Armando Perla
Chief Curator
Toronto History Museums, City of Toronto
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| Armando Perla, Photo Credit: James Recine |
Having
been trained as a lawyer, I started my professional journey working with
refugees and asylum seekers in Canada. After graduating from law school, I
worked with Haitian migrant workers in the Dominican Republic during my time in
Washington D.C., children in Central America who were trafficked and sexually
exploited, and children’s rights advocates from the global south in Sweden.
After several years abroad, I returned to Canada to be part of the team
developing the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR). It was at the CMHR that
I met Métis curator and scholar Tricia Logan and began a journey of
self-discovery that completely transformed the way I understood and practiced
human rights. When I started working at the CMHR, over a decade had passed
since my arrival in Canada as an asylum seeker. I had attended the University of Winnipeg, where I studied
political sciences, and had also completed a Bachelor of Laws at Laval
University in Quebec City and a Master of Laws at Lund University in Sweden.
However, I had not learned about residential schools or Indigenous history.
Learning from Logan that human rights were a Western construct that had often
left out Indigenous perspectives was also unsettling for me. My Canadian and European
legal training had never focused on looking critically at human rights.
