ABSTRACT
Garneau approaches the question of what Canadian heritage museums can become if settlers surrender their colonial inheritance by examining the case of the Manitou Stone, abducted from the Iron Creek/Battle River region of now east central Albert and transferred to the Royal Alberta Museum’s (RAM) geological gallery, and eventually moved to its own (temporary) space at the RAM. Garneau describes non-colonial action, rather than anti-colonial or de-colonial action, as based in real collaboration, not just consultation; it means learning and using, but not getting subsumed by colonial critique, in the process of restoring and recovering pre-contact Indigenous modes of knowing and being. Non-colonial keeping houses differ from settler museums in that they would be shared Indigenous and Settler spaces that recognize the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples and place the needs of living people before the preservation of possessions.
