suggesting that the NWMP were established simply to create order and protect Canada from eccentric whiskey traders and wolf hunters based in the United States.

In terms of depicting Indigenous history, the Shoal Lake Mounted Police Museum offers one display full of numerous random artifacts, including arrowheads, pemmican, hammer heads, and other materials. Positioning Indigenous peoples as backward is another common curatorial tactic in these museums. These are strategies that perpetuate the myth of terra nullius (lands deemed to be uninhabited by rational beings and ownerless), as well as the myth of the noble savage. Indigenous artifacts are depicted as (ancient) history. Such “anthropological looking” (Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki 2006, 33) makes Indigenous peoples appear as foreign or from another time despite being the original occupants of these lands. There is no context regarding Indigenous spiritual, political, or economic life in such displays. This kind of distancing makes it seem as though Indigenous ways of knowing and living are extinct. The only other story mentioned about Indigenous peoples depicts NWMP in a positive light. A placard mentions that Inspector James Walsh of the NWMP assured Sitting Bull and 5,000 Sioux that they would be provided with protection from the American army if they agreed to obey the laws of Canada and the Queen. The NWMP Inspector is described as a protector of Indigenous peoples. US Indian Police later killed Sitting Bull at Standing Rock (Vestal 1989), a fact not mentioned in the museum since the focus on police and Inspector Walsh occupies most of the frame.

The displays at the Shoal Lake Mounted Police Museum are deficient. They do a poor job of reflecting on the history of how police in Canada have treated First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples. The major role the Métis played in the creation of Manitoba is downplayed. There is little attention given to the shootings of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples in Manitoba or elsewhere across the prairies. Moreover, there is a lack of context and attention paid to the violence perpetrated by the Canadian state in the region, or the role police played in attempting to destroy First Nations and Métis life on the prairies. The operational role of the NWMP barracks at Shoal Lake in the aggressions against Indigenous and Métis peoples in Saskatchewan and Alberta in 1884–1885 is not mentioned. Instead, NWMP and RCMP officers are mostly depicted as heroic, benevolent figures. Public police are a main part of the lethal legacy and assimilationist history of the Canadian state (Miller 2004), but not according to police themselves as per their museum representations.

Unlike the Shoal Lake Mounted Police Museum, which has a small staff and a number of committed community volunteers, the Russell Hanson Mounted Police Museum—situated in Duck Lake, Saskatchewan, a small town north of Saskatoon—is owned and operated by one man. Russell Hanson is a former Saskatchewan farmer who has a passion for NWMP and RCMP history. Yet the history on display at this site is limited and partial. It reflects the historical vision and museum framing of a settler. The RCMP Heritage Centre in Regina has sent relics for display in the Russell Hanson Mounted Police Museum. The site also features the largest RCMP merchandise store outside of the RCMP Heritage Centre in Regina. When Indigenous people are mentioned at this museum, they are reduced to purveyors of beaver pelts, again what Dickinson and colleagues (2006, 33) call “anthropological looking.” Almighty Voice is mentioned in one placard, again as a “criminal,” rather than as a freedom fighter. During an interview, the killing of Colten Boushie, a 22-year-old Cree man from Red Pheasant First Nation, by Gerald Stanley was treated as akin to the protection of homesteads and farms by NWMP and RCMP in decades prior. If the Shoal Lake Mounted Police Museum is diplomatic in the way it fails to provide a space for the inclusion of history incorporating Indigenous views on policing and colonialism, the Russell Hanson Mounted Police Museum is a scene of settler governmentality (Morgensen 2011), in which the promotion of settler lives and their well-being to the detriment of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples is normalized. This is evident in the way tourists can purchase RCMP garb and trinkets for adornment and display in the merchandise shop. One can position oneself as the protector of the settler. The RCMP police brand is depicted and materially treated as one to be trusted. Indigenous peoples are treated as collectors of furs, as “criminals” or as non-existent, even though Duck Lake has Indigenous reserve lands on all sides.

