APEC at the Museum of Anthropology: The Politics of Site and the Poetics of Sight Bite

This paper examines the light shed on processes of globalization and local empowerment by the contestatory events that ensued when the Canadian government appropriated the University of British Columbia's Museum of Anthropology to be the site of the 1997 prime ministerial meeting of the Asia Pacific Economic Community. In its determination to assert its traditional ownership of the museum's site the local Musqueam band came into conflict with government officials, intent on presenting a settler narrative of Canadian nationhood to its trading partners. The official spectacle that was staged in the museum by the government is compared with Musqueam's self-presentation to reveal the persistence of stereotypes and the existence of competing historical narratives that accompany and compromise projects of decolonization within the museum community.     

From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954.

From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954. Lee D. Baker. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 325 pp.