MR.
SUAREZ: David Hurst Thomas will stay up here
on the stage, and he'll be joined by Clement
Price and Richard Kurin.
They will handle your questions.
Let me remind you once again, the microphone
is in the back of the center aisle.
We welcome your questions.
Yeah, I mean you have a little time because
they're getting
themselves settled and sitting down, but please
do head to the microphone.
Tell us who you are and where you're from.
[Off MIC conversation]
[The question microphone is inaudible]
MALE VOICE 1: - -
MR.
THOMAS: - -
[The answer microphones are also inaudible]
MALE VOICE 1: - - during the Civil war?
MR.
KURIN: - -
MALE VOICE 1: - -
MR.
KURIN: Yeah, I think with Henry the issue
wasn't so civil.
[Laughter]
MR.
KURIN: He didn't believe that the war should
be.
He wasn't for succession, he wasn't for abolition,
he wasn't for war.
He wanted to run the Smithsonian.
As he said, he ended up working on this - - who
is actually in correspondence with folks
in Liberia or for the expatriation of - - . That
was something that Lincoln, too, was part
of.
MR.
SUAREZ: As the next questioner makes his or
her way to the
microphone, not to split hairs about it David,
but when we say here what's here when we say
how many people are here?
I mean, certain nations straddled what's now
the Canadian/U.S. border.
There were native people all through the Caribbean.
Are we talking about what's now the 48, all
of North America?
What are we talking about?
MR.
THOMAS: Again, I was specifically speaking
about this country and the - - figure.
You bring up an interesting point, because
so much of both museum world and anthropology
now is driven by the legislation.
When the National Museum of the American Indian
was created in 1989, it was paired with legislation
about repatriation and
reburial.
That is a United States law that all of us,
on both sides, tribal sides and museum sides,
and in this case those are the same thing.
We have tribal recognition in this
institution and we also have museum recognition.
Much of it is played out according to the
territory of the United States because that's
what the law covers.
That said, there are any number of cases across
the borders where tribes are scatters, and
is it possible for a tribe that spans the
Northern border and Canada, can claims be
made for tribal members
that are actually living in Canada?
Tough question, same true with the Ache in
Arizona.
Part of it is in Mexico.
So it's creating incredibly difficult legal
problems, but I'll say that one thing that's
happening and in part because of the repatriation
issue within this museum, there are deals
that are being worked out with international
repatriation that are not required by law.
It's the right thing to do in some cases,
and we just need to figure out a way to do
it.
MR.
SUAREZ: Yes, tell us who you are
and where you're from.
SARAH WALKER: Okay, my name is Sarah Walker,
and I am the Program Manager for the Wellness
and Art Center and Iona Senior Services.
We take seniors from the community and bring
them to museums like the American Indian Museum
and I guess my question comes to, how do you
expect that the cultural diversity within
the museums
and that evolution is going to impact the
people that come and visit the museums on
a day to day basis?
What are the benefits going to be to the people
that walk through the door?
MR.
PRICE: It seems to me that museums at the
end of the day, or maybe at the beginning
of the day are places of wonder.
They are places of learning, and they are
places of
transformation.
Over the course of my professional life as
an academic historian, which means I'm a historian
who mainly works in words, I've had an opportunity
to work with
a curator or to work with a education person
at a museum, or to benefit from a long friendship
with people like John Franklin who is here,
and Lonnie Bunch, and Spencer Crew [phonetic],
and people like that.
I'm just amazed at how there's no place quite
like a museum because it's an intellectually
and spiritually protected space.
There's
some things that can go on in a museum that
cannot occur, say, in a theater or in a academic
setting such as a college campus.
With respect to the museum I know the most
about, and that would be the Newark Museum,
that museum has enabled people in a post-industrial
city, people who nearly lost their city through
nearly two generations of decline in an awful
spat of violence in the late 1960s, that museum
has helped to reintroduce those who bore witness
to that transformation and their progeny,
how absolutely important and precious a
museum in the downtown corridor of Newark,
New Jersey is.
