Earlier this year, Iwas fascinated to read the account of a participatory project at the Morrison County Historical Society in Minnesota, in which community members were invitedto write essays about “what’s it like” to have various life experiences in theCounty. One of the invited participants—the one who inspired the project—is ayoung transgender person. Mary Warner, the Museum Manager at the HistoricalSociety, wrote a series of moving articles for her museum newsletter and laterfor the AASLH’s Small Museum Online Community about her experiences tackling bigissues in a small museum. While the articles focus on the controversy around GLBT representation (which is fascinating), I was curious to learn more aboutthe project itself. I called Mary to learnmore about this brilliant example of a small museum thinking in big andcourageous ways about community participation in local history. For context,the Morrison County Historical Society has four paid staff members and engagesabout 2,000-3,000 visitors per year.
How did this projectget started?
Like most of our projects here, it’s a case of organicdevelopment based on our mission, which is Morrison County history. We on staffhave always had the sense that we want to collect the histories of people whodon’t have their histories collected that often – to have a representativesample that’s not just the famous people or the rich people.
For example, we’re interested in GLBT and Jewish historiesin our County – how do we get those stories? How do we get the history of thepoor? We’re an actively collecting museum, and we’re always thinking about howwe can take an inclusive approach with the artifacts and archives we collect.
But how did thisspecific project get started?
We had a board member who kept asking us to do oralhistories. We on staff have so much to do, there are only four of us, and weknow oral histories are so labor-intensive. We’ve done a few; I’ll interviewsomeone for a specific reason for an article or to add to a file. But we wantedto do something a little more formal to capture more.
It’s sort of weird how it happened. We have this boardmember asking for oral histories. And then my son’s friend--I knew he wastransgender--and so I wondered, if I do an essay project, would he write onefor me? The whole “what’s it like” theme was based on him.
So did you start byapproaching your son’s friend to see if he would participate?
When I start a project, I like to first get it into awritten form that anybody can follow. That’s a habit for our volunteer projects– we have to figure out how are we going to communicate what we want fromparticipants. So I put all the forms together first. And then I went to myson’s friend and asked him if he would he write an essay, and he did.
Why did you decide tocollect essays as opposed to digital media, perhaps video or audio?
I think part of writing for us – we do this all the time –if there’s a web source, we will print it off and add it to the archive. Westruggle with how to save digital media. If we do an essay project, it’s thewritten word, we can print it out and save it and it will be here in a hundredyears.
A lot of museums startthis kind of project with big intentions, but then they really struggle to getparticipation. I was impressed by how much success you’ve already had incapturing essays—not an easy thing to do. What did you do to recruit orencourage participation?
Well, our goal is 100 essays, and we’re not there yet. Wehave about 25 now. But it’s the kind of thing we need to keep pushing, and wehaven’t in a while.
We went to the genealogy group, and a whole bunch of themsubmitted. I think one person may have submitted something directly on the web,but mostly these are solicited. You have to remind people, keep reaching out. Ittakes constant reaching out, and reminding. Not everyone feels confident abouttheir writing. It would be a great thing to take into a school and do but wehaven’t done that yet.
How did you decide totranslate the essay project into an exhibition?
Whenever we are creating content, we like to use it in avariety of formats. We have two permanent exhibition galleries and then a longhallway that we use for a special exhibition that lasts about a year. We try tocycle artifacts and really milk all the content we create through exhibitions,our newsletter, on our website, and in programs.
So we decided to do the essay project, and then our curatorsaid, hey this year let’s do our essay project as the exhibit.
So we pulled objects from our collection to connect with theessays. In one case, someone wrote an essay about being a newspaper boy, and hehad already donated his newspaper bag.
How did you selectwhich essays to turn into exhibits?
Really, it was about which stories we had good objects for.We didn’t ask people if we could exhibit them, but when we were explaining theessay project, we explained that the essays would be used. Most people knowthat if they are donating their stuff to the museum, it is going to be used –in the newsletter, on the website.
Where did the interestspecifically in GLBT history come from? What kinds of conversations did youhave with staff and board members about the potential touchiness of the issue?
There’s a history with the GLBT community with people not beingout for the good share of our history, and then there’s a recent turning point,but we still have GLBT folks in our history – we know that about them, but howcan we write about it now?
We didn’t discuss anything about the possibility of negativereaction, even though we know that the dominant attitude in Morrison County isanti-GLBT. It was just: here’s this essay project we’re going to do, and wehave this inclusive attitude, so of course we’re going to collect this history.It’s ok. We’re going to do it.
The only time we had to really deal with it was when weexperienced two incidents of blowback. One woman came in on a tour and said,“why are you displaying that?” I told her if we didn’t show that story, wewould not be covering our history.
Once I had talked to the lady and told her this was where wewere coming from, she thanked me and told me that she and her husband weregoing to talk about it and think about it. We’re not trying to change minds,but we do want to encourage people to go ahead and think about what you see.
And then there was the anonymous letter. It was pretty clearthat this letter came from someone who was not already part of the museum. Thatletter didn’t come until after we’d talked about it in our local paper. We hadpublished the same article in our newsletter and we didn’t hear a peep.
One of the things thatcame up in that anonymous letter was the person questioning whether it was“history” to talk about someone’s contemporary experience. Is that somethingyou’ve heard other feedback about with this project?
Actually, we’ve heard it before. A few years ago, we had amusic exhibit, and we put a cellphone on exhibit because there are ringtonesthat go with cellphones. A lot of people were engaged by it, but they also wereconfused about why it would be in the museum. We are interested in contemporarycollecting, so we do it, and we are constantly educating people that currenthistory is history too.
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