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APEC at the Museum of Anthropology: The Politics of Site and the Poetics of Sight Bite RUTH B. PHILLIPS T hroughout its two-hundred-year history, the public museum has been a powerfully attractive object for appropriative projects. It has been an important agent for the inscription of the universalizing ideology of modernity as well as of imperial hierarchies of Western nations and world cultures. At the turn of a new millennium the museum remains one of the most prestigious of public spaces, a secular sacristy in which are kept the material objects that are most greatly valued, held to embody essential forms of evidence of history, culture, nature, science, and art. It is a unique“interspace ,”mediating the authoritative knowledge produced in the academy and making it accessible to broad publics. To gain control of the museum, therefore , is to gain control of a prestigious forum from which to propound knowledge and to assert value.1 In modern multicultural societies museums also act as important cross-cultural meeting grounds and sites of negotiation. In the politics of postcoloniality they have served as spaces in which knowledges produced within Western disciplinary traditions may be contested by members of indigenous, immigrant, and diasporic communities and where discrepant assertions of truth can be symbolically aligned or harmonized.2 As Sharon Macdonald has put it,“Precisely because [museums] have become global symbols through which status and community are expressed, they are subject to appropriation and the struggle for ownership.”3 The APEC Meeting: Local/Global Encounters In this chapter I examine one such “struggle for ownership” that took place in 1997 at the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology.4 On 25 November of that year, at the request of the Canadian government, the university lent the museum to be the site of the prime ministerial meeting of the Asia Pacific Economic Community (APEC), an economic union of eighteen Pacific Rim nations including the United States, China, Japan, 171 Indonesia,Australia,Mexico,and Canada.The meeting provoked large protest demonstrations on the UBC campus—the largest since the 1960s—directed against human rights abuses in member countries and against negative consequences of economic globalization. Police handling of the protest, which included forcible removal and detainment of protesters and the use of pepper spray, proved highly controversial and received sustained national press coverage.5 While the globally oriented protests were going on outside the museum a second, more locally focused contestatory drama was taking place inside. The actors in this drama were federal government officials, the Prime Minister of Canada, and representatives of the Musqueam First Nation, the indigenous people on whose ancestral land the university and the museum are located. The drama had two acts. In the first, federal officials cancelled scheduled formal speeches of welcome from Musqueam representatives. Their remarks would have articulated a postcolonial rhetoric of native sovereignty and distinct local identity before an audience representing the new transnational rhetoric of economic globalization. In the second act, the federal government used the Museum of Anthropology as a stage for the enactment of a pageant that reinscribed a hoary settler-colonial image of national identity before that same audience. The confrontation between Musqueam representatives and officials of the Canadian government received less attention than did the protest demonstrations , but it is equally worthy of analysis for what it reveals about the role of anthropology museums today. The episode offers an opportunity to assess the degree to which changing rhetorics of the local and the global signal new relations of power between settler societies and indigenous peoples. It also raises important questions about the appropriation of the museum as a site for the staging of political and other spectacles—a use to which museums are increasingly lending themselves in the aftermath of cuts in public funding— and the way such appropriations can compromise the role many museum professionals wish their institutions to play as agents of decolonization. In this chapter I will provide an account of the APEC–First Nations episode and place it within two specific historical contexts from which it acquires resonance. The episode is, first of all, a chapter in a local history that has to do with the evolving relationship between the indigenous Musqueam community and the Museum of Anthropology,the University of British Columbia,and the metropolitanVancouver region.Secondly,theAPEC leaders’meeting can be seen as a recent chapter in a longer history of successive appropriations of indigenous cultures that have occurred when Canadian governments have...

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