Decolonization, Divestment, Deluge

It’s no secret that many of our beloved cultural institutions receive funding from some of the most environmentally destructive corporations in the world. Even Rockefeller and Carnegie, renowned patrons of arts and education in Canada and the U.S., made their riches from oil extraction. Scrolling through a museum’s annual reports or strolling through its exhibitions, one is likely to come across the name or logo of an oil company, whether in the form of subtle tax-deductible donations or exclusive partnerships. Some local examples from the past year include support given to the Royal Ontario Museum from Barrick Gold, and to the National Gallery of Canada from Imperial Oil.

Recently, the behind-the-scenes relationships between institutions like museums and their corporate sponsors have become scrutinized by environmental and artist groups. In 2017, thousands of people signed a petition calling for the Canadian Museum of History in Ottawa to cut its ties with the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), a powerful lobby group that promotes the rights of oil producers in the country—often by undermining environmental protections and Indigenous sovereignty in legal courts. Meanwhile, in Europe, artivist (artist/activist) collectives like Fossil Free Culture and Art Not Oil have mounted interventions (often theatrical and/or visual performances involving oil-mimicking black paint) condemning oil sponsorship in places like the British Museum, the Louvre, and the Van Gogh Museum. While such protests seem to be accompanying the recent wave of oil divestment campaigns in municipalities, universities, and even countries across the world, the change in consciousness over the finances of cultural institutions is historically grounded in critical artistic and museum practices, and Indigenous activism.

Contemporary Canadian museum theory and practice have been significantly informed by critical moments like The Spirit Sings, a 1988 Shell-sponsored exhibition at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary. Produced in conjunction with the Winter Olympics, the exhibition featured hundreds of Indigenous artworks and artifacts from museums around the world, many of which had been collected during early European contact and had rarely been exhibited or made known to Indigenous people, scholars, or curators. Contesting the exhibition because of its sponsorship by Shell—which had been drilling in Lubicon Cree territory since the 1970s—Lubicon Cree activists garnered significant support for their boycott of the Winter Olympics. Similarly critiqued by scholars and museum professionals for its lack of consultation with source communities and display of sacred objects, The Spirit Sings has since been deemed a reference point for the decolonization of museum practice in Canada.

More recently, this has been symbolized by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015), with its 67th Call to Action recommending that museums promote decolonization through a reform of their policies and practices. The call followed numerous years of work by museum studies scholars and activists, who have recognized and documented the colonial histories of museums and promoted community collaboration and the unlearning of exclusionary museum epistemologies. In practice, this has meant creating repatriation policies for looted artifacts and human remains, sharing authority and access with the owners of such objects, and the creation of task forces on the relationship between museums and Indigenous communities. It has also meant coming to terms with difficult institutional histories. For example, in 2016 the Royal Ontario Museum apologized for its 1989 Into the Heart of Africa exhibition and has since been developing programming in an attempt to repair its relationship with the Black Canadian community.

Such efforts have grown in parallel with the “greening” of museums, or the rise of initiatives aimed at reducing museums’ carbon footprints and promoting climate-change awareness. However, theories and practices of decolonization and greening in museums have remained seemingly disconnected. For example, the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Anthropocene, a 2018 photographic and cinematic exhibition meant to shed light on humans’ impact on Earth, failed to recognize the role of colonialism and capitalism in causing climate change and made no mention of environmental racism. These decisions stand in contrast to deliberate efforts by the gallery to disrupt its settler gaze—among them, the renaming of the department of Indigenous and Canadian Art, and initiatives undertaken by curator Wanda Nanibush, such as major exhibitions by Indigenous women artists Rebecca Belmore and Rita Letendre, as well as the 2018 global Indigenous gathering aabaakwad (it clears after a storm). Similarly, funding models like corporate sponsorship have remained relatively absent from discussions of decolonization, and while divestment campaigns have gained ground in Europe, partnerships with the oil industry remain common in Canadian institutions.

In their distinct ways, divestment and decolonization efforts have simultaneously heightened concern around the financing of museums. Oil sponsorship remains part of a conversation that raises countless productive questions. For example, what does it mean to receive public funding from a government with an ongoing history of colonial violence and erasure? How can identifying the roots of public funding help us to grapple with the entanglement of settler-colonialism and extractive industries? By recognizing that the infrastructure, government, and social norms of a nation are all related to the extraction and production of its staple resource,11See Harold Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1930). the systemic interconnectedness of these funding sources is revealed. Canada’s dependency on oil, as one of the world’s top-ten largest producers, enforces a political-economic climate that ensures the continuation of its extraction, and the many legal struggles in Canada and abroad make clear the crucial role that nations and multinational corporations play in challenging and limiting Indigenous rights. Just this past April, Washington D.C.’s American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) offered a stark reminder of the complicity of museums in colonial violence and environmental destruction by states and corporations: Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s anti-Indigenous and pro-mining president, was to be honoured as “Person of the Year” at a gala at the AMNH. However, following public outcry, the gala was relocated. Along with a handful of other success stories, this makes it clear that protesting the dubious partnerships of museums keeps them accountable and promotes divestment from climate change-inducing industries. Similarly, continuing to scrutinize the sponsorship practices of oil producers can shed light on the connections between cultural production and the politics of resource extraction.