Website for the UC Davis Department of Anthropology Museum

I developed the web presence for the UC Davis Department of Anthropology Museum while I was working there as a Museum Scientist. The current site map is very close to where I left it, and many of my photographs and writing are still featured. (As of September 2022, the copyright notice in the footer still states 2015-2017, where I left off.)

I undertook a large project to photograph the Clinton Hart Merriam basketry collection, staring as an intern during my undergraduate education. After graduation, I was encouraged to apply for a position opening at the museum. This post is not intended to chronicle or describe the entirety of my work at the Museum, and this project of creating a website was a minor part of the full job responsibilities. I am listing it here as a web project of mine that still has lasting impact.

Though the bulk of my work was in collections management, I am grateful for the opportunity to have worked in education and outreach during my time at the Department of Anthropology Museum and for being able to photograph the extensive basketry collection. Part of this project was to share images of baskets with tribes as part of record requests and to schedule in-person cultural visits. I think the most touching moment is when a woman was able to identify a basket made by her grandmother and show the basket to her grandson.

There are all sorts of difficult colonial aspects to working in museums, especially those that curate Indigenous collections in areas where settler-colonists and the state have enacted so much violence. I stand by my efforts to decolonize the museum by making records transparent and available and by working with the campus’s NAGPRA Program in facilitating consultation and repatriation. It was a fraught working environment within the University, however, full of departmental politics and big personalities in which I was its most junior member. The extent to which working for change within the system begets justice is not clear to me, nor my efficacy in achieving it.

I was eventually forced from this position by a very hostile work environment and threats to capsize my academic career, which I capsized anyway, still haunted by the colonial ghosts of the discipline. Here on my own page, where I don’t have to relive this history to potential employers, I still want to share this failed enterprise and the learning experience it was for me. Despite the way the job progressed, I loved the work and I believe I left the Museum a better place through my time there.