In fact, I've said on occasion, if John Cotton
Dana did not come to Newark to found the Newark
Museum in 1909, Newark probably doesn't survive
the second half of the 20th Century.
As the city was declining, including its downtown
corridor, the museum, and it's an art museum,
but it's an art museum with a
great attitude because it displays more than
art, it plays jazz, it has a wonderful Tibetan
collection, it has a very credible commitment
to arts and education, because of all of that
and also until recently it had a mini zoo,
because of all of these assets, a lot of people
who had written Newark off don't after a while.
They begin to come back into
the city, patronizing the museum, doing so
at such a clip that by the 1990s, Newark is
viewed as a recovered city.
A performing arts center rises beneath the
shadows of
the museum.
A sports area, a massive increase in the number
of college and university students, so that's
a long and convoluted way of saying museums
are very special places for wonder, discovery,
and transformation.
Yeah.
MR.
KURIN: - - 30 million visitors a year, that's
a lot.
Overall, the museums across the United States
literally get hundreds of millions.
I think the figure is somehow about 800 or
900 million museum visits in the country.
That's more people than go to professional
baseball - - it's huge.
Many of the audiences come.
My wife teaches third grade.
She brings a busload of third graders to the
Smithsonian.
Many come and visit the Smithsonian for an
hour on Sunday, or during the week as a
school trip.
I think a lot of people want to see interesting
and different things.
We have a history - - changing exhibitions
more to keep them fresh, interesting, to provide
different sources of either inspiration, or
knowledge, or even entertainment.
Our museums, though, have to meet the need
of the very large public.
When people come to a place like the Smithsonian
they take it as a bit more than just an entertainment
- - weekend.
I get it, and people will, but it stands for
a little more than that.
And there's a
kind of dreadful validation - - and - - museum
it's my story of the museum, of the beliefs
and the values, and the accomplishments that
I cherish or are important to me, my community,
whatever that community is. - - and that bestows
- - official recognition, societal recognition
of the legitimation of people's experience.
I think that's why this
- - museums, because when they do that, when
they confer that legitimation, when they - - inclusion
with exclusion it says something to the people
who visit, and it says
something more than the kind of entertainment
value.
It says something deeper.
I think what we're struggling with over this
- - is really a question of both inclusion
- - what the American people will see when
they come to the Smithsonian.
- - people across the country go to the museums
in their states and cities and so on.
How we should do that and
to best do that - - in that so that - - culture,
- - in a way that resonates with - - .
MR.
SUAREZ: Yes sir.
MS.
WALKER: Okay, thank you.
MALE VOICE 2: - -
MR.
THOMAS: Sure, I'd be glad to tackle that.
I guess my point is there's a standard story
that is played out in natural history museums
here and my own as we get current with issues.
One is to use our collections to address the
biodiversity issues that are surrounding us
right now.
So we can
use stories like the passenger pigeon, and
we can talk about Teddy Roosevelt's role as
the first conservation President in this country,
and saving land, and saving archaeological
sites.
There's a conservation ethic that is growing
up in museums that's a very good thing.
My point was in the conversation here at the
National Museum of the
American Indian is too often that's confused
with losing culture, with the last real California
Indian dying in 1849.
The point here is there's a lively cultural
diversity that is persisting.
It cannot be understood by confusing it with
the natural history message.
It's giving native people the voices to tell
their own stories, and also we're still hearing
survival stories.
There were 25 community curated exhibits in
the first generation of the National Museum
of the American Indian from the Mapuche in
Chile all the way up
to the Northern latitudes.
Tribal people were invited into the collections,
used the objects to tell the stories that
you'd like to tell.
More often than not it's about cultural survival
and cultural diversity.
MR.
SUAREZ: Yes?
