The K’ëgit Totem Pole: Restoring Witsuwit’en Relations and Restorying the Quai Branly Museum

A multimedia presentation by Dr. Tyler McCreary and Joanne Connauton, Department of Geography, Florida State University

Tuesday, 1 April 2025,  1:00pm-2:30pm, 7th Floor Kaneff Tower

Tyler McCreary (PhD, York), Associate Professor, FSU, and Joanne Connauton, PhD Candidate, FSU, member Wahnapitae First Nation, will present a documentary and discussion on the K’ëgit totem pole taken from northern British Columbia in 1938 and erected outside of the Museum of Man in Paris, France. This SSHRC-funded research examines the history of the pole and a recent visit to the pole by a Witsuwit’en delegation of elders and youth. This presentation stresses the need to disrupt normative museological discourses about Indigenous objects and restory Indigenous genealogical relations to artifacts to recognize them as kin. The K’ëgit totem pole is recognized as a source of familial lineages, artistic practice, community knowledge and stories, language revitalization, and reclamation. In contrast to museum preservation processes that focus on the pole as an object to be chemically maintained, Witsuwit’en approaches to pole restoration focus centrally on healing relationships, including the need for repairing kinship relationships to an ancestral pole.

For further information contact Dr. Ann Marie Murnaghan: amfm@yorku.ca

The Department of Humanities, the Graduate Program in Geography, and the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies have generously sponsored this talk.