Remembering to Forget and Amnesiatic Looking

While the fostering of “anthropological looking” is pervasive in some police museums, we have also observed heritage sites where the role of policing in enforcing the dispossession of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples is not explained or accounted for, which Dickinson and colleagues (2006, 38) refer to as “amnesiatic looking.” Just as historical literature on policing in Canada often ignores First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples (McGahan 1988; Anderson 1972; Clark 1971), so too do many police museums, which is outrageous given the role that police have played in disrupting and controlling First Nations, Inuit, and Métis communities throughout Canadian history. It is also largely assumed what the “police” are. Obviously, the North-West Mounted Police were a central police force during the colonial period. However, other figures such as Indian Agents were engaged in policing activities, as well as through the enforcement of the pass system and permit system controlling the movement and activities of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples on and off reserve (Satzewich 1997; Satzewich and Mahood 1995). In the vast majority of the police museums we examined, there is no room made for such actors who worked in concert with the NWMP and RCMP.

An example of this is the Rotary Museum of Police and Corrections in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. This is a large museum with many relics on display. The Prince Albert region is home to several Indigenous communities. More than 40 percent of the city identifies as First Nations or Métis (White-Crummey 2017). In 1888, the site became the headquarters for the F Division of the NWMP until 1932, and the museum is located in the former NWMP guardhouse that once included detention cells in which many Indigenous peoples would have been held at various times. Yet one would never know this from the museum. It is vacant of policing history when it comes to First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples. In the tour script, it is claimed that the NWMP were created to “maintain law and order, protect Canadian sovereignty on Canada’s side of the international border, safeguard settlers, police the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, look after Indians, and stop the illegal whiskey traders from the USA.” Each of these state projects required dispossession and marginalization of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis communities, yet this is never made part of the tour. Moreover, claiming the NWMP were occupying the prairies to “look after Indians” shows the paternalism underlying the myth of the benevolent settler state, which is crucial to the work that such museums often do in sterilizing the history of police violence. As Mackey (1998) notes, museums and other cultural and heritage sites often communicate frontier narratives that position Indigenous persons as child-like figures encountered by tolerant and benevolent Canadian state agents and institutions. This representation is crucial to the myth the police created order, rather than mayhem and tension in Indigenous territories. These colonial myths are also policing myths (Campeau 2019; Phillips 2016) that legitimate Canadian state power.

Given that it is located on Treaty 1 territory, the original lands of the Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation, one might also expect rich documentation of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples and policing at the Winnipeg Police Museum. Yet the Winnipeg Police Museum, a cultural site rich with relics and displays in a large space that is part of the Winnipeg Police Service headquarters (see Walby, Ferguson, and Piché 2021), is poor at providing an accurate or adequate history of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples and policing. Museum staff at times also sort “good” from “bad” Indigenous peoples using their own shorthand rules. During the interview, a curator at the Winnipeg Police Museum talked about how he does not see eye to eye with Métis peoples on their history. For example, he felt strongly that Louis Riel was a “criminal” and was rightly executed, while bemoaning the fact that he is memorialized as a leader when certain other Métis leaders are not. For this curator, Cuthbert Grant is a Métis person deserving of more recognition because of his work as a sheriff. Cuthbert Grant was a sheriff or “warden of the plains” of the Assiniboia region designated by the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) during the period from 1839 to 1845. He sided with HBC in many disputes. “We give a day off for Riel but we do not recognize Cuthbert Grant at all . . . one was right and one was wrong,” the curator noted. The curator, a former police officer himself, featured no displays regarding Riel in the museum. Yet there is a small display for Cuthbert Grant, the HBC sheriff. This is an example of the settler mind frame (Morgensen 2011) in action in a Canadian police museum. Anyone not for the Canadian nation-state or the status quo is positioned as a “wrong” or “bad” figure to be eliminated from the frame, like so many First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples have been by the Canadian penal system.