CONSHASHA HOLMAN CONWELL [phonetic]: Conshasha
Holman Conwell, National
Museum of African American History and Culture.
It's interesting that Professor Price began
his remarks with a quote from the great Audre
Lorde.
My question is about gender in culturally-specific
museums.
I've almost given up on gender in non-culturally-specific
museums.
[Laughter]
MS.
CONWELL: Perhaps there's a
chance in this newer generation of museums
to get it right, or at least get it better.
I think that gendering history is a very incomplete
project, and the results
are fairly paltry, quite bluntly.
Any thoughts on the role of gender, specifically
in these kinds of museums, and the state of
that art?
MR.
PRICE: Well, certainly over the last 15-20
years, African American historiography has
felt the very deep imprint of scholars, many
of whom are women, who have re-centered black
women in slavery, in the great
migration, and especially in the modern Civil
Rights movement.
It could be argued that in a society that
values race and manhood it's not surprising
that historically museums that narrate the
African American story would tilt toward manliness
and valueize men.
I see that that is changing with respect to
the scholarship.
The most credible
museums that I know of ultimately follow the
scholarship.
So it is likely that within our lifetime we
will see, again, as far as African American
museums are concerned, a
much more gendered narrative toward the incredibly
important role that black women have played
in African American history.
As we are about to observe the sesquicentennial
of the emancipation, there's some remarkably
seemingly new evidence that before President
Lincoln decided that the time was right to
begin talking publically about emancipation,
the
slaves were already freeing themselves.
They were mislabeled contraband, they were
actually refugees.
A lot of those refugees, those people who
skate behind union lines, those people who
left the plantation because of the traditional
police enforcement of the lives and bodies
of black people were breaking down were women.
So this whole
notion that women are capable of doing remarkable
things in slavery and freedom, Conshasha,
will ultimately find its way to any museum
that purports to shed light on the
black experience.
MR.
SUAREZ: Well, since you asked the question.
Are you still up there?
Oh no.
Could I ask you a question?
I know it's a little odd.
[Laughter]
MR.
SUAREZ: You got me thinking about what, ideally,
that would look like.
You hit the door cold once this museum throws
open its doors
with tremendous pride of place, I mean, what
a location.
You walk in, how is gender handled?
Do you try to level the balance of the accumulated
weight of the imbalance up until now of the
way we've told ourselves those stories?
Or do you correct it just in doing a straight
up proper presentation for when you hit the
door cold when that museum opens?
How do you handle a subject that has been
mishandled in the past, and you're given an
opportunity to recalibrate once an institution
opens?
[Off MIC conversation]
[Laughter]
MS.
CONWELL: - - part of it is that you feel that
it's not incidental, that it's not marginalized,
that it's not - - you're going to have to
ask yourself - - while you may find places
to - -
[Laughter]
MS.
CONWELL: - - women in this
exhibition on history, on culture, on art,
because that’s where they belong.
Now, that is perhaps as fantastic a vision,
Ray Suarez, as it is to think you will find
Native American, Latinos, Asian Americas,
and Native American, etc.
It is what we in museum work do.
We live in that world of the possible and
the dream world.
So that it is not
incidental, that it is matter of fact in the
good sense of the world.
That, of course, they're there and you don't
have to just go looking for them because they're
everywhere.
Thank you.
MR.
SUAREZ: Thanks.
MR.
THOMAS: If I could just add one small point
to reinforce what you just said.
I agree with that completely.
To me, one of the best exhibits that I've
seen in gendered exhibits is at the Autry
Museum in L.A.
It's about cowboys.
They have a huge mural that goes back to the
1880s, and there are 50 cowboys in there.
Three of them are women.
Eight of them are black.
This isn't a gender exhibit at all.
It's just portraying the things - - . You
come away thinking, "That's cool that they
did that."
That's an effective thing to do without hitting
somebody over the head with it.
MR.
SUAREZ: Or making a separate
hall of women cowboys.
[Laughter]
MR.
