Consuming the Other through Tourism
This is a photo that I took of the totem poles at Brockton Point in Stanley Park – a location which, like the rest of Vancouver, sits on the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations – in early March of this year. The totem poles were moved to Stanley Park by the City of Vancouver in the early 1960s, and have since become the most visited tourist site in British Columbia (City of Vancouver, 2017). In this context, the totem poles at Brockton Point can be looked at as a local iteration of the ways in which cultural forms can be problematically produced or represented in order to satisfy the tourist gaze.
It is important to understand that the process through which Stanley Park was constructed as a tourist site involved the forced displacement and dispossession of the Coast Salish peoples. To explain, while the City of Vancouver was “adorning Stanley Park with specific and selective visual reminders of Aboriginality” for the purpose of tourist consumption, city authorities were “using the law to construct the region’s original inhabitants as ‘squatters’ and [legitimize] their eviction” (Mawani, 2004, p. 38). I find it incredibly disturbing (although not particularly surprising) that this history of violence through displacement and dispossession was not mentioned on any of the information-based displays at Brockton Point. The way in which this history has been glossed over by the City of Vancouver can be connected to the tourist pamphlet in “Report from the Bahamas, 1982,” which Jordan notes does not say “one word about the Bahamian people [affected by the] succession of crude intruders and its colonial consequences” (Jordan, 2003, p. 6 – 7). In both instances, a problematically selective form of social reality is being put forth for the consumption of tourists.
In addition to the above, many tourists visiting Stanley Park are not aware of the fact that the totem poles at Brockton Point come from the Kwakwaka’wakw and Haida First Nations who reside in Northern British Columbia, and thus these totem poles are not culturally representative of the Coast Salish who have ancestral and ongoing legal claims to the land making up Stanley Park (Mawani, 2004, p. 31). Mawani asserts that the placement of these totem poles is an issue as it “erases both the presence and the territorial ownership of local Coast Salish communities” (Mawani, 2004, p. 31). Furthermore, the careless decision made by the City of Vancouver to place non-Coast Salish totem poles on Coast Salish land indicates the presentation of “a singular, homogenized, and fixed Aboriginal to identity” to tourists at Stanley Parks, thus ignoring the diversity of cultures and experiences of First Nations communities in Canada (Mawani, 2004, p. 31). I propose that such a presentation can be looked at as a form of Orientalism, with the Western tourist being invited by the City of Vancouver to gaze upon a homogenized and undifferentiated Native Otherness.
The non-Native construction of Native Otherness at Brockton Point is rendered even more problematic when examining the ways in which this tourist site plays into a larger capitalist enterprise. Exemplifying this, scholars highlight the “continued tourist preoccupation” with the totem poles in Stanley Park as a contributor to the production of “Native-type souvenirs” across Canada (Blundell, 1993, p. 75). It is important to recognize that these souvenirs – the tourist consumption of which constitutes a multimillion dollar business in Canada – tend to employ stereotypical images of First Nations peoples as “colourful exotics [or] children of nature,” therefore locating them “not in the contemporary world but in an eternal past-in-the-present” (Blundell, 1993, p. 73 – 75).
Ultimately, analysis of the totem poles in Stanley Park suggests a need to look more critically at the meanings behind the ways in which cultures and communities are presented, commodified, and consumed at tourist sites.
Works Cited
Blundell, V. (1993). Aboriginal Empowerment and Souvenir Trade in Canada. Annals of Tourism Research, 20(1), 64 – 87.
City of Vancouver. (2017). First Nations Art and Totem Poles. Vancouver.ca. Retrieved 23 March 2017, from http://vancouver.ca/parks-recreation-culture/totems-and-first-nations-art.aspx
Jordan, J. (2003). Report from the Bahamas, 1982. Meridians, 3(2), 6 – 16.
Mawani, R. (2004). From Colonialism to Multiculturalism? Totem Poles, Tourism and National Identity in Vancouver’s Stanley Park. ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 35(1-2), 31 – 57.