Then there is the Kayung totem pole, a 12-metre pole made by the Haida people of the American Pacific North-West, on display in the Great Court: Procter takes issue with its indoor location – ‘it is divided from its original context’ – and with the fact that the museum signage doesn’t make clear that the village it was taken from had been abandoned because ‘the population was decimated by successive smallpox epidemics in the late 1800s, introduced by colonizers.’
