Pretend working

I have a stock of photos of staff pretending to work. It's amazing how many requests we get for pics of us doing our daily tasks.

Here I am posing with a box I am particularly proud of.

I do not pretend work, in fact, I have been very busy the past few months. I know I don't write about work, but it's pretty much the only reason I am in Kodiak. It's surely not because of the weather! Working in a small museum is great, I get to do a lot. It also means I have a lot to do! Overall, it's all good. I manage the collections, yadda yadda, except, it's not just managing any ol'regular collection. First, what makes the Alutiiq Museum special is the fact that we are an archaeological repository, as our name implies. We do not own most of the collections, we are the steward. And we do a level of outreach and are involved in the Kodiak Is. communities, in fact the world, in ways that are not typical of most museums. I'll talk more about these things later. I have to start at the beginning....

I was originally hired to complete a two-year extremely comprehensive registration project: researching over 100 different plots of land to determine ownership, get legal paperwork from donors and lenders, complete loan agreements with native corporations, federal, state, municipal agencies, re-do a part of storage with adding more drawers (which of course meant I had to appropriately catalog, store and document those collections), enter coll. info into Past Perfect museum software, etc. In this process I also worked with our Dep. Dir. to complete NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) Notices of Inventory Completion for human remains and funerary objects in our care (there's still a few left to do).

After my two-year project was up, they some how decided they could tolerate me and I continued to work on the project, but also worked on the formation of the Kodiak Alutiiq Repatriation Commission. While not very functional, it definitely has helped raise awareness about repatriation. One village submitted a repatriation request earlier this year, and three groups are working together to submit a joint claim, so yeah, Alutiiq ancestors are actually going to be reburied this year!!! I have been working on NAGPRA for three years, and I don't really want to work in a graveyard, so respectfully reburying these people is quite satisfying.

I'll write more about my work later. There is stil way more to brag about - because we rock! (I intend to fully prove this point.)