Elements of a counter‐exhibition: Excavating and countering a Canadian history and legacy of eugenics

Abstract

Into the Light, a recently mounted collectively curated museum exhibition, exposed and countered histories and legacies of 20th‐century “race betterment” pedagogies taught in Ontario's postsecondary institutions that targeted some groups of people, including Anishinaabe, Black, and other racialized populations, and disabled and poor people, with dehumanizing ideas and practices. This article advances understandings of the transformative potential of centralizing marginalized stories in accessible and creative ways to disrupt, counter, and draw critical attention to the brutal impacts of oppressive knowledge. The “counter‐exhibition” prioritized stories of groups unevenly targeted by such oppression to contest and defy singular narratives circulating in institutional knowledge systems of what it means to be human. The authors draw on feminist, decolonial and disability scholarship to analyze the exhibition's curation for the ways it collectively and creatively: (1) brought the past to the present through materializing history and memory in ways that challenged archival silences; and (2) engaged community collaboration using accessible, multisensory, multimedia storytelling to “speak the hard truths of colonialism” (Lonetree) while constructing a new methodology for curating disability and access (Cachia). The authors show how the exhibition used several elements, including counter‐stories, to end legacies of colonial eugenic violence and to proliferate accounts that build solidarity across differences implicated in and impacted by uneven power (Gaztambide‐Fernández).

“All emigrants are up to the physical, mental, and moral standards required”: A tale of two child rescue schemes

“…34 Here, as with the BHS, there is evidence that Kindertransport children/young people were positioned within a lower social class/hierarchy (Ala, 2018;Hopkins & Hill, 2010). In line with eugenicist perceptions of the time, a narrative of difference and deficiency was used to contain specific groups of people, including the poor (in case of the BHS) and groups from different ethnicities (in case of the Kindertransport scheme), ignoring and marginalizing their actual experiences (Kelly et al, 2021). In the case of the Kindertransport, this was also stimulated by the goal not to "replenish that good white stock with Jewish racial material" (Grenville, 2012, p. 4).…”

“…Thus, disability was constructed as unwanted, pathological, and something to eliminate. Not only that, this narrative of pathology extended onto other groups, namely the indigenous, racialized, and poor people (Kelly et al, 2021).…”

“…It should be noted here that the notion of “white stock” was also central in decisions made in relation to the BHSs across the globe (Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, as well as Canada) where “good white stock” was requested to build the empire (Paul, 1995; Von Benzon, 2021). Both embody biological determinist viewpoints and racist eugenics, with the latter also reflecting white settler colonial projects (Kelly et al, 2021). Displaced children were frequently positioned within a lower social class/hierarchy and stigmatized as less important than other children, but still preferable to their indigenous counterparts (Ala, 2018; Hopkins & Hill, 2010).…”

“…This includes a critical reflection of the varied experiences and narratives in relation to child migrants, as well as the ideals and rationales of emigration schemes, which were presented as moral programs to rescue children facing poverty or danger of traumatizing, racially degrading and ultimately genocidal persecution. Within this, there is a need to open up eugenicist narratives of pathology, victimhood, and contamination, including uneven formations of power and expectations that informed the processes involved in the decision‐making and the experiences of individual children therein (Kelly et al, 2021; Lynch, 2016; Moss et al, 2020). In the next sections, we introduce the two schemes, as well as discussing commonalities and differences between the schemes.…”

Slow Story-Making in Urgent Times

“…Alarmingly, in the Canadian province of Ontario where our inquiry takes place, disabled people’s slow death is being jolted toward speedier death sanctioned by COVID-19 triage protocols that outline who will, and will not, receive treatment when hospitals fill to overcapacity. While disabled people are oftentimes in closer proximity to death than others—the possibility of our living and dying has been historically and obscenely debated in the eugenics-dominated fields of philosophy and medicine that still dominate our knowledge paths (Kelly, Boye, & Rice, 2021; Kelly et al, in press; Kelly, Manning, et al, 2021; Malacrida, 2015)—we now find ourselves on the brink of necropolitical governance that, in the face of devastating overdevelopment and lip-service to social, economic, and environmental justice, cleaves vulnerability onto disability and weaponizes that vulnerability to offer us early death. In the current COVID context, naturalizing disabled and aged people’s vulnerability to premature death becomes a way of masking oppressive histories and intensifying inequities that cast our forms of interdependency (acknowledging that all of us are dependent on others albeit in different ways) as signifying our less-than-human status.…”