Taxidermic Signs

Overview & Synopsis

In Taxidermic Signs, Pauline Wakeham decodes the practice of taxidermy as it was performed in North America from the late nineteenth century to the present, revealing its connection to ecological and racial discourses integral to the maintenance of colonial power. Moving beyond the literal practice of stuffing skins, Wakeham theorizes taxidermy as a sign system that conflates "animality" and "aboriginality" within colonial narratives of extinction. Through a series of provocative case studies, Wakeham demonstrates how the semiotics of taxidermy travels across diverse cultural texts. From the display of animal specimens and aboriginal artifacts in the Banff Park Museum, to the ethnographic films of Edward S. Curtis and Marius Barbeau, to the fetishization of aboriginal remains in the Kennewick Man and Kwäday Dän Ts'inchi repatriation cases, Wakeham argues that taxidermy's sign system reinvents mythologies of disappearing wildlife and vanishing Indians while simultaneously valorizing the power of Western technologies to memorialize these figures.