 We're here to hear about our own CV Hearst Museum. So, fortunately, Ben Porter is a member of our, so he's happily part of our group, and he's, as you can also know, is the director of our Anthropology Museum here on campus. He's going to tell us- Am I standing in the way? One of many things have been going on there since he's become director, and he's going to tell us about connecting cultures there and building a 21st century Anthropology Museum. So, without further ado, thank you very much. Thank you, thank you. Hi everyone. I'm very honored to be your Valentine's Day speaker today. So, I hope I dressed appropriately. Yes, you know, we often say heart the Hearst, so there you go. Also, happy Lent to those who celebrate, says Ash Wednesday. Yes, have a happy Lent. Yes. Let's begin by acknowledging that we meet today on the ancestral lands of the Alona people. It's important to remember that. And today, I'm going to be speaking about the Hearst Museum's recent accomplishments and upcoming plans, and I've called a lot of notes and texts and different, you know, I give this talk, this talk and versions of this talk a lot, so I've sort of grabbed things from more popular talks and donor talks and scholarly talks and mashed it all together. So, hopefully it'll make sense, but we'll certainly, you'll learn a lot about what the Hearst Museum is doing over there across the plaza and hopefully have a little bit of fun along the way. So, I hope everything hangs together well. I also want to point out that what I'll be talking about today, you should know that it would not be possible without the museum's 18 staff members, 16 faculty curators, 19 board members and dozens and dozens of students who carry out the work of managing the collections every day. I'm very proud of my staff's commitment and indeed their passions for managing the museum's collections as well as making it available to the communities that we serve. So, although I am the director, as we know as a museum director, you quickly learn that your staff and your collections often direct to you. So, I've certainly learned a lot from my staff and I appreciate their hard work. I also want to acknowledge the former director, Mary Lynn Salvador, who passed away on October 23rd of last year. Her accomplishments were over the, her five years of leadership were quite dramatic including this major collections move, the design, the blueprints for the new gallery, the establishment of the Native American Advisory Council. I'll be talking about these things later on but I just want to say from the onset that when I became director and some people think I became the director in the summer of 2015 after Mary Lynn retired, I certainly had these projects to run forward with and only now are we starting to see the real fruit of the groundwork that she laid. So, please keep her in your thoughts. So, the thing I enjoy most about my job as director is that it gives me the opportunity to think about the current state of anthropology museums as well as the future of this genre of the anthropology museum. So, a guiding question for me is what should a 21st century anthropology museum be? And what should it do? As many of you know, the very idea of the museum was to create a space where the world's objects and the knowledge they contain could be preserved and displayed as art or science or antiquity. And the American anthropology museum was designed to be a place where the diversity of humanity could be displayed and in some unfortunate cases and many unfortunate cases, races and societies could be measured and ranked against each other. The collections that were made in the late 19th and throughout the 20th century has produced a vast archeological and ethnological record of human societies. And of course, it's not a record lacking in empirical, ethical and legal issues. Nevertheless, today's museums find themselves caring for a breathtaking amount of cultural materials. Upon stepping back, we are left with the question of how to manage, interpret, and display these materials in ways that are intellectually rigorous on one hand, while acknowledging museums' imperial and colonial engagements with indigenous societies, on the other hand. The thoughts I offer you today should be taken as my admittedly half-formed answer of how we are doing this at the Phoebe Hearst. So let's begin by talking about the and reflecting on the Hearst Museum's origins in the late 19th century. And that story begins with Phoebe Apperson Hearst, the museum's patron, founding patron. Phoebe Hearst was a young Missouri school teacher when she married the much older George Hearst of fellow Missourian who had done very well in California's mining industry. George and Phoebe later took up residency in Washington, D.C. in the late 1890s when George served as U.S. Senator for California between 1887 and 1891. And it was in Washington that Phoebe discovered the nascent field of American anthropology thanks to her early advocates, such as Frans Boaz, thanks to early advocates of the field like Frans Boaz, Harvard's Frederick Ward Putnam and Penn's William Pepper, among many others. Having already traveled extensively in Europe in the Middle East with her son, who was young at the time, William Randolph Hearst, Mrs. Hearst was