The truth is never the whole story

During the development of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, we spent months planning the Canadian Journeys gallery, the museum’s largest exhibition space. Its eighteen small niches each tell a different human rights story.

We debated which stories belonged there, which objects best illuminated them, whose voices should be heard and how much historical context each required. Every decision meant setting something else aside — not because it was unimportant, but because no museum exhibition can tell everything.

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That experience came back to me during the controversy surrounding Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present. Much of the criticism has focused on what the exhibition leaves out. Some critics have argued that because it omits important aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it presents a false picture. Some have called it “untrue.”

That is a serious accusation. But it raises a larger question: What makes a museum exhibition true?

Curators rarely begin by asking, “How do we tell the whole story?” They know that is impossible. Instead, they ask: What story are we trying to illuminate, and how can we tell it honestly?

Every exhibition is an act of interpretation. Which objects best reveal the story? Which voices should visitors hear? How much context is enough? What belongs somewhere else — in another gallery, another exhibition or another museum?

Selection is not the opposite of truth. It is how museums make complex subjects understandable.

With that in mind, I returned to the Nakba exhibition asking what would justify calling it “untrue.” I found no fabricated evidence, invented testimony or erroneous facts. What I recognized instead was a familiar curatorial process: documented sources, lived experience and interpretive choices brought together to illuminate one particular group’s story.

The exhibition emerged through research, consultation, scholarly review and community engagement. Like every exhibition, its choices can be debated. But questioning an interpretation is different from dismissing an exhibition as untrue.

Three questions have become blurred in this debate: Are the facts accurate? Has sufficient context been provided? How complete is the exhibition?

These are different questions. Accuracy is an obligation. Context requires scholarly judgment. Completeness is impossible.

No exhibition on residential schools tells the entire history of Indigenous peoples in Canada. A Holocaust gallery cannot encompass every dimension of Jewish history. Museums are not encyclopedias.

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Nor does this exhibition claim to tell the entire history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It tells a carefully defined story: the experiences of Palestinian Canadians from their perspectives, whose families were profoundly shaped by the Nakba.

Reasonable people can disagree about curatorial decisions. Museums should welcome disagreement; it can improve scholarship and deepen public understanding.

What concerns me is something different. When we call carefully researched exhibitions “false” simply because they are not comprehensive, we confuse completeness with truth.

Recognizing the limits of our own understanding is not weakness; it is a form of intellectual humility. The question is not whether an exhibition tells the whole story. It cannot. The better question is whether it tells the story it has chosen honestly, transparently and with scholarly integrity. Judged by those standards, I believe Palestine Uprooted succeeds. It tells the story of Palestinian Canadians honestly from their perspective – which was their stated intent.

Museums do not exist to end conversations. They exist to begin them. At their best, they remind us that understanding another person’s history is not a threat to our own. It is one of the ways we learn to live together.

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Judith Dueck was the first Director of Research, Content and Scholarship at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. She writes in a personal capacity.