Reflections on Vancouver, British Columbia and other topics, related or not
Unbecoming B.C. history
The province’s showcase museum
goes the way of the Gleichschaltung
Greg Klein | November 23, 2025
Official photos of the Becoming B.C. re-opening
show a dearth of all-important indigenous.
This is an update to a previous post on Canadian historical ignorance.
I returned to the Royal British Columbia Museum in January 2025 after an interval of several years that included a period of uncertainty for the place. Since 2021 museum officials and the provincial government had been announcing sometimes confused and tenuous plans to radically alter exhibits, close exhibits, dismantle the Becoming B.C. section or even demolish the entire building for a nearly $1-billion ideologically correct replacement. All that resulted from a Haida employee’s vague allegations of “white privilege” and “micro-aggressions.”
Yet I noticed little change to Becoming B.C., the all-of-a-sudden-controversial provincial history gallery that simply had to be shut down in January 2022 but was surprisingly re-opened in July 2023. Most of what I remember was still in place. A few additions to Old Town, the life-sized, walk-in model of frontier urban B.C., included a Japanese photo studio in one of the second-storey Grand Hotel rooms. The little cinema that used to show silent flicks now features a documentary about the studio. From any point of view, it doesn’t do justice to the events of 1941.
A desperate effort to conventionally legitimize Becoming B.C. involves new signage decrying “settlers” and other evils like “stolen lands,” “unceded territory,” “discontent,” “social inequity,” with additional fashionable rhetoric.
Outright stupidity trumps scholarship. We learn that “early Chinatown communities were vastly diverse.” So that’s why they were called Chinatowns?
More historical fecklessness shows in signage about Vancouver’s Hogan’s Alley. The oft-discredited claim that it was a black neighbourhood evidently meets the curator’s accuracy standards. I think the signs also misrepresent why railway porter jobs were open to blacks.* Other info (for example “many porters held university degrees”) seems dubious.
That guy on the left, the guy with the camera
—he might not be white!
Expressing teen girl activism more than historical research, one sign states that black railway porters’ “contributions included fighting to move Canada away from its conception as a white dominion to a multicultural society, a struggle that continues to this day.”
In fact all the Hogan’s Alley material is out of place in a city where black history would be better represented by, for example, an account about the Coloured Regiment (sometimes referred to as the Pioneer Rifles or the African Rifles), Victoria’s gold rush-era police force. Or would that prove embarrassing? The unit disbanded because other American arrivals scorned its authority.
Even more embarrassing֫—to conventional ideologues—would be the encouragement given to black Americans by James Douglas and other colonial authorities, and the positive, even grateful accounts written by people like black American civil rights activist Mifflin Wistar Gibbs.
Are museum staff even interested in history? Last February the museum held a black fashion show, an obviously trivial event that began Black History Month, itself a reflexive imitation of an American trend.
Although an hysterical native headfuck sparked the museum’s upheaval, the biggest change so far has been the unexplained disappearance of a major native exhibit. A once-prominent collection of aboriginal masks, with an audio commentary about related legends, has gone. That’s possibly due to “repatriation” of the artifacts but, if so, why? Why not display them where international visitors can see them?
Still playing but overdue for replacement is a thoroughly unconvincing film about native efforts to revive native languages. One guy, presented as a success story, speaks only random Cree words, no phrases, sentences or ongoing discourse. An elderly woman claims her language can express complex ideas, but that’s not substantiated in the documentary or in what I saw of related material in the Our Living Languages exhibit. (How many Canadian indigenous languages had numbers or could express the concept of zero? Any of them?)
There’s no explanation for written forms of native languages. They’ve recently become obligatory, replacing some English-language proper nouns, especially with place names like šxʷməθkʷəy̓əmasəm. Surely this all-important indigenous accomplishment wasn’t devised by white guys? Surely not Original Sin white guys? Surely not, not, not?
The documentary states that the federal government outlawed native languages. Did it? Once again it looks like the curators accept any sloppy shit, even falsehoods, as long as the garbage is ideologically useful.
The museum has committed itself to a years-long transformation for greater emphasis on natives and other “diverse populations,” in which “new stories and previously untold perspectives will be respectfully added.”
But during these four years of micro-aggression turmoil the museum has been moving slowly, far behind the social revolution. B.C. has more identity groups than ever. There are junkies, drag queens, women with penises and “largely peaceful” antifa warriors to consider. Genocide continues its inter-generational trauma. And if black railway porters deserve so much attention, what about Chinese railway labourers? Their work could be deadly even if, as a race, they’re less attractive to condescending whites. Then there’s B.C.’s Jews. Or better yet, Palestinians. Or both—but wait, not in the same building.
If Royal B.C. Museum management aren’t keeping up, however, can we blame them? They must have their own horrific stories of oppression and glass-ceilinged me-tooness, just like other upper-middle-class white women.
The injustice never ends. So maybe we don’t need the museum after all. Maybe this entire province, this entire planet, stands as a testament to white hetero male guilt.
Would any history scholar currently working in B.C. dare refute that?
See a related post on the Royal B.C. Museum and Canadian historical ignorance.
*As I understand it, blacks had been welcomed into a number of railway customer service jobs since the 1880s when CPR head honcho William Van Horne, an American, introduced that U.S. custom to Canada for its slightly exotic appeal. (Even now, some posh American restaurants like to hire black wait staff who handle the jobs with somewhat ostentatious flair.)
Mind you, I’ve travelled Canada extensively by rail and can’t remember any pleasantness from black employees. In my experience that’s been about standard for most CP, CN and Via staff. But one black Via porter went further, telling me he had killed two people and I was next. When I responded to that he replied, “I can have you put off the train for using four-letter words.”