Greater Victoria museums—big and small— are facing down the role of historical institutions in a society reckoning with the impacts of its colonial roots. But they’re also just trying to keep the doors open.

Resignations, internal surveys, decolonization efforts, funding announcements (and cancellations) have generated countless headlines about the Victoria-based Royal BC Museum. But it isn’t the only institution facing challenges. Several other museums across Greater Victoria face the same concerns with only a fraction of the provincial institution’s funding and staff.

Kelly Black is the executive director of Point Ellice House, a short water-taxi ride away from the Royal BC Museum. Since taking the helm of the Rock Bay-area historical house and garden in 2019, he’s transformed the museum, which is full of late Victorian-era furnishings and items, into a cohesive narrative that examines the early days of settler-colonialism in Victoria. It’s a change of pace from a place formerly known best for its afternoon tea.

“We decided to focus first and foremost on being a museum,” Black said.

Black was able to create new interpretative signage for the historic Victorian-era house with some BC grant money in 2019. Point Ellice House was once home to the O’Reillys, an influential family in the early years of BC. The signs help re-situate the history within the house with current-day understandings about class, gender, and colonialism.

“People like to talk about how updating something like [The Royal BC Museum’s] Old Town is revisionist history, but all history is revisionist,” said Black. “History is nothing but revising how we talk about the past.”

Any storytelling inevitably leads to some details being highlighted and others left out of the picture, Black said. Former Point Ellice House patriarch Peter O’Reilly was once head of the Indian Reserve Commission, responsible for drawing up many of the province’s 600 First Nation reserves that displaced and dispossessed Indigenous communities across the province. The museum had once glossed over those facts, but Black’s interpretation puts it front and centre.

“When you look at a map today and you see a reserve, Peter O’Reilly probably played a role in it,” he said. “This isn’t radical, what we’re doing. This is what happened. Peter O’Reilly was the Indian Reserve Commissioner for 18 years, and this is the work that he did.”

Retellings like these are what colonial sites like Point Ellice House can accomplish with dedicated staff and sufficient funding.

“If we stick with a history that was crafted 30, 40 years prior, people aren’t going to come,” Black said. “Museums and heritage sites need to reflect the conversations that people are having in our wider community and society,”  

There are plans to create a permanent exhibit in the house to further discuss the Indian Reserve Commision and its legacy, but currently, there isn’t any money to fund it.  There’s barely any money to keep the museum going as it is, Black said. Point Ellice House may very well close in the next three weeks—the end result, according to Black, of successive BC governments expecting museums to act more like for-profit businesses rather than funding them as cultural infrastructure similar to public libraries.

In a recent statement, the BC Museums Association said BC's 2023-2024 budget announced earlier this week is a continuation of the chronic under-resourcing of the museum sector and its commitment to supporting reconciliation and greater equity in arts, culture, and heritage.  The budget makes no mention of any museum initiatives beyond the Royal BC Museum.

“So far, it seems that the province does not want to support its colonial heritage sites to do the work of talking about the history and legacy of colonization,” Black said.

Most provincially-owned heritage sites like Point Ellice House are either about to close or have cut back on paid staff that keep the sites running, said Black. Almost 10% of museums across North America are expected to permanently close, according to a report by the International Council of Museums. An additional 20% are unsure if they will survive.

The current NDP government has yet to fulfill its 2017 campaign promise to double the BC Arts Council budget and the entire arts, culture, and heritage sector is barely present in this year’s budget, according to the BC Museum Association statement.

Up on the Peninsula, Sidney Museum executive director Michael Goodchild is grateful for the “excellent funding and support” from the Town of Sidney and the District of North Saanich.

“We’re hoping that [funding] will continue for a good long while,” Goodchild said. The museum’s operating budget hovers around $200,000 a year and consists of a mix of municipal funding, sponsorships, and visitor donations.

But despite strong community support stemming from events like Sidney’s annual Lego exhibition, the small 4,750-thousand sq. foot- museum, located in the basement of the Old Post Office building struggles to find the dedicated financial resources to engage in larger museum initiatives or to hire and retain staff at the competitive wages needed to match the cost of living on the Peninsula, Goodchild said

In 2022, the museum experienced complete staff turnover as each of the three-person team independently found opportunities elsewhere.

Goodchild said it never feels like there’s quite enough resources to dedicate towards museum priorities, such as improving the current bare-bones exhibit on Sidney’s lost Chinatown, updating the Sidney waterfront interpretative panels, or pursuing the conversation about repatriation with nearby W̱SÁNEĆ nations.

The Sidney Museum didn’t have a formal process in regards to the reparation of Indigenous belongings within its collection prior to Goodchild’s arrival.

“One of our long-term plans is actually to recalibrate, rethink the prioritization of the way the museum does its work,” he said.

“It’s not so much that we want to add a chair at the table,” he added. Rather, it’s about divesting some of the authority of the museum to the communities that are directly involved in the historical story.

“We don’t want to speak on behalf of communities that are very much still here and very much capable of speaking for themselves.”

“People often have placed a high degree of trust in museums,” Goodchild said. “When they read an interpretative panel of the museum, often that is taken at face value, because they trust that the museum is itself a historical authority.”

But in Canada as well as other places, museums are often linked to dominant society structures and the stories they tell often reflect those imbalances.

Goodchild’s hope is that the museum can instead serve as a gathering place where there is space for previously silenced communities to tell their stories and history. He is beginning that process by writing an Indigenous ethics policy that will help guide the museum's future collaborations with First Nations communities on reconciliation.

To Goodchild, it’s  important that the Sidney Museum repatriate any Indigenous belongings it may have and tell the stories that neighbouring W̱SÁNEĆcommunities are willing to share.

“It should be in their voice, with their authority, and with their permission,” he said.

“On a basic level, we have to acknowledge the fact that this area that is now Sidney was not always Sidney,” he added. “We have to do better at acknowledging and respecting the communities that have existed long before we came.”

Conversations about the role of BC’s museums were highlighted in late 2021 when the third floor of the Royal BC Museum (RBCM) was closed “to start the process of decolonization” in the Old Town and Totem Hall exhibits. A decision made in response to calls to action from Indigenous leaders, according to the museum.

That decision came after Lucy Bell, head of the Indigenous collections and repatriation department, resigned in 2020, citing a workplace culture of racism and anti-Indigeneity. After her resignation, the museum undertook an internal survey, which revealed that the workplace was characterized by a “culture of fear and distrust,” according to reporting by the Globe and Mail. Shortly after, CEO Jack Lohman resigned from the museum.

Finally, former premier John Horgan brought RBCM back into the limelight in May 2022 when he announced a $789-million plan to rebuild the institution. The plan was poorly received and Horgan suspended the project, saying that he “made the wrong call.” But the publicity renewed questions about the museum—both about its past and its future.

In late 2022, RBCM began a multi-year public engagement process to give British Columbians the chance to share their thoughts for a “revised, public-informed concept of a modern museum."