The Struggle behind “Struggle and Story”: A Canada 150 Exhibition at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library

Curating a library exhibition, especially one marking an historic event like the sesquicentennial of Canadian Confederation, is much more than simply mounting a show. In many ways, it is the equivalent of writing an essay, although in physical form. The curator initially assembles items — manuscripts, printed books, and images — that provide the raw material for an argument. Out of that initial foraging and research, a theme emerges. The conversation that then takes place between “text” and initial ideas eventually leads to a tension of sorts, since the items selected both support and challenge the curator’s preconceived notions. As the process evolves, a thesis emerges which provides the unifying point around which the exhibition revolves. As a result, it is meant to offer an experience with which the viewer is invited to interact, agree, or disagree. The exhibition mounted at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library in 2017, “Struggle and Story: Canada in Print,” had its origins in the curator’s romantic memories of Canada’s Centennial of 1967. While collecting material from the current collections, however, it rapidly became clear that telling the story of Canada through print could not have the same patriotic slant that had been a prominent feature of the celebrations fifty years ago. Among other things, it was the absence of items, crucial to telling that story, which would largely shape the exhibition. The silent voices of the Indigenous people, women, and minority groups that struggled to be heard over the traditional narrative altered the ways in which the displays came to be organized. The final result was very different from the original concept. In the end, mounting such an exhibition becomes a form of historical bibliography, inasmuch as it has to account for the ways in which our ancestors had chosen which stories would be preserved and which would be omitted, which would be collected, and which would not be deemed important in the library’s holdings. An exercise such as this one may highlight the lacunae in a library’s collection development policy, but it can also point the way towards expanding the institutional mandate to include the stories of those that previous generations may have disregarded.