Olsen: Museum a `monument to colonial storytelling'
The government's plan to replace the Royal B.C. Museum in Victoria is an “$800-million monument to colonial storytelling” disguised as Indigenous reconciliation, B.C. Green MLA Adam Olsen said Tuesday.
“Most Indigenous people I speak to have no desire to visit their culture in a museum,” said Olsen, who is a member of the Tsartlip First Nation. “We don't want to visit our culture locked behind glass.”
Premier John Horgan and Tourism Minister Melanie Mark unveiled a plan on Friday to shutter the Royal B.C. Museum on Sept. 6. It will be torn down and rebuilt by 2030 at a cost of $789 million.
The price tag sparked criticism from the public and opposition MLAs who said the money would be better spent on fixing the broken health-care system or giving drivers relief from gas prices.
Olsen said Friday's announcement was wrapped in the language of reconciliation, decolonization and addressing systemic racism at the Royal B.C. Museum.
The museum's former CEO, Jack Lohman, resigned after an internal report examining institutionalized racism found that the museum was a “dysfunctional and toxic workplace, characterized by a culture of fear and distrust.”
Calling stolen Indigenous items artifacts, as Horgan did Friday, reduces them to symbols of cultures that no longer exist, Olsen told a news conference on Tuesday. The items should be repatriated to Indigenous communities, he said.
“Some of the items in the museum's collection are the missing puzzle pieces to the broken parts of our culture, the parts that we haven't had the benefit to access because they've been locked away in cabinets in the basement.”
Olsen contrasted the $789 million with the $500,000 the government committed in 2020 to help Indigenous communities repatriate cultural items, ancestral remains Olsen would like funding to help Indigenous communities across B.C. build small museums, giving them a direct say on how their stories are told.