Weight of the past

Trip to Cambridge today with the kids to poke around museums and meet up with relations. Ended up in the University's Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, which was - as you might expect - full of Stuff That Used to Belong to Other People, stunningly displayed.

Smack in the middle is this astonishing totem pole, made by the Haida people of the Canadian West Coast. After a bit of digging, I find it was collected by a Dr. Charles F. Newcombe, who turns out to have been pretty progressive for the time - i.e. working with the locals and, like, learning from them, rather than just charging in and taking.