The linkage between the totem poles at the Royal Ontario Museum and the demise (and potential resurgence) of Ontario Place is not one of obvious similarity. The totem poles are objects taken from their place of origin on the west coast, historical objects that are the bounty of colonial appropriation. In contrast, Ontario Place is an urban recreational hub, existing both as an architectural object and ecological construct. Referencing the map shown on the above page though, they both can be categorized in a position that is informed by state control, capital, urbanization, and environmental destruction.
First and foremost for the totem poles is their relationship to colonization. This almost need not be said, considering that the only reason for their location in the ROYAL Ontario Museum is the forced displacement of indigenous objects from their home into centers of colonial power, as in the ROM. A useful lens for looking at the totem poles in the context of the ROM is Glen Couthard’s Red Skin, White Mask. This positioning of the totem poles in the ROM precedes the concepts outlined in Couthard’s text by thirty or forty years, but nonetheless in viewing them in a contemporary context Couthard’s ideas on the “politics of recognition” becomes relevant[1]. Proponents of liberal pluralism might argue that the location of the poles in the ROM is a showing of representation of indigenous culture through artefacts in a canadian cultural hub. Through the lens of Red Skin, White Mask that assertion is problematized by the reality of the poles being representations of the genocidal assimilationist policies of the canadian state prior to 1971[2]. Looking at the diagram from the previous page again, the aspect of state control in relation to colonization becomes apparent.
The current location of the totem poles, both temporally and spatially can be viewed through the context Henri Lefebvre’s Urban Revolution as a rendering of something not necessarily made obvious in his text. While he creates the signposts of the ongoing process of urbanization, from the political city-mercantile city-industrial city-critical zone with the transition from agrarian to urban mixed in between mercantile and industrial, it feels like there is a gap where the process of colonization is not accounted for[3]. When settlers came to North America and began the process of settlement, displacement, and genocide indigenous people were not occupying cities in the same way Lefebvre conceptualizes the urban fabric of europe[4]. Couthard refers to indigenous structures as “place-based, non-state modes of self-sufficient indigenous economic, political, and social activity”[5]. These conceptions seem to fall outside of Lefebvre’s hypothesis of the process of urbanization. The power structures central to the urban are not present in the same way, and thus it is unclear where the totem poles fit spatially in the urban fabric. Clearly as objects they are in the ROM, in the center of a city that is somewhere inbetween the industrial city and the critical zone[6].But temporally and in a more esoteric sense they exist outside of Lefebvre’s linear delineation of the urban. The totem poles were in a sense ripped from their true place then placed in a colonial institution that is either perversely assimilationist or a perverse attempt at liberal pluralism.
The development of Ontario Place is an example of a failed combination between state-funded recreational infrastructure and private capital. With this context, Ontario Place can be interrogated with an eye to the development happening in the global south that Lukasz Stanek discusses in Architecture in Global Socialism.What might have happened to Ontario Place if there was an injection of nonaligned Yugoslavian architects and development? With the struggles faced by Ontario Place in the 1980s with lack of funding that forced it into a position of pivoting towards a waterpark 1992 and demolishing and replacing the Forum with the Molson Amphitheater in 1994, maybe something similar to Non-Aligned infrastructural assistance could have been leveraged to prevent the current predicament of an expensive, ecologically destructive, privately owned spa being built on the landscape that Michael Hough designed as utopian public space[7] [8].
[1] Couthard, 3.
[2] Ibid, 4.
[3] Lefebvre, 15.
[4] Lefebvre, 3
[5] Couthard, 11.
[6] Lefebvre, 15.
[7] Baird et al.
[8] Stanek 6.