the limits of recognition: The Spirit Sings, Canadian Museums and the Colonial Politics of Recognition Kelsey R. Wrightson university of british columbia abstract This article critiques the settler colonial politics of recogni- tion in relation to Canadian museological practice. Despite a strong intellectual legacy critiquing asymmetric power relations and the problems of representing “otherness,” there have been few sustained examinations of the ways in which museums are implicated in settler colonial regimes of power. Dene scholar Glen Coulthard has written exten- sively on the manner in which the “politics of recognition” perpetuates settler colonialism in Canada. I argue that the normative shifts in Canadian museum practice post-1988 exemplify institutionalized shifts toward the colonial poli- tics of recognition within Canadian museums. Further, I find that this is part of ongoing settler colonial practices of domination. I argue that current museological practice, particularly as it relates to Indigenous pieces within muse- ums, must include a critique of the settler colonial politics of recognition as part of both critical analysis and norma- tive orientation. [museums, politics of recognition, settler colonialism, Canada, Indigenous peoples] The present museological management of Aboriginal collections by non-Aboriginal peo- ples in Canada has been heavily influenced by the changing expressions of Canadian national- ism. In the nineteenth century, when most of the Native collections in museums were brought together, the act of building Canada involved asserting a nation literally over top of Native cultures. ... Just as Canada asserted sovereignty over Aboriginal lands, Canada was to assert sovereignty over Native peoples’ separate iden- tities and cultures. —Deborah Doxtator (1996, 61) Prominent scholar and museum curator Ruth B. Phillips (2011) argued that museums and public monuments are reflective of political ideologies. Indeed, they “have come to serve as primary barome- ters of the manner in which public institutions—and, by association, their governmental sponsors—inter- pret laws and policies related to cultural diversity” (Phillips 2011, 4). This continuity between the exter- nal political environment and museological practice is especially relevant in the context of continuing set- tler colonialism in Canada. Settler colonialism is a particular form of colonial domination rooted in the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands and the remaking of these lands into settled spaces (Alfred 2005; Coulthard 2014; Simpson 2007; Wolfe 2006). The overlapping and interconnecting modes of domination include gendered violence, capitalist expropriation of land and labor, and white supre- macy. To understand museum spaces solely as either reproducing colonial violence or as the emancipatory reclamation of history and self-recognition is unnec- essarily reductionist, and problematically elides the complexity of museum practice. However, Dene scholar Glen Coulthard (2007, 2014) has written extensively on the manner in which the “politics of recognition” as advocated by political theorists such as Nancy Fraser (2003) and Charles Taylor (1994) perpetuate settler colonial relations of domination, though through substantively more conciliatory and less explicitly violent means than eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forms. Despite a strong intellec- tual legacy critiquing asymmetric power relations and the problems of representing “otherness” alongside national narratives, there have been few sustained examinations of the ways in which museums as authoritative spaces are both reflective and active hubs in a matrix of explicitly settler colonial power and knowledge (Brady 2008, 2011; Lonetree 2012; Lonetree and Cobb 2008; Message 2007; Wakeham 2008). Given Coulthard’s critical interjection into contemporary practices of colonialism as well as the particular and ongoing violence of settler colonial relations of power in Canada, the United States, Aus- tralia, and New Zealand, the nexus between critiques of settler colonialism and museological practice is an important point of engagement. This article examines the ways that museums remain implicated in the per- petuation of explicitly settler colonial regimes of power, and the settler colonial politics of recognition, specifically. 1 Beginning from a specific reading of the colonial politics of recognition, I argue that by examining the museum anthropology Museum Anthropology, Vol. 40, Iss. 1, pp. 36–51 © 2017 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/muan.12129