taken by the idea that an entire academic discipline could be dedicated to studying human societies, especially ancient and non-European societies. Mrs. Hearst went on to become one of Anthropology's founding patrons, discipline-wide. She sponsored researchers, as you know, like the Andeanist Max Uli and the Egyptologist George Reisner who built systematic collections from, and over all of these archeologists like Uli and Reisner built collections from Peru and Egypt and Greece and Italy, the United States, Mexico and beyond. Now while critics may wish to classify Phoebe Hearst as just another American Victorian who collected antiquities, we know from her archive, and this is something that my colleague, Dr. Ira Jackness makes clear repeatedly, that she was deeply interested in documenting the research process in ways that recorded objects' contexts, both physical context and cultural context. So Phoebe Hearst returns in 1891 after George's passing and for the next three decades, she championed a whole range of what we would call today social justice causes from early childhood education to public higher education like this campus, from women's suffrage to reducing poverty. Mrs. Hearst also invested in her passion for anthropology, believing the people of California deserved a place of learning and discovery equal to those East Coast institutions she'd seen such as the American Museum of Natural History, Harvard's Peabody Museum, and the Penn Museum of Anthropology and Archeology. So she called on Frederick Ward Putnam to help her establish a museum and a department of anthropology at the University of California. The museum opened in 1901 in San Francisco at what is today UCSS Mount Parnassus campus, and the gallery showcased a sample of Phoebe's collection. She had committed about 250,000 objects from ancient Peru, Egypt, the classical Mediterranean in North America. Now Hearst and Putnam would go on to hire the young Alfred Krober who used the museum and the department to build his vision of a holistic, yet diverse field of anthropology. And in 1991, there's a lot that happened, of course, between Krober and 1991, but we don't have time to go into that. The museum changed its name for a third time from the Robert Lowy Museum to the Phoebe Hearst Museum to honor Phoebe as our founder and her many contributions to the museum and to the Berkeley campus and of course to the state of California. So after telling this story, which you should know as we're all citizens of Berkeley, we should all know the story of Phoebe Hearst and the Hearst family's contributions to campus, I often wonder if Phoebe Hearst and Alfred Krober would recognize the Hearst Museum today. In fact, I bet they would hardly recognize the discipline of anthropology. And I think that's a good thing. Now, much like anthropology shifts towards public interest approaches, so too are university anthropology museums changing, albeit at admittedly slower paces. Some museums have broadened the scope of their mandate to bridge the gap between contemporary art museums and natural history museums, two paradigms that are quite interesting and productive paradigms, but at times can be difficult bedfellows for anthropological collections. Now, these changes may make sense for museums with particular collections or that sit within specific museum ecosystems, such as here at Berkeley where we have the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and we also have the Berkeley Natural History Museums. Of course, you have the Hearst Museum, the Botanical Garden, our Berkeley ecosystem really makes sense to have this anthropology museum. The question I'm gonna be asking in a little while is to what degree does that make sense for the Bay Area? So after much discussion and soul searching, the Hearst has decided that it's not yet ready to abandon the anthropology museum paradigm despite its complicated and unfortunate legacy that we all know too well. Rather, my staff and I believe that anthropology museums can find inspiration in the myriad ways that contemporary anthropologists draw on their disciplinary toolkits to understand humanity's greatest problems. The museum's mission is to steward a vast collection of objects spanning the infinite breadth of human cultures for the advancement of knowledge and understanding. And our vision is to promote the tools of humanists and social scientists for the common good, encouraging people to reflect on alternative perspectives, connect with others and take action for positive change. Values we care about include humanity and stewardship, collaboration, discovery, and risk taking. Over 117 years, the Hearst has grown into a museum that studies the past and the present in order to encourage dialogue, understanding, and respect. We facilitate connections by helping people relate to objects, cultures, and to one another. So the Hearst accomplishes this mission by making the museum's vast 3.8 million object collection accessible to as many stakeholders as time, funding, reason, and cultural sensitivities permit. The collection now spans two million years of human history and all six inhabited continents, making it among the largest collection in North America and certainly the largest one held by a public university. The museum's collections