The totem poles in Stanley Park are the most frequented and photographed tourist site in British Columbia (Grant and Dickson 48). (1) Since the first pole was erected in 1903, the colourful display has become an important Vancouver landmark, one that currently draws 3.3 million people annually (Jensen 29). Over the years, the totem poles have come to signify Stanley Park itself. In amateur and professional photographs, tourist brochures, books, postcards, and on government websites, the poles are spectacularized as the symbol of Vancouver's most cherished "urban playground." What is ironic, however, is that the totem poles represent the Kwakwaka'wakw and Haida Nations who reside in Northern BC, and not the Coast Salish (2) who have ancestral and ongoing legal claims to what is now Stanley Park. Several scholars have detailed how this (mis)placement of the poles erases both the presence and the territorial ownership of local Coast Salish communities (Hawker 34-45; Jensen 62-74; Mawani "Imperial" 125-132). Others have told us about the stories and histories of the Kwakwaka'wakw and Haida that are recorded in the carvings on the poles themselves (Jensen 30-47). However, few scholars have explored how the Stanley Park totem poles as a tourist site have figured in the making of Canadian national culture. In the epigraph above, Chris Rojek and John Urry observe that "[t]ourism and culture plainly overlap," but how? Whose culture is (re)presented, displayed, and consumed at the totem poles site in Stanley Park? This paper aims to address the place of Aboriginality in Canadian national culture by approaching the totem poles as an iconic yet shifting symbol of colonial alterity. By Aboriginality, I am referring here not to the changing cultural, legal, and/ or political identities of First Nations that have been documented by legal historians and socio-legal scholars alike (Backhouse 21; Mawani "Genealogies" 323-331), but to the discursive construction of specific Native images and motifs that have problematically come to represent all Aboriginal peoples. (3) To elaborate, the Kwakwaka'wakw, Haida, and several other Northwest Coast communities have traditionally carved freestanding poles. Yet in the popular Canadian imaginary totem poles have come to symbolize "authentic" (4) Native art that is desired and consumed by tourists and visitors. Although totem poles and other Northwest Coast designs and images signify an authentic Native Otherness in mainstream Canada, it is important to recognize that this perceived authenticity is premised on an inauthenticity: on a singular, homogenized, and fixed Aboriginal identity that does not adequately capture the complicated and diverse histories and experiences of First Nations communities in the province of British Columbia (BC).