THOMAS: Yeah.
MR.
SUAREZ: Which is okay too.
[Laughter]
MR.
SUAREZ: Yes?
MR.
KURIN: - - then you would probably have someone
at some point saying, "Hey - - ." - - we have
a National Women in the Arts Museum - - 25
years ago.
- - represented in museums generally.
We - - to be located - - that too - - I think
if you looked at history - - American history
museums started out as - -
railroads, - - covered wagons, boats, and
so on.
The - - so now we have two technology - - so
we - - another museum called the - - basically
ended up with three museums around technology.
How many museums do we have on American art?
We have two museums to tell the story of - - . I
guess my point is, - - is a very big story.
There's a lot of people to
represent, and there's a lot of - - which
we'll see.
We don't raise an issue - - the American story
through - - technology.
We think that's okay.
We - - raise an issue if we
look at America's story through - - . We don't
raise an issue if we have too many American
history museums because we have - - . - - of
very complex, sometimes contentious interesting
historical story and doing that from a bunch
of buildings, well it may not all fit under
one roof.
I think as we look and investigate this question
we have to
ask some practical questions about collections,
presentation, ways of getting different angles
on a story, so we take it away, I think, from
some of the kind of highly idealistic and
idealized notions that really don't reflect
how - - were.
MR.
SUAREZ: Yes?
NANCY BERCAW: That's a perfect segue into
what I wanted to ask.
I'm
Nancy Bercaw and I'm an Associate Curator
over at the National Museum of American History,
the big house.
[Laughter]
MS.
BERCAW: I was really struck, also, by the
Audre Lorde quote about using the master's
tools to dismantle the master's house, and
that you were representing, because I work
a lot with the early collections of the museum,
and how the early collections of the museum
shape the questions that we're able to ask
today.
So, indeed, those questions of that
representation of Joseph Henry are still haunting
us in many ways in our museums today because
the things themselves do.
We're burdened by the things.
I was thinking of the master's tools, but
then I was really struck when you said, "You
know, museums are these places that are spiritual
and intellectual sanctuaries."
Playing off of those
two tensions, because I really do believe
they're both of these things.
I thought, well, you know, we talk about balkanization
of museums and we're talking in terms of race
and
ethnicity, but really we should be talking
about the balkanization of the museums in
terms of art, technology, and history.
They become these sacred, intellectual and
spiritual places.
They're both of those things combined.
Perhaps the balkanization is in the disciplinary
nature of our museums, not in the subject
matter.
I don't know if you
all are following me there, but why can't
we talk about art and history in the same
space?
Why can't we have dance, performance, and
science combined?
I think that's what these new anti-museums
are doing, perhaps.
I would like us to rethink what museums are,
and I thank you so much for bringing that
up.
MR.
PRICE: Thank you.
Again, I
spend most of my time on a college campus.
What you've described we call interdisciplinarity
[phonetic].
[Laughter]
MR.
PRICE: At Rutgers, we no longer
hire assistant professors who claim to know
one thing.
In the history department we want someone
who can teach in the history department but
also have a relationship with Africana studies
and women studies.
We want young scholars to have at least some
interest in the city of Newark.
I've been on the faculty long enough to recognize
that is a
fundamental change in the nature of the academy.
I agree with you.
I think museums by their very nature should
be these very complicated interdisciplinary
multi-layered not just buildings, but the
way curators are hired and deployed in the
museum and beyond the museum.
MR.
KURIN: Yeah I think the issue raised with
the Autry was
interesting, because that was a TV cowboy,
a performing cowboy and then merged with an
American Indian museum and a women's history
center, and really reinterpreted this story
of
the American West.
So you have involvement of Latinos and Asian
immigrants building the railroad.
I mean, it's a good case study of how that
was done.
When I look at the Smithsonian, what we've
been trying to do with some of the efforts
to go across the institution with Secretary
Clough's creation of the consortia, we're
- - to go across the
institution and look at the American experience.
