Howard E. Grant remembers visiting the Museum of Vancouver in the 1950s when it was called the Vancouver Museum and situated downtown.
“It showed things called artifacts of my people and other people,” said Grant, a Musqueam band councillor. “It was dead, it was gone. It was as if they no longer existed.”
The case was the same at the Museum of Anthropology and the Royal B.C. Museum.
“One-third was personal regalia that shouldn’t be shown,” he said.
He and Leona Sparrow championed changes at the Museum of Anthropology in the 1970s and now a new, unprecedented three-site exhibition called c̓əsnaʔəm, the city before the city, opens Jan. 25 and aims to further rectify the representation of aboriginal people in museums.
“It’s one of the first times where Musqueam’s really been able to tell our own history in our own words,” said Jordan Wilson, a member of the Musqueam Nation, co-curator of the exhibit at the Museum of Anthropology and part of the curatorial collective for MOV.
The exhibits at the Museum of Vancouver, the Museum of Anthropology and the Musqueam Cultural Education Resource Centre and Gallery highlight historical and contemporary activities of Musqueam people, with their belongings and multiple voices presented in written, audio and video form.
And they are belongings, not artifacts, notes Museum of Vancouver curator Viviane Gosselin, who served as a member of a curatorial collective.
Artifacts sounds too lifeless, sterile and scientific, she said.Text layered over scenes of Vancouver in a video welcomes visitors to the c̓əsnaʔəm exhibit at MOV. Visitors are asked to hang their preconceptions about native people on a rusty nail outside.
Inside, the exhibit is welcoming and warm, with brick-red accents, a large video animation and cedar walls reminiscent of a longhouse.
This room precedes the museum’s history of Vancouver exhibit, which previously started with the 1900s. It will remain at MOV for at least five years.
“It is a big statement,” said Gosselin. “For tourists and locals who don’t know much about local history, this is the history of Vancouver starting, not in 1886, but thousands of years ago.”
Located at the edge of the Fraser River in the neighbourhood known as Marpole today, Musqueam people first occupied c̓əsnaʔəm 5,000 years ago, according to the exhibition’s press release.
The population of the community swelled 2,000 years ago and was only one of Musqueam people’s villages in the region. Grant says Garry Point in Steveston is where the prominent Point family gets its name.
Grant loves that the belongings of the exhibit highlight the sophisticated knowledge of Musqueam society thousands of years ago.
“When I look at these things, I’m saying to my children, who will be saying to their friends, we weren’t savages, we weren’t primitive,” he said.
Grant pointed to an image of a rake used to gather herring and intricately carved harpoons, and noted his brother, who’s a machinist, said even today it would be difficult to fashion implements that are so precise.
Indigenous ways of knowing, colonialism and contemporary Musqueam culture are some of the topics connected at MOV. The exhibit features family-friendly interactive exhibits and soundscapes that blend historical and modern sounds.
Rich with multimedia, the Museum of Anthropology exhibit focuses on Musqueam identity and worldview, highlighting language, oral history and the community’s more than 200-day vigil in 2012 that halted a condominium development on c̓əsnaʔəm land where ancestral remains were unearthed in Marpole.
The exhibition at the Musqueam Cultural Education Resource Centre and Gallery focuses on Musqueam knowledge and technology, past and present.
The Courier’s visit to the Museum of Vancouver Tuesday afternoon followed a tour for members of the Musqueam community. A museum staffer said it was wonderful to hear Musqueam visitors exclaim, “That’s my grandmother,” or, “That’s me as a child.”
Grant says the ancestral name he carries hails from his great, great, great, great grandfather who met British explorer Capt. Vancouver in 1791, as laid out on a historical timeline, along with a photo of his great grandfather and his house post in 1884.
When Grant “came to his senses” as a young boy in the 1940s and ’50s, he asked his mother why five family fires continued to burn in Musqueam longhouses, when the only longhouse fires he saw elsewhere were communal ones on Vancouver Island.
“Yes we were humble. Yes we were strong. And our old people, to have maintained something of who we are, who we were, right next to the largest city in Western Canada…” Grant trailed off.
“It’s striking,” Gosselin pitched in.
“We created a renaissance in the 1960s into the Squamish Nation, into the Fraser Valley — they now have longhouses,” Grant continued. “In the winter ceremony, we were down to 300, 400 people who participated. Now you have about three or four thousand.”
crossi@vancourier.com
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