c̓əsnaʔəm, the city before the city is an exhibit at UBC’s Museum of Anthropology which tells the story of the traditional Musqueam people’s village of c̓əsnaʔəm located in Richmond, BC. c̓əsnaʔəm was long used by the Musqueam people as a burial ground for the dead, but was long forgotten by the colonial Canadians and was dismissed as just a piece of land. The exhibit was a rather strange experience for me, as it took me on a journey through history and culture that I have never experienced before. Unlike traditional, western museum exhibitions, many special considerations were taken upon the creation of this exhibition by the curators in charge. Instead of using third-person pronouns in the exhibition pieces, every piece of information was drawn from personal experiences, described in the first-person form. It was not a collection of artifacts described by the curator alone but rather a collective contribution to form a larger story of the Musqueam people in the ancient village of c̓əsnaʔəm.
Various people willingly contributed their stories and experiences on the topic of c̓əsnaʔəm in order to promote the education of First Nations history in Vancouver. I was amazed by this particular exhibit: it was created through minimal intervention by people other than the contributors themselves. In most cases, the curator for an archive or an exhibit decides what to keep in and what to take out of the collection, depending on the story the curator wants the audience to discover. But with c̓əsnaʔəm, the city before the city, authority is given to each and every contributor to tell what they want to tell and withdraw anything they do not want to share with the public.
It is fair to say that a certain central authority, even when it is minimal, is necessary when creating an archive. But I believe that the degree of this central authority strongly shapes the archives themselves. While archives such as the Mass Observation in Britain has a more centralized system for archival documentation, projects such as the People’s Archive of Rural India has similar authoritative spread to the c̓əsnaʔəm exhibit. Each of those kinds of archives are managed and created in different ways and serves different purposes as well.
It’s amazing to see modern archives with many collections and artifacts come together through the contribution of a unified community. The c̓əsnaʔəm exhibit showed me how archival artifacts can be transformed into an educational showcase by taking advantage of these direct first-hand contributions in a museum setting.