You have things relating to the American experience
in the portrait gallery, and American art,
and Hirshorn, and the Folk Life, American
history, the - - and so on, so why not do
projects that go across those institutions?
So I think we've been doing more of that.
Right now we have a number of programs dealing
with the Civil War.
Well, we deal with the Civil War across the
institution.
There's a website that joins that, and brochures,
and other things.
You can really follow the
Civil War across the institution.
We have a webinar, I think, tomorrow or the
next day on Thomas Jefferson with people participating
from the National Museum of American History,
National Museum of African American History
and Culture, Natural History Museum, and this
museum, American Indian, to talk about Jefferson's
legacy.
So why not?
He had impact,
as was said, on Lewis and Clark, and native
country, but also in terms of the natural
world, and certainly in terms of American
history and so on.
I think we're looking at more.
The interesting thing, of course, for our
next generation is the web starts obviating
a lot of those bureaucratic structures that
have characterized our institutional boundaries
and
practice.
If you are my cousin Jarrod in Michigan and
you want to know what the Smithsonian has
about American history of a certain period,
person, or theme well you go on the
web.
You don't give a hoot whether it's on the
third floor west of American history, or the
second floor of the portrait gallery, or buried
in the archives of American art.
You want to have access to it.
I think in some ways our technology has the
possibility of actually obviating some of
the boundaries of knowledge that are created
by institutional
practice and structure.
I think we're on the verge of a kind of new
world with that.
I think we have the technology now to actually
enhance and aid interdisciplinarity and connections
in the way that we have not had before.
When I look at the visitorship to the Smithsonian,
again, 30 million in real people coming to
the museums on the mall and
in New York, we have over 200 million people
that are visiting that virtual Smithsonian,
that digital Smithsonian on the web.
A lot of divisions that we've seen about dividing
up American
history with culture and art will not exist
for those other 170 million people.
MR.
SUAREZ: You are our last two questions.
First you.
LINDA CUOLCO: Okay hi.
I'm Linda Cuolco [phonetic] recently of Takoma
Park, Maryland.
Can't forget that.
Recently retired after 40 years of federal
service, 20 of which at the
Inter-American Foundation, which has collaborated
quite a bit with the National Museum of the
American Indian and the Smithsonian Folk Life
Center.
I just want to put a plug in of the Inter-American
Foundation with the National Museum of the
American Indian has collaborated a lot on
community museums.
Also with the Folk Life Center too, I think,
at one
of the festivals.
I just think that's a very critical area to
work with the community museums where you
can really work in small towns, etcetera throughout
the region on
really allowing the community themselves to
tell their stories.
I had another question.
I was fascinated by Dr. Price's presentation,
especially the statement you made about those
not yet white that now have a greater understanding
of influence of race and culture.
Since many of us are those not yet white,
I'm Italian and
my late husband was Jewish.
I'd be curious to hear from you, if you could
expand a little bit more about that and how
that is manifested.
Thank you.
MR.
PRICE: Thank you.
A few years ago the institution that I run
at Rutgers was asked to engage all 2,300 members
of the New Jersey State Police.
This is when they were under
court decree for misbehaving along the highways
and byways of New Jersey in an obnoxious practice
called racial profiling.
I had never worked with law enforcement officers
before,
but I had read quite a bit of the new scholarship
on the social construction of race, and how
certain ethnic groups are racialized when
they come here because they are able to exploit
pigment, because they are able to join the
union army, because they are able to intermarry
beyond their clan, they become white.
What I found very interesting is that the
troopers, most of whom are of white ethnic
heritage did not know that their forebears
were not necessarily white on arrival.
When you walk Italians and Jewish, and they're
mostly men, and they're from other places
in that kind of vast, so called Ellis Island
group of people who come here in the late
19th and early 20th Centuries, when you take
them through the history of their forebears,
a history they either don't know or have conveniently
forgotten.
