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THIS STATEMENT EPITOMIZES three decades of criticism from scholars and Aboriginal peoples in what has become known as the postcolonial vein, charging museums with the appropriation of Indigenous cultural objects and identities. These critics have rightly pointed out that museums purchased stolen objects, restricted Aboriginal people within museum spaces, and constructed Aboriginal identities according to European-derived ordering schemes that contradictorily portrayed Indigenous cultures as both static and vanishing.3 But such critiques of museum essentialization and repression have, in their well intentioned enthusiasm, used an essentializing brush to paint museums.4 Museum practices have always been diverse and changing, and Indigenous peoples were not passive in, ignorant of, or universally opposed to the museum-creation process. In fact, many Aboriginal individuals have exercised a great deal of agency - agency absent or minimized in many postcolonial critiques - in helping to lay the foundations for and/ or maintaining the very institutions that are the subjects of ongoing controversy and condemnation. Further, in many instances museum staff have also assisted Aboriginal peoples, much to their mutual benefit. Responding to postcolonial criticism, Julia Harrison has argued that academics should be mindful of the "unique culture of the individual museum" when it comes to appraising Aboriginal-museum conflicts and collaborations. The following is a response to this request, and it draws its substantive detail from the history of the Museum of Anthropology (moa) at the University of British Columbia (ubc).5
Moa opened officially in 1949, and its operating philosophy was firmly rooted in colonial and salvage anthropological ideals.6 Nonetheless, moa staff believed (and believe) that their enterprise was beneficial to Aboriginal peoples, that they were (and are) active in First Nations communities, and, in turn, that Aboriginal individuals and communities have been increasingly present within the museum. In order to ensure a degree of manageability, I privilege the Stódo's historical relationship with moa over that of other First Nations', though this still requires discussion of the broader context of ???-First Nations relationships as these influence MOA-Sto:lö interactions.7 Moreover, it was after participating in the joint UVic-USask/Sto:lö Nation Ethnohistory Graduate Fieldschool as an MA student at the University of Victoria that I first studied Stcr.lö relationships with museums and interpretive centres.8 This article builds on that project and primarily seeks to address the...