Canadian Museum for Human Rights Opens Long-Term Exhibition on Palestine’s Nakba

The Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg has opened a new long-term exhibition titled “Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present,” placing the Palestinian experience of the Nakba and forced displacement within a broader human rights conversation through personal testimonies, historical objects, art, and interactive materials.

The exhibition, located in the museum’s Rights Today gallery on Level 5, opened on June 27, 2026, and is scheduled to run until November 30, 2028. According to the museum’s official exhibition page, the presentation is designed as a powerful exploration of the ongoing forced displacement of Palestinians.

Rather than treating the Nakba as a closed historical chapter, the exhibition presents it as a human experience that continues to shape Palestinian lives across generations. The museum explains that Palestinians use the term Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe,” to describe the mass displacement of 1948, when around 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced during the creation of the State of Israel. Today, millions of Palestinians remain refugees, living in exile or in camps across the region.

The exhibition combines history with personal memory. Instead of relying only on documentary panels, it brings together videos, personal belongings, tactile and interactive elements, artworks, and written materials that connect major political events with the daily human experiences of individuals and families.

One of the exhibition’s key features is a collection of testimonies from Palestinian Canadians recorded by the museum in Montreal and Winnipeg in the fall of 2022. These interviews became part of the museum’s oral history archive, which includes more than 300 interviews related to human rights. This gives the exhibition a direct Canadian dimension, linking the memory of the Nakba to Palestinian families living in Canada today.

Palestinian symbols of memory and identity are strongly present throughout the exhibition. Among them are house keys carried by Palestinian refugees after displacement, often preserved as symbols of return. The exhibition also highlights Tatreez, traditional Palestinian embroidery, not only as a form of cultural art, but as a way of preserving identity and memory after displacement, especially through women and intergenerational storytelling.

The exhibition also includes a traditional Palestinian dress from Gaza dating back to the early twentieth century, alongside artistic and interactive materials that evoke home, exile, memory, loss, and resilience. Through what the museum describes as “memory boxes,” visitors are invited to engage with objects that open into short stories about displacement, longing, identity, and survival.

Art and literature are also central to the exhibition. The work features Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, including the poem “Think of Others,” as well as artwork by Palestinian artist Malak Mattar from Gaza, whose paintings reflect the experience of a generation shaped by repeated wars. The exhibition also includes work connected to Palestinian-Canadian artist Najat El-Taji El-Khairy and materials that evoke the memory of Jaffa and Palestinian oranges.

The exhibition is especially significant for Palestinian and Arab communities in Canada because it brings the Nakba into a national Canadian institution dedicated to human rights. It moves the story beyond political debate alone and presents it through memory, art, family history, personal objects, and lived experience.

For non-Palestinian visitors, the exhibition offers an opportunity to understand forced displacement not simply as a statistic or a historical event, but as the story of families who lost homes, land, and memory — and who continue to carry their keys, stories, and identity across generations.