Despite the old refrain that Canadian History is boring and despite the publication of many, handwringing national surveys that document how few school children know John A. MacDonald’s middle name, Canadians are in fact deeply and actively engaged with the past. Their engagement emerges from family story-telling and from their curiosity about the origins and changes in familiar places such as their own homes, neighborhoods, shops, school, workplaces and places of entertainment.

Museums, along with many other public institutions, struggle to engage this popular engagement with the past. The challenge emerges from many, deeply held practices of museum interpretation and education. Simply put, museums do not much trust Canadians to interpret their own pasts. They seek expertise almost exclusively among highly trained professional historians whose interpretations of the past too often still tell a single, national or unitary story that marginalizes diversity so obvious in the lives of ordinary people past and present.  When museums present the past as an arena filled only by best-documented Canadians—people who were almost always wealthy and powerful, white and male—culturally diverse audiences cannot connect their own lives to that past.

“Not Just Numbers: Representation in the Canadian Census” (hereafter NJN) attempts to rethink the past by bridging one of the divides separating diverse publics from museums. It aimed to create accessible, welcoming events where interactive, communal discovery could occur through hands-on, collaborative research. It brought together individuals who did not necessarily know one another into non-judgmental conversations about the lives of earlier residents of Canada’s cities. These lives were documented in packets of census, newspapers, photographs, and other reproductions of archival materials. NJN events assumed a detective game with documents serving as clues and three rounds of questions challenging participants to work together to piece together the individual story represented in the documents. The NJN exercise repeatedly demonstrated that everyone, regardless of age, education, or background, could be a researcher. Conversations among these researchers typically required empathy, the making of connections between past and present, and discussions of overlaps among the life-stories of the researchers around the table and the life of the person whose story they sought to tell. The exercise increased public awareness of the considerable resources freely available to them to explore their own past and own family stories, promoting scholarship and story-telling through supportive, collective dialogue.

NJN Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PVBhNGo79A

The Toronto Ward Museum (TWM) is a community-engaged museum without walls that facilitates the preservation and sharing of personal stories of migrants in Toronto’s history. We utilize collaborative processes to identify community needs and opportunities, then use those insights to create programming that promotes empathy and curiosity between storytellers, community members and the larger public. The museum creates forums for dialogue relevant to migration, citizenship and pluralism within an urban context. Finally, it acts as a catalyst in community initiatives and forges partnerships between individuals, communities, and organizations toward our collective empowerment. The name and logo of the museum illustrate the importance of Toronto’s wards or neighborhoods, as the most important sites for community-building, communication, and the interpersonal adaptations and changes occurring among all who live in diverse cities, whether they are newcomers or descendants of indigenous people or earlier European settlers.

NJN had its origins in discussions between TWM’s Gracia Dyer Jalea and public historian Daniel Panneton about how to scale-up popular modes of engaging with the past (through family stories and curiousity about individual neighborhoods) into a public discussion. Dyer Jalea and Panneton met with representatives from several TWM organizational partners for a test-run of a draft NJN event. Feedback collected and through further conversation, a three-round discussion format emerged.  By harmonizing diverse communal and individual histories, NJN encouraged participants to envision their nation’s past as a varied and kaleidoscopic collection of stories. Multiculturalism might be a relatively new Canadian policy but cultural diversity has characterized Canada from its earliest days.

NJN was a Canada 150 and Ontario 150 project. It ran as a public program during 2017, holding editions at the Toronto Reference Library, the Global Centre for Pluralism in Ottawa, and the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 in Halifax. Evaluation of these events is now completed and a second phase of NJN is in development, creating a toolkit for classroom use.

Participant testimony shared with us their personal feelings on the program:

"It forced us to confront assumptions that we make."

“[NJN] is a fabulous program. As a historian I have worked with this type of information before, but it makes history more accessible for all. Well done!"

"A good opportunity to reflect on how diverse Canada's past is/was."

"An engaging and meaningful program about identity, representation and migration. I felt welcomed in the conversation."

Back to Top

All Toronto Ward Museum Programs are developed as collaborations with multiple partners. For NJN we especially want to acknowledge the growing scholarly and professional expertise of several young adult professionals who planned and implemented the program, notably Dan Panneton, Project Leader & Researcher, and Gracia Dyer Jalea, Founding Executive Director of the Toronto Ward Museum. Special thanks are owed to the Toronto Public Library for providing space for NJN events. We offer acknowledgment and special thanks to our funders, the Community Fund for Canada’s 150^th , (a collaboration between the Toronto Foundation, the Government of Canada, and extraordinary leaders from coast to coast) and the Myseum of Toronto.