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Pauline Wakeham. Taxidermic Signs: Reconstructing Aboriginality. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008. ISBN 978-0-8166-5054-5. 255 pp.
In 1984 Donna Haraway published "Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden," her reading of the animals in Carl Akeley's African dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History. In 2008 Pauline Wakeham, assistant professor of English at the University of Western Ontario, published her interpretation of a diorama of animals and humans in the Buffalo Nations Luxton Museum in Banff. According to Haraway, each of Akeley's dioramas "has at least one animal that catches the viewer's gaze . . . vigilant, ready to sound an alarm." Nor are the "taxidermie specimens" in the Luxton diorama mere props, as they usually are in turn-ofthe- century dioramas. In Banff plastic natives with blank stares are upstaged by stuffed animals who seem more alert and animated. In Wakeham's reading, "the tableaux are accordingly overwritten by colonial discourse's strategic conflation of the categories of animal - ity and aboriginality - a discursive collapse that racializes native bodies and relegates them to a...