First Nations, Museums, Narrations: Stories of the 1929 Franklin Motor Expedition to the Canadian Prairies by Alison K. Brown (review)

in 1929, Cambridge University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology sponsored an expedition to Western Canada to collect First Nations artifacts. As Alison K. Brown notes, at the time “First Nations were subject to extremely invasive policies aimed at assimilation, which, in turn, stimulated an extensive program of ethnographic salvage” (2). Brown’s goal in looking at the trip is to “demonstrate how the analysis of historic collections can inform awareness of the legacy of colonialism as it relates to the revitalization of cultural heritage and to improving relations between indigenous people and museums” (2). Furthermore, Brown seeks to examine largely ignored questions of how Native people responded to both the expedition and the subsequent use of their cultural items that are now housed in the museum’s Rymill Collection, the largest assemblage of prairie artifacts in a British museum. Finally, First Nations, Museums, Narrations offers a look at collection practices on the Canadian prairie, an understudied area in a field that had a copious amount of literature on the Northwest Coast.

The trip was informally called the Franklin Motor Expedition because it served as a promotional opportunity for the Franklin Motor Company, which provided the “air-cooled” car the group traveled in and published Donald A. Cadzow’s resulting publication, Air-Cooled Adventure among the Aborigines, which mostly focused on promoting the vehicle but provided gendered and racial stereotypes of the journey. For one, Cadzow noted an encounter with the Saulteaux where he went to work “with the possibility of flight uppermost in my plans,” showcasing both the “heroic ideal” of fieldwork and the alleged savage nature of the Indians (120–21). Additionally, the portrayal of the area as “untamed and beyond the limits of civilized society” gendered the expedition as a masculine and dangerous affair characteristic of narratives during the golden age of exploration (32). Finally, in emphasizing the car and technology, the expedition played on narratives of the progress of Anglo-European society and the decline of First Nations, which was a central justification of the salvage anthropology the men conducted (154). For Brown, the trip exemplified the blend between the “amateur” and “professional” periods of anthropology by including Cadzow, who had worked for the Museum of the American Indian in New York with John and Robert Rymill, brothers who had little experience in professional anthropology.

Brown’s real contributions come during the second half of the book, where she shifts from looking at non-Native ideas to how the First Nations experienced and responded to the expedition. Chapter 5 switches from discussing how non-Natives perceived the expedition to how First Nations “talked around the collection in cultural and spiritual revitalization processes in supporting community history” (35). Brown then provides a chapter on the exhibition’s artifacts following her proposed biographic approach. To put it simply, Brown adopted the arguments of Igor Kopytoff and others who argued that “artifacts cannot be fully understood at just one point in their existence; processes of production, of circulation, and of consumption must all be taken into account” (25). Doing so not only provides the artifacts with a history but allows us to understand them as something more than “dead,” decontextualized pieces. The discussion of the development of the Rymill Collection from the expedition naturally leads into Brown’s concluding chapter on the relationship between Native collections and British museums and the necessary evolution of the how museums contextualize those items.

First Nations, Museums, Narrations is a helpful and thought-provoking book that encourages the reader to explore not only museum collections but also how we describe the artifacts housed within. Coming out of more than a decade of field research, Brown’s book should be read by anyone involved in museums and Native collections.