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Welcome to the new $375.5 million Royal Alberta Museum, a place where one of Canada’s most dynamic provinces is presented to the world as an anarchic flea market of tacky kitsch, random antiques and straight-up garbage.

Edmonton–raised aviator Wop May lived a life of near constant adventure that included helping to bring down the Red Baron. Most modern museums would have immortalized his story with a life–sized diorama or audio–visual display. The Royal Alberta Museum simply nailed up his flight suit and hung up his plane in the lobby, but provide little to no colour as to why they are there.

Among the small number of artifacts chosen to represent the province’s gut-wrenching history of residential schools, one of them is literally a pile of the bricks used to build one of the schools. It’s not the only artifact on display, but it’s telling that bricks made the cut. It’s like representing a gulag by simply displaying a bunch of plates and saying “here are the plates that gulag prisoners used.”

The whole point of a provincial museum is to highlight the things that make Alberta special. Instead, most of the square footage is devoted towards cataloguing quotidian aspects of Alberta life that existed pretty much everywhere.

There is a tribute to canning. A case filled with old radios (we listen to the radio in Alberta, you see). A bench from a train station. Some Ukrainian macramé. A restored 1966 Mercury M100 pickup whose only distinction is that a single Alberta family owned it for 50 years.

This kind of curation is fine if you’re one of the many small town museums dotting Western Canada. Some of the country’s most charming roadside attractions are random collections of old ploughs and captured German pickelhaubes stored in the basement of a town hall.