The only other depiction of Indigenous peoples in the Winnipeg Police Museum is on a box for an 1873–1973 centennial and ceremonial RCMP Winchester rifle displayed in a glass case. On the box there are two cartoon scenes in which NWMP officers on horseback chase Indigenous peoples across Prairie landscapes. This is an official box for ceremonial RCMP paraphernalia. These scenes are telling of the RCMP understanding of Indigenous groups. In addition, on the box it is written “Winchester salutes the RCMP on its centenary.” As researchers we wondered how many First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples in Canada have been shot at by those rifles or guns like these. Again, on the most pressing questions, police museums tend to be silent. Such “amnesiatic looking” is an approach to curation and museum display that “privileges forgetting over remembering” (Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki 2006, 38, 40).

One common practice at the Winnipeg Police Museum, which is similar to other law enforcement museums, is that during open houses or special events staff allow visitors to put on an old buffalo coat officers wore during cold winters. There is no mention of where those buffalo coats came from or how the mass killing of the buffalo on the prairies was part of an extermination policy aimed at destabilizing First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples (Hinton, Woolford, and Benvenuto 2014). There is no mention that some Indigenous peoples considered the use of the buffalo coats as a form of desecration (Woolford 2009). Rather than using the relic to teach museum visitors about First Nations and Métis peoples, the coat, like so many other objects in the museum, is presented without context and background. The museum visitor is allowed to position themselves as a police officer through adorning themselves in their gear, yet representations of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples that counter-inscribe settler colonial narratives are not presented in the building.

Located on Treaty 7 region in Alberta, the traditional territory of the communities comprising the Blackfoot Confederacy, the YouthLink Calgary Police Interpretive Centre is among those police museums that fail to represent First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples at all. The Interpretive Centre features an actual helicopter that serves as the museum centrepiece, a display of a full tactical team in operation, as well as a mock forensics lab. The most elaborate police museum in the country offers no placards dedicated to First Nations, Inuit, and Métis communities. This is shameful as the focus of the museum is children, who need to learn about Canada’s history of state violence if reconciliation is to become more than rhetoric.

A Discrepant Example Worthy of Replication

In contrast to the police museums above, the Duck Lake Regional Interpretive Centre does address colonization and its atrocities with displays on Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont in the context of Métis leadership and organizing, as well as Almighty Voice, in Indigenous struggles. Also significant is the inclusion of First Nations and Métis accounts, alongside those of police, in museum narratives.

Out in front of the Interpretive Centre is a painting that depicts dead bodies, at least one of which is Métis, revealing the loss of the 1885 battles that occurred on all sides. This vision is also painful, displaying death and suffering in a vivid manner. It promotes reflection and contemplation before one even enters the museum (Fiander et al. 2016). The Métis flag flies beside the mural. Contrast this with a gigantic photograph at the entrance of the RCMP Heritage Centre in Regina, which depicts a NWMP or RCMP officer on horseback overlooking a vast, empty prairie expanse. This vision is one of a heroic mounted police custodian overseeing an empty land. It promotes myths, which sets up visitors for everything that follows in what is by and large an RCMP propaganda museum (Ferguson, Piché, and Walby 2020). In the former, the Métis subject and perspective is at least present; in the latter, the Métis and First Nations communities of the prairies are absent presences.

The critical forms of punishment memorialization that appear in the Duck Lake Regional Interpretive Centre alongside mainstream accounts is partly a function of the site having become less “criminal justice” oriented over time and more focused on regional history, creating space for non-police interpretations of law enforcement (Fiander et al. 2016). As a result of this rare approach, the inclusion of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis voices subject to Canadian state repression are positioned in ways that have the potential to challenge settler colonial perspectives.

