Tristin Hopper: The Royal B.C. Museum was once beautiful. Wokeness drained it of all life
The most valuable historical artifact on display at the Royal B.C. Museum is also the one that they’ll never acknowledge.
Once one of the finest and most innovative museums in the world, its three floors are now primarily a living testament to how quickly something beautiful can be destroyed from within.
B.C. has had some form of provincial museum dating back to the 1880s. But when its modern incarnation opened in Victoria in 1972, it was hailed as one of the most innovative museums in the world.
Local media would boast that their museum was a showcase of “firsts in international museumology.”
There were few glass cases or informational placards. Rather, the Royal B.C. Museum became famous for its series of hyper-realistic walk-through dioramas of iconic B.C. environments.
The interior of a First Nations longhouse. The tunnels of a Vancouver Island coal mine.
And, the jewel in the RBCM crown; Old Town. A full-scale mockup of an early 20th century B.C. community, complete with wood cobblestone streets and a Chinatown donated by Chinese-Canadian community organizations in the 1990s.
Posed human figures were conspicuously absent; the idea was to give guests the illusion that they were moving through spaces occupied by living figures who had just stepped out for a moment.
But then came the various moral panics of the early 2020s: Systemic racism, “ongoing genocides,” “mass graves” at Indian residential schools. In the midst of it all, B.C. Premier John Horgan decided that the Royal B.C. Museum had to be destroyed.
First Nations had long criticized the Indigenous galleries of the museum for being out of date. There were also longstanding disputes that artifacts had been obtained under suspicious circumstances.
But Horgan’s plan was uncompromising. The entire structure must fall, and in its place be erected a $789 million temple to equity and inclusion.
Public outcry would eventually pressure the province into halting its plans and partially reassembling the museum’s human history galleries. But the damage had been done. To visit the museum now is to see exhibits so scoured of spark and texture that they might as well have been swept by a fire.
The coal mine, sawmill, homestead and First Peoples gallery are all gone. And for everything left, there are placards everywhere to lecture visitors that they are moving through a profoundly evil space.
A mock-up of an early 20th century salmon cannery is accompanied by a sign stating that salmon, a “sacred food” for B.C. nations, has been devastated by “exploitation and climate change.”
A partial reconstruction of HMS Discovery — one of the first European ships to enter the Juan da Fuca Strait — is accompanied only by a cursory note that the vessel was used to penetrate “land and waters … stewarded since time immemorial by Indigenous peoples whose home this had been for thousands of years.”
A nearby model of Fort Victoria is paired simply with one of the museum’s many, many land acknowledgements. Of the rough-hewn structure that forms the core of the modern province of British Columbia, visitors are told only that it was built atop Lekwungen territory.
A model railway station that uses sound and light to simulate the arrival of a passenger train now largely serves as a monument to oppressed black railroad porters.
On the second floor of the Grand Hotel, the centrepiece of Old Town, is an innocuous display of what an office would have looked like at the close of the 19th century. Visitors are told that the quotidian scene before them was really a cockpit of environmental rape.
“Offices like this were established to manage the land and resources of BC,” it reads. “The colonial approach was at odds with the sustainable relationships that First Nations people have with the land and waters.”
And just in case the message wasn’t received, curators took pains to ensure that the office’s window had a view of a clearcut forest.
If the intention was simply to feature history that included fewer white men, it’s not like B.C. was lacking in options.
B.C.’s first governor was Sir James Douglas, the son of a Bajan Creole woman. His wife, Amelia, was the daughter of a Cree chief, and spoke multiple Indigenous languages.
Just a few steps from the site of the museum is the former home of Mifflin Gibbs, one of the most influential members of Colonial B.C.’s not-insubstantial population of black pioneers. His election to the Victoria City Council in 1866 represents one of the first times that a Black man secured public office anywhere in the British Empire.
The first feature film ever made in Canada, 1914’s In the Land of the War Canoes, was shot in B.C. using exclusively Kwakwaka’wakw actors, and telling a stylized version of Kwakwaka’wakw mythology.
