At the University of British Columbia Anthropology Museum, they concentrate on the cultures of Northwest Coastal Indian peoples, or First Nations in Canadian parlance. Everyone, including me, seems to want to know first and foremost about totem poles, and this museum displays them dramatically and in abundance. I have tried to make this photograph, shot in color, resemble the vintage photos that accompany many of the artifacts and that help put them in context for modern viewers. Carved usually from single trunks of the straight and tall red cedar, totem poles were used as inside and outside beam supports (as in this photo), mortuary and memorial markers (the former usually including a box section to hold remains), and decorative or ceremonial objects. The original poles don’t have deep, mysterious, symbolic meanings, although some of the characters do give clues to lineage. The ones we saw were more likely to have been found in groups within a village rather than in isolated forest locations, the way I had always pictured them. In an age when we feel uncomfortable knowing that the contents of our natural history museums are really somebody else’s history and perhaps ought to still be there rather than here, it is a relief to know that these wooden totem poles would have disintegrated before now had they not been preserved. They were often obtained from “abandoned” sites, although we know that European arrival in the New World was usually followed by “driven out” or “relocated.” In addition, many items were sold to the museum by First Nations families themselves. A guide at the Cowichan Interpretative Center stated that when a modern or vintage totem pole begins to show its age from weathering, it is taken out in the woods to return to the soil and a new one is carved to take its place. For additional images I took recently of UBC’s totem pole collection, go here.