Discussion

As noted by a former Canadian military member turned author in his musings on the 1885 Métis resistance, “when the arm of the Rebellion had been raised and loyal citizens and Mounted Police shot down for striving to vindicate Canadian authority, it was not for us as Canadians to ask whether the rebels had any right on their side or not. Our National integrity had been assailed, our National honour had been threatened, and it only remained for our citizen-soldiers to draw the sword in their defense” (Mulvaney 1885, vi). Based on our examination of representations, as well as interviews with staff, it is as if most police museums in Canada exist to carry this sentiment and posture forward into the future ad infinitum without a moment of critical reflection. The quote suggests it is not for Canadians to ask any questions about the past or the treatment of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples.

Representations of colonialism are never neutral (Modest 2014). These representations can either be positioned to bury the past or to reflect critically on it. As it stands, given the partisan nature of how people remember and memorialize, there are almost two versions of history in Canada (Moran 2016), one that defends settler colonial thinking, and one that views colonialism as a historical and ongoing form of state-induced trauma. Settler colonial and frontier thinking often goes unchallenged in contemporary Canada as part of a backlash to official reconciliation efforts (Besner 2018). Settler Canadians are complicit in police repression of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples, yet this is not an issue that is broached at most Canadian police museums. Instead, the state and many settlers are comfortable with the “killing indifference” (Razack 2013, 353) they display toward the First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples. By not providing a space for Indigenous voices and views of colonialism, heritage sites such as police museums can legitimate state practices and paradoxically justify or rationalize unjustifiable forms of violence and control (also see Sutherland 2014).

The museum should be an agent for social change in the public sphere (Piotrowski 2015). In this sense, the narrative of Canadian nationality that is found in many police museums throughout the country needs to be challenged (Ashley 2011) since it is part of the frontier mentality of curation that positions First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples as outside, or distorted within, the frame. Part of contesting colonialism and settler cities in Canada (Tomiak 2017) should be challenging museum representations of Canada’s history. However, many police museums in Canada are not organized to host discussions that challenge settler colonial views. Like legacy media representations (Lambertus 2004), it could be argued that museum representations tend to erase the structural violence that police have played a role in perpetrating against First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples in Canada. The Red Serge of the Mounties is proudly displayed at most sites, but there are almost no Métis sashes to be found, nor are there adequate descriptions of their struggles on the prairies. Indigenous arrowheads and cultural artifacts are displayed as if they are dinosaur bones from a bygone millennium. Brutal police shootings of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples (Stelkia 2020) are not mentioned. Police involvement in forcibly displacing First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children to residential schools and settler foster homes receives zero attention. Starlight Tours, where police abandon First Nations and Métis peoples outside Prairie cities in the dead of winter (Comack 2012), do not exist in these museums either. Struggles for land and self-determination that have occurred since contact (Pasternak and King 2019; Hill 2010a; York and Pindera 1991) also tend to be excluded.

Conclusion

The police museums examined here, and others in Canada, tend to provide insufficient accounts in their approach to depicting First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples and policing in Canada. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s (2015) 94 Calls to Action and the dozens of Calls for Justice emerging from by the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (2019)—whether they relate to “criminal justice” or the cultural, education and heritage sectors—are a starting point for thinking about how to represent this history differently. We are just beginning to encounter the difficult knowledge (Failler and Simon 2015; Segall 2014) and debates that need to happen as part of reconciliation, and, indeed, the radical change that needs to occur with policing itself should it exist at all (Vitale 2017). We cannot help but think that transforming the way Canadian police museums represent First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples, along with policing, could be one way of making changes in both sectors (also see Christie 2007; Green 2006) while working toward abolishing the police (Maynard 2020) that have been integral to settler colonialism and upholding white supremacy (Maynard 2017; Monaghan 2013). Given their links to active police forces and the placement of these sites in operational policing spaces, decolonizing police museums in Canada also requires parallel, radical changes in the way we as a society respond to transgression, conflict, distress, and poverty, such that the public police as we know them today become the relic of the past, and any future memorialization of them is seen as a monument to barbarism.

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