he freedom to investigate and publish supe-rior knowledge about serious things is thefoundation of the scholarly professions(Shils 1978). In western capitalist societies thisprinciple of scholarly privilege has been coupled tothe idea of private property. Researchers typicallynot only claim property rights over the knowledgethey produce, but also proprietary rights over thesubject matter—the field of raw data—from whichthey extracted their knowledge. This conceptualparadigm continues to be imposed upon the world— as a type of vestigial colonialism — long after thedecline of those imperial regimes that gave rise to itin the first place. Contemporary examples are to befound in the ways museum and university scholarsattempt to classify, represent, and control theirfields of study in the name of "science," "academicfreedom," and "scholarship." This paper reviewshow the assertion by aboriginal peoples that theyown their own histories served to interrupt and re-define that western idea of scholarly privilege, atleast as it applied to several public representationsof indigenous languages and cultures at the Univer-sity of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology.