Life must be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards.

Kierkegaard

            The evening of June 23^rd found me participating in a special event organized by the Museum’s Learning Department. They invited a group of students from the Diversity Institute at the University of Victoria (U Vic). The purpose of their workshop was to offer the group the opportunity of taking a critical look at the Modern History’s gallery view on diversity.

The students were invited to bring an object that was meaningful to them. All the objects were used to recreate the decision process that determines how objects are incorporated into a museum collection.  (Since I was also an active participant in the session, together with the other UBC student doing a CFE practice at the Museum, from now on I will refer to the group of students as “us” rather than “they”). We were given the opportunity of making any of those objects part of the Museum collection from 10 am to 11 am of the following day and also the freedom to do so in any way we found suitable. I expressed having a connection with one of the objects brought in and, together with my UBC partner, put it on display in the Maritime section of the Modern History gallery, for this contains information on the presence of Spanish explorers in British Columbia during the 18^th century. This is a historic episode I have had a great interest in since I found about it, because I am originally from Colombia, a country with significant ties to the Hispanic culture. I also included in the display questions related to immigrants in British Columbia, myself included, such as “What do immigrants bring with them to BC? What do they leave behind?” The discussion that followed our intervention in the gallery, which served as a conclusion to the activity, made me aware once again that not all of us who immigrate to BC have the same motivations and needs, and that we do not all fit the same mold even if we all are in the same category.

This special activity was also a reminder of what I now think of as an inevitable tension when studying history: how in the abstractions or generalizations of collective historical processes we may lose sight and appreciation of the individual historical processes; of how we tend to think of “history” as collective and “story” as individual. Objects that are incorporated into museum collections might not tell us the individual (hi)stories behind them but they do allow us to recreate the world they were a part of, a world we might still have ties with regardless of the time and distance existing between those objects and the present, our present.

This activity brought into my attention once again a thought that I consider necessary to incorporate into this reflection: our understanding and appreciation of the present. While history allows us to revisit the past and “right our wrongs”, for example when it comes to respecting diversity, we should also be aware of the “rights” of our present world. There have been discriminatory immigration policies in British Columbia’s history that are now untenable in our society and in our educational system.  I believe all educators in BC should highlight in equal measure both the harm inflicted by those policies and the fact that we are no longer being governed by them because it is now, in the present, that those policies are unacceptable.  In this way also I believe we are more likely to offer our students a more hopeful –but not naïve- vision of the future. In light of events currently happening in other places around the world, it is an ever more significant and urgent contribution to make from all of us living right now in British Columbia.