are known for its strengths in Western North America, especially California, but other well-regarded collections include a global textile collection, a West African art collection, and well-documented archeological sites from Africa, the Mediterranean, South America, and the Pacific. And the museum's collections continue to grow. Museum's accessions, the museum accessions new collections that meet the rigorous legal, ethical, and scientific criteria set out in its policies. Among other new collections that have been accessioned here is the West African Sinofo collection from Cal alumnus and major donor Bob Haas, who collected these materials in 1964 when he was a Peace Corps volunteer in the Ivory Coast. This is a fire spitter mask. It's just one of about 25 objects that he donated to the museum last year. You can see up here in the corner how the fire spitter mask is performed. So this is just one of several objects that he donated. Another collection that recently arrived is the materials that were removed from the Emeryville shell mound in 1999 in the run-up to the construction of the Bay Area shopping area. So you all know the Bay Area shopping area and the story of the Emeryville shell mounds. So the museum cares for this large collection and I'd be happy to talk about more more accessions that have come in the door recently. To be careful, this large collection in two facilities, one brand new climate controlled 37,500 square foot off-campus facility that contains about 60% of the collections. The remaining collections are safely kept in upgraded facilities in Krober Hall and both facilities have dedicated spaces for researchers, students, and descendant community consultations. Now the renovations have occurred over the in the past several years, have been sorely needed to preserve the collection. Take note that the museum no longer keeps collections in the Phoebe Hearst Gymnasium basement. So take note that the museum no longer keeps collections in the Phoebe Hearst Gymnasium basement. Yes, yes, well that's, that's separate. When I made that statement at the triple A's, I think Ira, you were there. There was like, you know, people came up to me afterwards and said, oh, that's a great, that's a great thing. So we lost a lot of space though. On the horizon is a plan to renovate the museum's remaining facilities in Krober Hall. The museum has partnered with the New York architectural firm, Sam Anderson Architects, which is known for its museum designs to develop the plan for a new conservation lab among other spaces. That's a project that'll be kicking off in April. So the Hearst employs a modest staff of 18 people who manage and promote the collections. That's a very small staff relative to other museum collections around the country, especially collections that are smaller than ours. Nevertheless, we're hard workers and very passionate and committed. Many of the staff have advanced degrees in anthropology and or museum studies. 16 faculty curators assigned to collections from specific areas and time periods help manage the collections and promote its use in research, exhibition, and teaching. The museum also employs and trains about 30 Berkeley students each year through its work study and URAP programs. Faculty and their students use the museum's collections and their teaching nearly every day. Stanley Brandeis is there this week looking at our Malinowski collection for his history of anthropology class, for example. He's come in all week in IRAs giving lectures to the class. So the collections are being used almost every day by classes. And then researchers from around the world visit the museum to conduct their work on the collections. Descendant communities often visit the museum to conduct research, as well as carry out NAGPRA consultations. So the Hearst therefore hosts a wide variety of stakeholders that are typical of university-based anthropology museums. So one might think that with a vast collection at a major research university, more people would be aware of the Hearst Museum, right? But in my time as director, I have learned that this is hardly the case. And in part, this has to do with our modest exhibition space. Over the past two decades, as many of you know, the dream of building a downtown facility has never made it past the planning phases. And with the campus' austerity measures predicted to last until at least 2020, I do not foresee an opportunity for such a project in the near future. But let's not let this reality dissuade us from the core aspect of our mission to promote the tools of humanists and social scientists through our collections. So as we wait for this more ambitious horizon, my staff and I are focused on strengthening the museum's core so that we can be ready to scale up, if you will, when the opportunity presents itself. And one way we're doing this is promoting the museum while increasing the collection's discoverability by enhancing our virtual offerings. We are developing a new website. This website is now live, but we're continuing to develop it as a place where visitors can take these virtual deep dives into the collections. The website launched in November. Do check it out. We're still adding content that describes the different collections and supporting documentation, but a