One of the unforeseen consequences of becoming
white is
amnesia.
[Laughter]
MR.
PRICE: You do forget who you once were.
A lot of these guys actually thanked me for
reminding them how they look in historical
time, and how in the 19th Century the Irish,
and the Italians, and the Jews had their issues
with law enforcement.
Since that experience I
have really taken a great interest in the
journey toward whiteness.
It's a fascinating journey.
I don't mean to minimize it.
It's a journey that involves certain benefits
that are accorded to the Irish, but not to
the blacks.
For example, in New Jersey, the Irish are
treated pretty badly, but they are never denied
the right to vote, as was the case with the
blacks.
The first known riot in Newark was an anti-Irish
riot.
Everybody when they think of Newark they think
of the 1967 riot.
This anti-Irish riot was a pretty scary
riot.
People were killed.
The protestant whites sought to push the Irish
out of Newark.
When you tell a 3rd or 4th generation Irish
guy and maybe a woman that to be Irish in
the middle of the 19th Century was hardly
to be accorded whiteness as that transformation
would be possible, say, in the 2nd decade
of the 20th Century.
Since we're talking about
the sesquicentennial so much, what I find
fascinating in the sesquicentennial, in the
northern states the Irish were the largest
ethnic group to fight to save the union.
Here in D.C. at Lincoln's cottage, which was
not really Lincoln's cottage back in the day,
mean, Lincoln was protected by a group of
Irish union soldiers from
Pennsylvania.
He befriended these guys.
I believe that as a result of the Irish sacrifice
in that war, after the Civil War, that's when
the Irish make their great, in many ways,
heroic climb into American society as cops,
as firemen, as politicians, as Americans.
Every group is not able to replicate that
because of our fascination with pigment, and
also the long trepidations associated with
enslavement, but the study of how certain
groups can reinvent themselves as whites and
other groups cannot I find very fascinating.
MR.
SUAREZ: This will have to be our last question,
ma'am.
DIANA BAIRD N’DIAYE: Thank you.
Diana Baird N'Diaye from the Center for Folklife
and Cultural Heritage.
I actually worked at the American Museum of
Natural History when I started my career,
but my real heart was with community-based
museums.
I was so glad that the last questioner
mentioned that.
What my question has to do with is how we
create networks of community-based museums
that interact with the larger museums, and
bridge some of the possible
essentialism of museums.
Many people have dual heritages.
We interact and it's such a complex society
both culturally and socially.
How do you see bridging the heritage and culturally-specific
museums on a community level?
I know some of this is being done already,
but I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.
MR.
THOMAS: I didn't talk about the
outreach part of the National Museum of the
American Indian.
I haven't been on the board for several years,
and can't speak to it today but I do know
that you raise a great point about the relationship,
in this case, between the new National Museum
of the American Indian here on the doorstep
of congress and Indian country.
Why should native people
trust the federal government any more now
than they have all along?
How is it that this museum can speak for tribal
groups?
It's not just North America.
It's Central and South
America.
To his credit, I think, Rick West saw this
right away.
Initially this museum had to be sold to Indian
people.
How is that done?
There is a three-year consultation process
of going out into the community, talking to
people, and listening?
What should his museum look like?
In California I know you got the message it
should tell the
story that all Indians don't live in teepee's
now, which is one issue, and most of them
never did.
What do you want out of your National Museum
of the American Indian?
Then further than that, because 30% of the
collection came from outside this country
in Central and Southern America.
There has been, to me, unbelievable outreach.
Now that it's
facilitated with web features, the amount
of involvement where artifacts can go out
into Indian country without ever leaving.
There's a huge internship program here where
native
people come and learn the craft of museums,
learn to build exhibits, learn how to tell
their stories, how to conserve the artifacts.
My experience has been there's an extraordinary
outreach that's going here.
Already we're seeing alumni from this institution
changing the smaller tribal museums certainly
across the country.
MR.
