Urban Vancouver

Storyeum's Canada: Tourist friendly?

By Jonathon Narvey on April 24, 2006 - 10:04pm

The lesson of history is rarely learned by the actors themselves. -James A. Garfield

Canadian tourism officials are complaining that our image as a land of moose and Mounties is just so passe. I can just imagine the marketing team meeting: "Listen up, pristine wilderness, snow-peaked mountains and hockey just won't cut it for the Winter Olympics. I mean, give us something to work with here!"

Meanwhile,one local attraction that seems the perfect venue for getting the story out about BC to tourists leaves me unsettled about what kind of story we're telling.

Vancouver's Storyeum is a living museum in the heart of Gastown, with incredible sets, actors and singers.

I had the opportunity to visit it for my third time this weekend. Storyeum provides a unique theatrical journey through BC and Canadian history, from the pre-contact era of the First Nations to the European settlement, on to the gold rush, the building of the national railway and Confederation.

Along the way, the audience is reminded of the terrible "price of progress"; the annexation of First Nations land just as European diseases wiped out their population; underpaid Chinese railroad workers forced to work under the most dangerous conditions; continued restrictions on Chinese immigrants that existed long after the National Dream was completed. The second-class treatment of women is also thrown into the mix, with suffragettes protesting to win the right to vote.

The overall message of the performance is actually hopeful; witnessing a happy reunion at a train station in 1945, the actors reaffirm how the country has now become a more egalitarian society.

As uncomfortable as the pedantic scenes earlier on made me feel, I understand that the trend in the teaching of history is leaning more to self-criticism. And why should Canadians get off the hook? If the creative directors at Storyeum want to create a show about the fight against prejudice and injustice as the driving theme of our nation (in all three incarnations of the attraction to date), I can no more argue with that than question the need for a Holocaust Museum in Germany.

Still, I wonder at the portrayal of the American supporting characters in Storyeum's historical drama. The American president James K. Polk (admittedly a land-greedy war-mongerer) is depicted as a lisping wild-eyed moron. Soon after, an American miner in Barkersville, BC appears as a brainless drunken hick. There are plenty of funny
characters in the performance - but the Americans are the only ones we laugh at purely for their Dumb and Dumber routines. Why is that?

Do the schoolchildren who file in on field trips really need yet another dose of anti-American propaganda with the daily grist? Is Storyeum so successful already that it can afford to offend our tourists from Washington, Oregon and California? (Judging by the sparse attendance I've witnessed on all three occasions I've gone, I suspect it needs all the return business it can get; eight of us took a tour that could have accomodated nearly eighty). The stories we tell of our history reflect on us as much as those colorful characters from our past.

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