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  • First Nations, Museums, Narrations: Stories of the 1929 Franklin Motor Expedition to the Canadian Prairies by Alison K. Brown
  • Robert Coutts
First Nations, Museums, Narrations: Stories of the 1929 Franklin Motor Expedition to the Canadian Prairies. Alison K. Brown. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014. Pp. xx + 305, $95.00 cloth, $34.95 paper

One of the more critical statements in Alison Brown’s thought-provoking study of the relationship between Indigenous peoples and museums appears in the last chapter of her book. Under the title “Building Relationships,” she describes her interest in writing “around” the artefacts collected by the 1929 Franklin Motor Expedition rather than simply “about” them, focusing on their cultural rather than material aspects. First Nations, Museums, Narrations does just that, and, in large part, it is what separates Brown’s work from many others in museum studies as she considers the historical impact of collections and collecting in the context of the colonial discourse. [End Page 300]

Although the Franklin Motor Expedition bears a somewhat prosaic name, its history raises some important questions about the commodification of cultural materials. In Winnipeg in the summer of 1929, Donald Cadzow, an experienced former employee of the Museum of the American Indian, Robert Rymill, an Australian graduate in anthropology and economics at Cambridge University, along with Rymill’s younger brother John, climbed into their large six-cylinder Franklin sedan. For the next three months, they drove across the Canadian prairies, visiting reserves and purchasing artefacts that ranged from the trivial to the prized. While the expedition was small in comparison to other ethnographic endeavours, the team amassed the largest single collection from the Canadian prairies now in a British museum, visiting a total of eight First Nations and collecting several hundred pieces.

The Franklin Motor Expedition represented a good example of the blurred boundaries that still existed between the amateur and professional periods of anthropology, for it was during the interwar years that anthropology transformed from the preoccupation of the amateur collector to the profession of the scientific investigator. Studying the collection itself, as well as the visual and written records produced by the expedition, Brown discusses in detail how the contexts for the creation and display of such collections helped to shape the emerging relationship between Indigenous peoples and museums. When Cadzow and the Rymill brothers set out to collect artefacts from across the prairies, it was with the belief that they were assembling the remnants of disappearing cultures. Of course, they were not alone in this assumption as most anthropologists of the time believed First Nations were headed for extinction. At the same time that the assimilationist policies of a repressive federal government undermined First Nations cultures across Canada, ethnographic salvage was in full swing. The Franklin Motor Expedition was only one such initiative that sought to fill the display cases of museums in Canada and throughout Europe.

The connection between collecting and colonialism is an integral part of Brown’s study. Citing anthropologist Ruth Phillips, Brown summarizes the four types of collectors that operated at the time of the Franklin Motor Expedition: professional ethnologists who sought materials representative of non-acculturated populations; Native agents who used their positions to supply museums with sought-after materials; art collectors seeking “authenticity”; and, lastly, tourists who purchased Native-made souvenirs as trophies. These types, however, were not mutually exclusive – the different approaches to collecting [End Page 301] frequently merged. According to Brown, Cadzow and the Rymill brothers “cross-cut them all” (18).

In 1998, while assembling a museum catalogue of the almost 700 artefacts from the Cambridge collection, Brown discovered that First Nations in western Canada were completely unaware of the collection’s whereabouts and, indeed, did not know whether it existed at all. Deciding to retrace the Franklin route, Brown consulted with members of the First Nations and their descendants about the expedition. She spoke as well to descendants of the collectors and reviewed the visual documentation of the expedition. In the end, Brown brings multiple perspectives to the processes of collection, including the notion of collecting as a deeply political activity.

Brown’s chapters narrate this engaging and fascinating story, from the state of reserve life in...

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