SUAREZ: Richard Kurin, does the Smithsonian
outpost in San Antonio offer any lessons about
how to create a relationship, how to build
a hybrid museum?
It's become a real anchor for the revitalization
of what had been a cultural strip for Mexican-Americans
in San Antonio.
Now it has all kinds of wonderful spinoffs
going on.
MR.
KURIN: Yeah, and the Alameda is one of now
170 affiliate museums of the Smithsonian across
the country.
Actually this afternoon we'll hear from several
members of those
affiliate museums as a way of indeed connecting
the Smithsonian to various communities, a
larger nation, and quite frankly also getting
out of Washington.
It's not all knowledge and inspiration as
in Washington.
I think that reflects what this museum realized,
which is many native peoples were actually
west of the Mississippi.
This museum had to talk
to folks, so how do you do that?
There was a notion here of the fourth museum,
of the museum that was dispersed in Indian
country.
Dillon Ripley tried a great experiment in
the late 60s in developing the Anacostia Museum
at that time, which was across the river in
Anacostia.
People thought that Dillon Ripley was crazy.
Why would
you put a museum across there?
We'll probably hear from Camille Akeju here
later in the afternoon.
The idea of centering a museum in neighborhoods
and in
communities is not a bad strategy if you're
not only trying to push stuff out and reach
people, but also take ideas in.
I think that’s what the affiliates program,
I think that's what a number of art programs,
Lonnie Bunch these days, and Camille, and
Rex, and their colleagues at the African American
museum had been holding sessions in different
cities
across the United States.
Not only in terms of generating collections
for the Smithsonian, but generating collections
and ideas for local museums, for state and
regional museums, so that a lot more people
can participate in the museuming [phonetic].
There's a confession.
I frankly thought, as an anthropologist, I
have that lineage
too, I thought museums might fade away in
a post-Colonial era.
Maybe they were a thing of a different age,
but they're not.
They're here to stay, and they're very vibrant.
Now
there's 50,000 museums across the world.
17,000 museums in the United States.
Museums aren't going away.
They're a way, indeed, of gathering up people's
ideas and feelings, putting them in a place,
and giving them value.
It's kind of amazing - - . If we're going
to be part of that movement, of that museum,
and that museum of the 21st Century, how do
we
do it?
Joseph Henry had a lot of things he said I
didn't quite agree with.
[Laughter]
MR.
KURIN: Probably many of you wouldn't agree
with too, but one of the things Henry--
MR.
SUAREZ: You've got to forgive him though.
He's like 216 years old.
[Laughter]
MR.
KURIN: I know.
One of the things he did do which was so interesting,
he took that idea.
Thomas Jefferson had the original idea of
the weather buddies.
People
across the United States participating in
the effort to understand and rationalize the
weather, he didn't have the technology to
do it.
Henry, with the telegraph did.
He sent thermometers and barometers across
the country.
Every day people would telegraph in their
readings of the weather to the Smithsonian.
That's what led to the
weather map.
It's kind of a great example of citizen science.
I think we're at the moment in this time in
our museum, culture, and technology where
indeed we can do massive waves of citizen-citizenship,
citizen - - , citizen-democracy.
That is, really use the tools of technology
so it can be inclusive and very broad and
widespread across the country.
Using
the tools of the museum, using the value of
the museum with the tools of new technology
to tell a much more inclusive story that resonates
across this country and around the world.
MR.
SUAREZ: Please thank our panelists.
[Applause]
MR.
SUAREZ: I'm going to level with you.
I did a bad thing that moderators should not
do.
I lost control of the clock, but the conversation
was interesting, so I let it run 10 minutes
over.
That means you really have to promise me
that you're going to be back in your seats
and ready to get back to work at 1:30.
The best cafeteria of all the Smithsonian's,
I can say that because I don’t work for
you guys, is in this building.
So please enjoy your lunch, enjoy your break,
be back here ready to go at 1:30.
