Reframing The Water We Call Home and the “Iron Chink” at the Gulf of Georgia Cannery National Historic Site

In 2023, I joined The Water We Call Home as a research assistant while the exhibition moved from Galiano Island's Yellowhouse Art Centre to the Gulf of Georgia Cannery National Historic Site in Steveston. I created the exhibition scrapbook, supported the installation, and began the research that became my 2024 M.A. thesis at Simon Fraser University.

The thesis asks how re-presencing and reframing can help a settler-colonial museum move toward decolonial practice. It connects the Indigenous-led exhibition to a speculative digital counter-tour that reframes the historically named “Iron Chink” fish-processing machine through the stories of Chinese cannery workers.

The Water We Call Home is the first Indigenous-led exhibition displayed at the Cannery. Co-curated with Coast Salish–Sahtu Dene artist and storyteller Rosemary Georgeson, it centres Indigenous women's connections to fish, water, and family around the Salish Sea.

Moving the exhibition was not a simple transfer between rooms. Reframing meant making it specific to the Cannery's own social and political history: placing the Advisory Circle's stories in conversation with the fishing industry, colonial policy, and the collections already held on site.

I worked with Rosemary and the curatorial team to build a scrapbook from The Native Voice and Native Alliance for Red Power publications. The selected articles placed the exhibition within a wider history of colonial fishing policy, Indigenous resistance, and the continuing struggle for sovereignty.

What belonged in the scrapbook was decided collaboratively. Material was not included simply because it was dramatic or historically important; it also needed to serve the exhibition and the people whose experiences it carried. The finished book sits on a table at the centre of the installation, inviting visitors to spend time with it together.

The exhibition's practice of re-presencing led me back to the under-told history of Chinese labour in Steveston's fishing industry. I focused on the machine historically named the “Iron Chink” and asked what changes when it is interpreted through the workers it was designed to replace, rather than as an isolated piece of industrial technology.

I researched the Cannery and City of Richmond archives, then built a counter-tour in Cargo. Archival photographs act as the navigation: each one begins with the institution's description, then opens into histories that the original metadata leaves out. A black-and-white palette keeps the records in the foreground, while alternative text makes the tour available beyond the images themselves.

Across both pieces of research-creation, I argue that museums can move toward decolonial practice by pulling away from objects as the whole story, focusing more deeply on people's lives, and creating real space for Indigenous collaboration.

The goal is not to replace one institutional history with another. It is to make the institution capable of carrying multiple histories that are specific to the place, accountable to community, and accessible to the people who encounter them.