lot of it is now up for viewing. The museum has also built a publicly searchable portal that visitors can browse to discover the collections, study the metadata, and view images when culturally appropriate. The portal has many important features such as a map viewer to show the object's provenience, but of course the viewer obfuscates the site's exact location to protect the place's location as well as accord with federal laws. Now, this landing page for the collections portal has existed now for a few years, but later this spring the museum will premiere, this is just a sneak peek of a new version of its portal that will have a more inviting look and feel and of course improved functionality. This is a project in collaboration with Research IT, specifically Chris Hoffman and his staff, who's already been doing a wonderful job of supporting the campuses, museums, and collections in this transition to the web-based, collections management web application that we use called Collection Space. But on the horizon, in our new portal will be a feature that will display 3D photogrammetry models of the collection that we are creating with a team of undergraduates, again in a collaboration with Research IT. And so we'll have a number of our models. Right now you can view these models, you'll soon be able to view these models in our virtual kiosk that's inside the gallery where we have objects like this. We worked all summer creating models of about 15 objects to get a sense of what a good protocol is for creating these models. And we're hoping that both in our website and in the collections portal, those same models will be viewable online. So you won't have to leave your desk. So, the museum is also promoting its collections, I have to get that water going, through its loans program to other museums. Unexhibit currently are objects at the Berkeley Art Museum, the California Historical Society, and the Smithsonian's new National Museum of African American History and Culture. In this last museum, a plaster cast of a bronze effet sculpture helps tell the story of the human cost of the transatlantic slave trade and the human cost of slavery. The museum's renowned collection of Egyptian mummy portraits is the focus of a current exhibit at the Block Museum at Northwestern University. And this exhibit is the outcome of our former conservator, our colleague and our former conservator, Jane Williams, who conducted this research with material scientists at Northwestern to determine the origins and composition of the paint pigments that were used to make the Egyptian mummy portraits. And currently the museum is in conversation with the Herd Museum of American Indian Art to loan a collection of Alaskan Yupik masks for an exhibit this coming fall. So we do a large number of loans and we receive a large number of loan requests, some of which we do turn down for a variety of reasons. This one's particularly special because of course this museum has just opened. Has anybody had a chance to visit the museum? I would highly recommend it. It's by chance possibly the most powerful museum and museum narrative I've encountered in decades. Very emotional experience for visitors as well. What was very interesting when I visited for during right before the triple A's, one of the curators gave me a tour and was able to show me where the Herd Museum's object was positioned in this very powerful place where the decision, the curator's decision to use this statue was to really give a human face to the story because there were not a lot of faces as people were learning more and more about it. So as you complete your journey through this particular gallery, you encounter this piece. And as an aside, as I was standing there and just hearing this information from people, people were probably a dozen people at a time would gather around this statue and look at it and they were very struck by it. And then when they heard that this had come from the Phoebe Hearst Museum, they first of all asked, where is that? And then they asked, who's Phoebe Hearst? And then unfortunately, and then they were so thankful, they were thanking me and asking me to give a mini lecture on West African sculpture, which I know nothing about. And but it went on, so I just kind of stood there for 45 minutes, what people just would, the curator would just introduce me to people. And so it was a real positive experience. And I think it's the first time for me when I realized just how, what a powerful role objects have in these narratives and how important it is for the Hearst Museum to be participating in those projects. So do get a chance to visit the museum. It does take a few months to get a ticket, however. So it should not go without saying that caring for and making accessible a collection of the size and complexity is costly. Museum does not have a robust endowment to support it. That is typical of our peers on the East Coast. Decades of depending on state funding did not require the museum to think about fundraising and revenue until the 1990s. And all that's changed now. To give you a sense of costs, the museum's annual budget is around $2.5 million. Two million of this is dedicated to staff and students, salaries and benefits. The remaining portion is for supplies and equipment and facilities