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Located well out of downtown on the University of British Columbia campus, the Museum of Anthropology , 6393 NW Marine Drive, is far and away Vancouver's most important museum (mid-May to early Sept daily 10am-5pm, until 9pm on Tuesday; early Sept-mid-May Tues 11am-9pm, Wed-Sun 11am-5pm, closed Mon; $7, free Tues 5-9pm; tel 822-3825, www.moa.ubc.ca ). Emphasizing the art and culture of the natives of the region, and the Haida in particular, its collection of carvings, totem poles and artefacts is unequalled in North America. To get there by bus, catch the #10 or #4 bus south from Granville Street and stay on until the end of the line. The campus is huge and disorienting - to find the museum, turn right from the bus stop, walk along the tree-lined East Mall to the very bottom (10min), then turn left on NW Marine Drive and walk till you see the museum on the right (another 5min). In the foyer pick up a free mini-guide or the cheap larger booklet - a worthwhile investment, given the exhibits' almost total lack of labelling, but still pretty thin. Much is made of the museum's award-winning layout, a cool and spacious collection of halls designed by Arthur Erickson, the eminent architect also responsible for converting the Vancouver Art Gallery. Particularly outstanding is the huge Great Hall , inspired by native cedar houses, which makes as perfect an artificial setting for its thirty-odd totem poles as you could ask for. Huge windows look out to more poles and Haida houses, which you're free to wander around, backed by views of Burrard Inlet and the distant mountains. Most of the poles and monolithic carvings, indoors and out, are taken from the coastal tribes of the Haida, Salish, Tsimshian and Kwakiutl, all of which share cultural elements. The suspicion - though it's never confessed - is that scholars really don't know terribly much of the arcane mythology behind the carvings, but the best guess as to their meaning is that the various animals correspond to different clans or the creatures after which the clans were named. To delve deeper into the complexities, it's worth joining an hour-long, all-year guided walk . One of the museum's great virtues is that none of its displays are hidden away in basements or back rooms; instead they're jammed in overwhelming numbers into drawers and cases in the galleries to the right of the Great Hall. Most of the permanent collection revolves around Canadian Pacific cultures, but the Inuit and Far North exhibits are also outstanding. So, too, are the jewellery, masks and baskets of Northwest native tribes, all markedly delicate after the blunt-nosed carvings of the Great Hall. Look out especially for the argillite sculptures, made from a jet-black slate found only on BC's Haida Gwaii or Queen Charlotte Islands. The African and Asian collections are also pretty comprehensive, if smaller, but appear as something of an afterthought alongside the indigenous artefacts. A small, technical archeological section rounds off the smaller galleries, along with a new three-gallery wing designed to house the Koerner Collection, an assortment of six hundred European ceramics dating from the fifteenth century onwards. The museum saves its best for last. Housed in a separate rotunda, The Raven and the Beast , a modern sculpture designed by Haida artist Bill Reid, is the museum's pride and joy and has achieved almost iconographic status in the city. Carved from a 4.5-tonne block of cedar and requiring the attention of five people over three years, it describes the Haida legend of human evolution with stunning virtuosity, depicting terrified figures squirming from a half-open clam shell, overseen by an enormous and stern-faced raven. However, beautiful as the work is, its rotunda setting makes it seem oddly out of place - almost like a corporate piece of art.
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