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Hey, yall. I tweet mostly about bread, my journalism, or Lucille Bluth gifs Not much about my #museum job. But today was special and I'm going to make a little thread about it. We opened a small but mighty exhibit. Yes, that's the flag of the Marshall Islands
Here's the story:
Here's the story:
In 2015, when I was still freelancing full time, I read a @cestmoiLanglois article about Marshallese people living in Oklahoma. It was published in @hakaimagazine and is still very good: https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/landlocked-islanders/
In 2016, I was starting my new job at the Field Museum. One of my assignments was to help get a new series of rotational exhibits off the ground, built around collaboration with Pacific Islander communities. We ended up turning @cestmoiLanglois's piece into a photo display and...
...talked about how cool it would be to make an exhibit in collaboration with the Marshallese diaspora in Oklahoma. The idea sat for a couple years. At the end of 2018 we decided to do this project for Dec 2019 installation. But we didn't have any connections in Enid...yet.
Enter Enid High School's assistant principal, Cindy Black, and ELL Coordinator, Lori Palmer. EHS has a double digit percentage of Marshallese students. Cindy and Lori pulled together a group of students to contribute to this project. Terry Mote, a community leader, signed up, too
I visited EHS for their annual Islander Night, and announced the project. https://www.enidnews.com/news/lifestyles/enid-marshallese-students-to-help-create-chicago-museum-exhibit/article_840a9be3-d92e-54de-9f9e-2f783cdc7121.html
In March, the Enid group visited. Members of Chicago's Pacific Islander and Native American communities joined the Museum in welcoming them on the marae of Ruatepupuke II, a 19th century Maori meeting house that currently resides at the Field Museum.
The kids did a crash course on exhibit development. They toured the existing (old) Pacific exhibits, analyzed them, visited the Marshallese items at the Museum (a couple hundred items), and came up with proposals for their exhibit. They met with our designers, too.
We asked them to make lists of what they liked about the existing (old) exhibits, and what they didn't. On the left, "What Worked." On the right, "What Would You Change." Yikes. #museumtwitter take note. #Museums
BUT THEN. A Field Museum anthropologist went to #Majuro in 1947 and, in addition to bringing beautiful jaki-ed back to Chicago, took a bunch of photos of Marshallese people. The Enid group got to look at the album.
On the first page of was a picture of Terry's mom.
On the first page of was a picture of Terry's mom.
70+ years after her photo was taken — never knowing why it was taken or where the "white guy with a camera" had come from or where he went — her son finds the photo in Chicago. But get this: she's still alive and in Oklahoma. We got to give her the photo a few weeks later.
But before the kids left Chicago, the Pacific Islander and Native American communities in the city threw them a potluck at the American Indian Center. Lots of singing and dancing and food. Plus, several families who had children adopted from the Marshall Islands joined in
In Enid, we met different folks in the Community, and got to talk to even more Marshallese students at EHS about the exhibit and their ideas and vision for it. More stories. More delicious food. More new friends.
In October, I got to go to Majuro with a colleague to do more outreach. One of the most memorable trips of my life. We met our Enid friends' relatives, commissioned items for the new exhibit, shared the plans with local students and more.
We were on track to open and bring the Enid group back to celebrate, but then covid hit. The Marshallese diaspora in the US has been disproportionally hit by covid. Work on the exhibit goes electronic (like everything else) https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-07-09/coronavirus-marshall-islands-spokane-arkansas
It was @thisismonisa that got this exhibit across the finish line after I got pulled onto other projects. Almost two years after that first visit, the exhibit is finally installed. We celebrated on Zoom today, and gave a tour. 70+ people watched from all around the world.
Instead of tweeting pictures of the exhibit, I'll give you this teaser. Yall gotta come see it (when its safe to do so)!
Stay tuned to this thread. I'll drop info on online events around the exhibit here so you can see these kids' vision for yourself. There's so much joy, pride, pain, and love in what they have to say.
But to wrap up:
But to wrap up:
Engaging with communities whose heritage is held in a Museum collection should be standard. Museums aren't neutral, and have difficult histories that need to be reckoned with. It's not easy work, but its necessary work. Onward!
Thank you for reading.
Thank you for reading.
