Posted on 11/11/2021 2:16:42 PM PST by nickcarraway
The Royal British Columbia Museum in Vancouver announced last week that it would close sections of its First Peoples galleries, beginning this month. In January, the entire wing, located on the museum’s third floor, will close. The closure comes in response to calls by Indigenous activists to change how the museum discusses the colonization of British Columbia, privileging the stories of settlers over the Indigenous peoples who had long lived on the land.
“Decolonization of the museum’s galleries is important and long overdue,” said Daniel Muzyka, the museum’s acting CEO, in a statement. Closing the gallery, he added, is “necessary to begin the long-term work of creating new narratives that include under-represented voices and reflect the lived experiences and contemporary stories of the people in BC.”
In a statement, Melanie Mark, B.C.’s Minister of Tourism, Arts, Culture and Sport and one of the province’s few elected First Nations politicians, said, “For too long, museums have been colonial institutions that exclude others from telling their own stories. We have an opportunity to turn the museum inside out, and it starts here, now, on the museum’s third floor.”
The Royal BC Museum has previously conducted decolonization efforts. In 2016, the museum returned 17 cultural objects to the Huu-ay-aht First Nations in a repatriation ceremony. The Museum still holds a large collection of Indigenous artifacts. The Royal BC Museum did not give specifics on how else it will address its colonial legacies and what the future of the First Peoples galleries will be.
Institutions elsewhere in North America have also begun to reframe how their exhibitions and displays that discuss the continent’s first inhabitants. In 2019, for example, the American Museum of Natural History in New York etched corrections on the glass displays of dioramas that described Indigenous people using demeaning and racist stereotypes. At the time, Lauri Halderman, the museum’s vice president for exhibition, told the New York Times, “We could have just covered it over. What was actually more interesting was not to make it go away but to acknowledge that it was problematic.”
What percentage do you have to be?
When I was in high school, my classmates joked it was better to just marry an FN chick than actually work, and we would be on easy street. I used to work at KFC during summer time and the order from the “reservations” were given priority. It will always state on the system the delivery charge is waived and they get 50% off.
It was just insane. And when our delivery guys deliver miles into the damn isolated area, they NEVER TIP.
Sort of like how the noise makers want to tear down statues of Confederate heroes. At some point, the Civil War will go down the memory chute, and there will be no evidence that slavery ever happened in this country. Which will take away the argument for reparations. Sounds like a White Supremacist plot.
Typical leftist feel good crap.
I suspect that even the poorest ones alive today live longer/healthier and better (less conflict, more comfort) lives than today than their ancestors did over 10,000 years.
Paging Oskar Werner.
Royal BC Museum is in Victoria, not Vancouver. There is a world of difference between the two.
Thanks nickcarraway. I liked the fake Viking zombie story better. Wanna decolonize the Americas? Build millions of dugout canoes and paddle back to Asia. I was born here, I'm staying right here.
First Peoples galleries
s/b
Second-to-last Peoples galleries
More and more, it looks to me like “de-colonizing” our history equals erasing American Indians and blacks all together. Anyone else noticing that?
There is a museum in Vancouver, across the street from the University of British Columbia campus, which has a lot of interesting "First Nations" artifacts including totem poles. I don't recall the name of that museum offhand. I have been there and was wondering how anyone could find any of it offensive. But to the Perpetually Indignant (P. J. O'Rourke's phrase), there is always something to be up in arms about.
I was born here, I’m staying right here.
***Doesn’t that make us indigenous?
It does.
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