British Legacy in Canadian Military Museums

Shallow Symbolism and a Comfortable “In Between” Nationhood

Abstract

This article examines how military museums in Canada represent Britishness. As a former British colony, Canadian government agencies have long emulated British institutions. Britishness as well as The Royal Family played a central role in Canadian culture throughout the first half of the 20^th century, including in the military. We examine how military museums depict the relationship between Britain and Canada and the effect of representations of Queen Elizabeth in these museums displays. Our analysis examines the way Canadian identity has been constituted vis-à-vis Britain’s over time and how this process of forging nationalism plays out in the military context. We argue that these museums depict a militaristic nationalism located in an in-between space of the nation. The representations in these museums align themselves neither with old Britain and its colonial consciousness, nor with new Canada and the contemporary political tension between settler and Indigenous groups. Instead, the museums depict Canada as a fraught member of the British Commonwealth, accountable neither to the crown nor to the othered groups within its borders. This analysis raises questions about the function of this nationalism depicted in military museums and the symbolic purpose of the British-Canadian relationship portrayed in these spaces.