The Royal B.C. Museum is a short bus ride away from the grave of Nellie McClung, the figure most responsible for securing women’s voting rights. What’s more, she did it with jokes: Where suffragists in the U.K. had resorted to literal terrorism, McClung simply made fun of Canada’s male legislators until they relented.
If you’d travelled through B.C.’s various mill towns and mining settlements in 1911, you would have seen a well-dressed man with a Cantonese accent claiming to be Japanese.
That was Sun Yat-sen, and he was discreetly moving through B.C.’s many Chinatowns to fundraise for his plan to topple China’s Qing Dynasty. It worked, and he’s now widely seen as the founder of modern China.
When European explorers and fur traders first came to what is now the Canadian West Coast, they encountered highly developed Indigenous communities that easily outmatched them in terms of military and diplomatic power.
Tlingit in the far north had fought Russian colonists to a stalemate; a war still enshrined in the modern borders between Alaska and B.C.
When Spanish and British representatives met in Nootka Sound in the late 1700s to determine which of them would be adding B.C. to their sphere of influence, the talks were brokered by Maquinna, a Nuu-chah-nulth chief whose grip on the coast was so total that he boasted European slaves.
None of that was mentioned at RBCM, and it probably never will be. Because it tells the truth about a dynamic and engaging corner of the planet that doesn’t often match the “oppressor/oppressed” dynamic that the museum’s new curators would obviously prefer.
Every white figure profiled by the Royal B.C. Museum is a rapacious colonizer. Every non-white figure is cast as a one-dimensional victim: An interchangeable “person of colour” whose entire life is presented only as a distillation of the suffering they endured.
This clinical and dehumanizing approach to the past is summed up perfectly by the museum’s newest gallery, Odysseys and Migration.
It’s intended to highlight the various migration streams that have defined B.C.’s last 150 years. But it does so with beige colouring, harsh fluorescent lighting, inoffensive sans-serif fonts of paragraph after paragraph of aggressively boring text.
“Chinese Canadian community organizations and initiatives reflect the Chinese diaspora from various places, including Cuba, India, Jamaica, Malaysia, Mauritius, Peru, South Africa, Taiwan, Vietnam, and more,” reads a card entitled “Diverse Journeys.”
One of the few artifacts on display is a hammer and some broken crockery. The hammer, we are told, was used by overworked Chinese to perform the deadly labour of building the Canadian Pacific Railroad. The crockery is where he ate his “meagre” rations.
The Royal B.C. Museum used to be a place where the delight of visitors was audible. Now, it’s just sullen clumps of tourists, shuffling from one depressing placard to another. A security guard refusing to glance up from his phone sums up the current state of employee morale.
The Royal B.C. Museum is what happens when you hand the reins of a beloved institution into the hands of people who hate museums, who hate history and who seem to hate B.C. itself.
But they do love themselves; that much is made very clear in the museum’s new iteration.
Amid the vandalism and desecration that they’ve cheerfully imposed on one of Canada’s richest cultural jewels, there are constant smug reminders that they are proud of what they have done.
Anyone entering the human history galleries of the Royal B.C. Museum must pass by a sign laying out the superior virtues of its executive. “Worldwide, museums are redefining their role in our cultural landscapes. The Royal B.C. Museum is no different,” it reads.
The Old Town cinema is screening Hayashi Studio, a film about Japanese-Canadian internment narrated by and starring the white academics who shot it. At multiple points, the audience is reminded of how benevolent they are to have dug up the non-white histories so cruelly ignored by their colonialist forebears.
In the First Peoples gallery of the Royal B.C. Museum, there used to be a partially burned traditional mask. It had been placed there to symbolize the cultural loss suffered by First Nations as a new and trendier culture subsumed them.
In B.C.’s first decades, Christian missionaries had told local peoples they could never enter heaven without first burning the “false idols” inherited from their ancestors. And so, centuries of accumulated heirlooms were destroyed.
It’s a powerful message about the folly of shattering tradition and beauty simply because something new and enticing has arrived to take its place.
But that mask, like so much else, has been happily hidden away by the new and more enlightened helmsmen of the Royal B.C. Museum.
