I went to the museum in Victoria yesterday and I had a bit of a shock.

I’ve lived here for nearly four years now and this is the first time I’ve gone. Partly that’s because I’ve been to severally really great museums and so now I tend to measure all new museums against their measure and that is really not very fair.  I spent, for example, a lot of time as a child in one of the Carnegie-Mellon museums, and in the British Museum and to tell the truth they’re pretty hard to measure up to.  And while the Royal BC Museum is really wonderful in many ways, it is not a museum with anywhere near the breadth of the C-MM or the BM.

Still, I liked what was there. They represent, for example, various parts of BC history and environment in permanent dioramas that do a really good job of giving a visual sense of what they variously represent.  There is also, on another floor, a First Nations exhibit (also permanent) that provides story, examples of art, culture, etc.  Now I find exhibits of First Nations a bit difficult.  There’s the history for one thing  – imagine Turks staging historical displays of the Armenians, or the Taliban leadership building a loving memorial to women, or a Nazi museum to all things Jewish.  That may seem a bit harsh, but there you go, that’s feeling for you. But for the shock…

So I go in, but feel like a rabbit ready to bolt.  I go through the first hall pretty quickly and end up in a life-sized coastal long house. When I go in it is a bit unsettling, like being in a totally empty National Trust home, where you know the family is gone, that they lost this because they could no longer afford to keep it up or some other tragic set of circumstances forced them to become unhitched from their past. I rushed through and wandered around in the next hall. I saw a potlatch exhibit that had the kinds of bowls and things that we give away at the Winter Dance. They even had the gold dishes, pretty close to what sits in the kitchen cupboards of the long house where the Dance is held. In a museum. As if it were past. (The next dance, the next use of those dishes in the cupboards is in about six weeks.)

So that was a bit eerie. Then I decided – what the hell – I’ll go back into the long house and sit for a bit. I chose a corner and just listened to what the place had to tell me.  (I could imagine the mix of Indians carving and the mixed crews that put up the exhibit, and all the different motivations that went into building that model. It effects the experience of a place knowing something of it’s history.) There is a background tape playing with some Indian singing his song, and it is pretty low so I had my eyes shut so I could hear better, and then my own song was really strong (it often is this time of year), so I was really still and quiet trying to hear both, when a loud voice said (with delight) “Oh look at that woman!” and there was a bright flash…

she took my picture…as part of the exhibit?…an Indian sitting in the long house.

No kidding.

Now I did have my braids looped today and I did have my head scarf on and it was pretty dark in there so maybe she thought I was a statue or something? But I don’t think so.  This has happened to me once before in a situation where there could have been no doubt that I was a live human being.

My physical response to the museum visitor/tourist was to ignore her. My emotional response was not so simple.  I felt outraged of course, but mostly I just found it funny, in a kind of dry ironic way. It made me think of the book by Dean MacCannell called The Tourist: A new theory of the leisure class that came out in the late 70s (I think). If you haven’t read it, there’s a review here.  Here’s what the reviewer says:

The thesis of The Tourist is that the tourist represents modern men in microcosm surrounded by commercial images and enticements, searching for meaning and life in new experiences, and consuming whatever he encounters along the way.

So I got consumed by her camera, and will be taken back to wherever as part of authentic BC?

The part in the book I remember finding most interesting (it is a very interesting book) was the discussion about what makes something authentic in this consumer-tourist culture. Reality, according to the reviewer, has come to be seen as something other than what the tourist has. That’s why they go where they go, take pictures. They are trying to capture that bit of what was, or perhaps find a place where they feel more connected? It’s the golden age syndrome – somehow the past was more truthful, more real, more what life should be, and if we can recreate it we will all feel better. Bollocks of course, but there you are. In the same review the author says:

So off we go, trying to find something honest in fragments of medieval cities, Gothic cathedrals, Indian pueblos: there one can perhaps glimpse “real life.” In this respect, architects and designers have long been tourists in their enthusiasm for traditional craftsmanship and unself-conscious building. But just as tourism effaces differences, so it destroys the truth it seeks through the application of what MacCannell calls “staged authenticity,” whereby places and events are not left as they are, but are contrived to look as tourists expect them to look.

“Not left as they are…”? What a delightful idea. We could have a permanent exhibition of mass graves to represent the dying. Or huge piles of dead stinking animal carcasses to represent the slaughter, or dioramas of the attempts at Indian slavery, or…. well you get the idea.  But I doubt tourists would come to that.  I think staged authenticity has as much to do with how tourists want them to look, as to how they expect them to look.  I had someone years ago tell me to just get over it – move on. I felt like slitting his kids’ throats and saying, just get over it – move on.

So I was disturbed a bit to have become a tourist destination; it did bring up the rage quick and bright. But it was also pretty funny because like as not she has no idea at all that what she is seeing, that those dishes in the case around the corner, the necklaces and baskets, they are being made and given away all around her, especially at this time of year.  The season of winter dances has just begun, and as far as I know, they have yet to become marked on a tourist map so she will likely never know that what she is seeing in the museum is a living culture, a way of being that is very different from what she is used to.

The thing is that believing that you have the truth of something by just looking at it, or a representation of it, is pretty damn funny.  I mean could I convince my boss that all I had to do to earn my paycheque is to look at a picture of my desk with its pile of waiting work? That I wouldn’t mind at all. Life is something that changes you. It breaks you open, bends what you thought was iron, forces growth or causes death. Tourist attractions are about changing life to fit the known parameters of the tourist.  The touristic desire makes what is something living and breathing, both angry and amused, a digital image. It makes life controllable and, of course, in that moment, separates the experience of seeing irrevocably from the living of it. I mean, what would have happened if she’d talked to me instead of taking my picture?

I can’t help wonder what she will say about me when she shows her pictures to her friends and family back home – “Now here is a real Indian?