MOA is temporarily closed — from January 16 until late 2023 — for Great Hall seismic upgrades.
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NEW – Enrich your visit of MOA with this new self-guided tour! Explore the Museum and its worldwide collections through rich, multimedia content. Move through the different gallery spaces—at your own pace, in your own order—to discover collection highlights, brought to life through the perspectives and voices of Indigenous artists and knowledge holders, museum curators, and other experts.
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An interdisciplinary seminar series on visual and material culture. Free and open to all. Select Thursdays. See full details
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MOA Unmasked: Beading + Textiles in Motion
Thursday September 14 at 11am + 7 pm | Friday September 15 at 4:30 pm
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Thursday August 10 at 7 pm + Saturday, August 12 at 11 am
MOA on the Move: Native Youth Program Tours at MOV
Tuesday, July 18 – Friday, July 21, 2023 | 11 am + 2 pm
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This Event Is In The Past


Recasting Ainu Indigeneity in Museums Through Performing Arts
Wednesday August 3, 2022 | 5 – 7 pm
Join MOA for a lecture and performance by Ainu Indigenous scholar/artist/dancer Dr. Kanako Uzawa.
In 2019, MOA was thrilled to welcome Indigenous Ainu singers Mayunkiki and Tomoe Yahata for a special Hokkaidō 150 event hosted by the Centre for Japanese Research (CJR) at UBC and MOA. The Ainu peoples are Indigenous to Hokkaidō of Japan and the Sakhalin and Kuril Islands of Russia.
In this follow up event, Dr. Uzawa will explore Ainu performing arts, through discussion and performance, as an important element of Indigenous knowledge. Dr. Kanako Uzawa is an Ainu scholar, advocate and artist. She will be participating in the Intercultural Indigenous Choreographer Creation lab at the Banff Centre this July. She is also a participating artist in the A Soul in Everything: Encounters with Ainu from the North of Japan exhibition at the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum in Cologne, Germany and is currently involved with planning the upcoming Ainu exhibition at the University of Michigan Museum of Art as a guest curator.
She is a multilingual cultural scholar who speaks Japanese, English, Norwegian, and limited Ainu and has lived in six different countries. She obtained her doctorate from the Arctic University of Norway in 2020, and is the founder of Ainu Today.
Presented by Centre for Japanese Research + Museum of Anthropology at UBC and SFU’s David Lam Centre.
The event is made possible through the generous financial support of the David Lam Centre, School for the Contemporary Arts, the Institute for Performance Studies, and the Global Asia Program at Simon Fraser University; the Centre for Japanese Research, and the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia.
Please note: the event is free, but does not include access to the Museum, which will be closed during the event. Registration is not required, but capacity in the Haida House is limited so we suggest arriving early to avoid disappointment.
Photo by Mats Gingvik
MOA's Haida House (no museum access) • Free Lecture Program