After visiting the “Speaking to Memory: Images and Voices from St. Michael’s Residential School” exhibit at the Museum of Anthropology, I reflected on the impact that the wide scope of material and mediums might have on the visitor. E. Beverly Brown’s photographs offer the perspective of students through images where the students in my opinion seemed to have very strong bonds to one another.

Moreover, Contemporary photographs of the now abandoned St. Michaels School in Alert Bay were included as backgrounds to the various quoted material posted up throughout the exhibit. These texts range from Duncan Campbell Scott’s reasoning behind the creation of residential schools in Canada: “I want to get rid of the Indian problem…” to details about the school’s failures quoted from the report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal peoples, 1996.

In the center towards the back of the room, there is a large food mixing machine with accompanying testimonies stating that children had to make substantial amounts of bread and received shocks from the machine. Finally, the apologies of various Church authorities, the Canadian federal government and the RCMP and several student testimonials are voiced on the walls of the exhibit.

These various perspectives are “speaking to memory”, in the sense that memory is a constructive process. According to Dr. Daniel L. Schacter: “Human memory is not a literal reproduction of the past, but instead relies on constructive processes that are sometimes prone to error and distortion.” Hence, in order to build a collective memory, a single perspective or medium is insufficient to portray past events. Since so many visual, textual and material elements are combined in order to construct this memory in the exhibition, each contributes to a larger testimonial, with the exception of the apologies and general quotes. The greater amount of images and voices the visitor is exposed to, the more they can grasp the events in a critical and intelligent manner.