Articles

Abstract:

Canadian educational institutions played a role in the early twentieth-century eugenics movement by perpetuating destructive knowledges that targeted groups of people, including Indigenous, Black and other racialized, as well as poor and disabled populations for institutional segregation, cultural assimilation and sterilization. This paper examines colonial eugenic and pedagogical practices in educative spaces, by drawing on archival research that uncovers three decades of eugenics in Central Canada’s higher education institutions and on a co-created, accessible and critically contextualized exhibition that cast new light on these archival materials. Specifically, we analyze the meanings produced from projecting eugenics course slides in two very different contexts. While the eugenics course used the slides to exoticize, contain, control and shame bodies of difference through a rhythmic presentation of dis-embodied facts, charts and definitions, within the co-created exhibition, which emerged from a process of building solidarity, grounded in difference (Gaztambide-Fernández 2012), we implemented alternative techniques and rhythms of knowledge transfer. We inserted critical context from multiple perspectives, prioritized visitor experience and made the slides accessible in different formats to subvert the pressure and authority towards certain notions of normalcy and perfectibility that the slides once produced, thereby altering the transfer of knowledge in space and time. Through analyzing how value-laden data about the body performs as it is projected in very different educative settings, we argue meaning is encoded in the performative transfer of knowledge. Understanding colonial eugenics education (and scientific modes of instruction more broadly) as performance provides new tools for understanding the politics and practice of knowledge production and the relationships between producers and consumers of knowledge as these co-constitute scientific authority.

Abstract:

Into the Light, a recently mounted co-curated museum exhibition, exposed and countered histories and legacies of 20th century “race betterment” pedagogies taught in Ontario’s post-secondary 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, multi-sensory, multi-media storytelling to “speak the hard truths of colonialism” (Lonetree, 2012, p.6) while constructing a new methodology for curating disability and access (Cachia, 2013). 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, 2012).

[Exert] A new exhibition reveals eugenics in education in Ontario. The exhibition is the first of its kind to bring to light the difficult history of Canadian university involvement in producing and disseminating harmful "knowledge", knowledge with brutal consequences for marginalized communities. To date, few universities in Canada have grappled with their historical involvement in eugenics research, teaching, and practice. Fewer still have opened their archives to researchers in order to reckon with those histories and with the implications of the difficult knowledge unearthed.

While eugenics sought to eradicate those deemed “unfit,” this exhibition centres the voices of members of affected communities who continue to work to prevent institutional brutality, oppose colonialism, reject ableism, and foster social justice. Into the Light is co-curated by Mona Stonefish, Peter Park, Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning, Evadne Kelly, Seika Boye and Sky Stonefish. The exhibition presents artistic, sensory, and material expressions of memory.

The display of 30 years of eugenics course documents (from 1914 to 1948) creates a rare opportunity to consider the ways in which eugenics was taught here in Ontario, over time. The exhibition shows that in Ontario, eugenics was taught to generations of teachers in domestic science, as well as nutrition, health, and social welfare professionals.

The exhibition shows how eugenics, and its dehumanizing effects, stretched well past the end of the 2nd World War, and is, in many ways, still with us.

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