upgrade, facilities care over there in Krober Hall. As we all know, the campus' austerity measures requires all departments and units to find ways to become more self-sustaining and the Hearst is not exempt from this mandate. So in response, the museum is focusing on various revenue opportunities, including collecting fees from repository requests, loans, media use and reproductions and collections access. I'll come back to this in a moment, but one thing we're also doing is partnering with the Institute for Field Research this summer to run a four-week museum studies summer program for students. So we have a few spots left. If any students are interested in joining, please check out the IFR website. You can hang out with us for four weeks. Now another way we are increasing revenue is through grant writing. Now we've had success over the years, over the decades I might say, winning federal grants, especially from the NEH, the NSF and the IMLS. We recently won a small grant to improve the storage of the museum's Mediterranean Metals Collection and we are waiting to hear the outcome of a much larger grant that will help inventory and re-house faunal and botanical collections from the California Archaeological Survey. That decision should be coming March 1 unless the federal government's budget is completely destroyed, then forget about it, yeah. So in the past two years we've also had some luck with fundraising from grants from different foundations like the Buck Foundation, the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Foundation, the Coret Foundation, and not least of course is the William Randolph Hearst Foundations. The museum has also re-energized its advisory board that consists of major donors, museum enthusiasts and campus decision makers. The board is charged with advising the director and staff and advancing and advocating for the museum's mission. The museum has also transitioned its former membership program into a donor program called the Phoebe Hearst Society, appear the Phoebe Hearst Society. Members of the society can gain access to events and activities such as the annual Phoebe Hearst Society lecture. We had Maureen Kersel give our first lecture in January talking about how she's working with and also studying looters in her archeological projects in Jordan. They also can receive behind the scenes collection tours and more. Next month, for instance, the society is hosting a small reception at Alfred Krober's house on Arch Street where Kent Lightfoot and Val Lopez will be speaking about the collaborative Alma Mutsa and UC Berkeley project. And in May, some members will travel with me to Taiwan to tour the island's museums and learn about aboriginal Formosa art and culture. So this business model, if I dare use the term, should sustain the museum through the next few years of campus austerity, but do not pretend to believe that the campus's contributions to the museums will ever increase in the coming years. So this is why I believe that to sustain the museum, we must seek ways to make an impact beyond our campus stakeholders. How can the museum make the collection for which it cares accessible to an array of communities, including Native American tribes and international descendant communities? One significant way, of course, the Hearst is serving as public stakeholders through exhibitions and programs. The museum recently completed a $2.2 million renovation on its modestly size, but state-of-the-art 5,500 square foot gallery. The gallery has a new entrance, a gallery classroom, upgraded HVAC in a comfortable lounge where visitors can reflect and students can study. The gallery also has this visualization kiosk I've been telling you about where objects and landscapes documented with photogrammetric techniques can be viewed in two and 3D formats. Now the gallery's renovation inspired the staff to rethink how exhibits and programs could advance the museum's public mission to connect cultures and promote the tools of anthropology. The Bay Area's museum ecosystem consists of so many quality exhibits that present encyclopedic reviews of works by specific artists or by specific time periods. In the past decades, the Hearst followed a similar pattern, drawing on its collections to tell compelling stories about specific times and places. However, in order to distinguish ourselves in this complex ecosystem, we decided to move in a direction that would allow exhibits and programs to explore key contemporary issues through the lenses of anthropology. The key question for us is, what new things can the Hearst Museum collection teach us about issues such as migration and sexuality, identity, power, addiction, and more? The Hearst first exhibit, which I hope you saw, in its renovated space took up issues surrounding the acts of making and material culture. It was called People Made These Things, connecting with the makers of our world and the exhibit challenged visitors to reflect on their relationships with the objects in their everyday worlds. Incorporating objects from the Hearst's collections along with thought-provoking pieces from community members, the exhibit asked, why do we sometimes know a lot, a little, or even nothing at all about makers? What are the cultural forces shaping our fascination with the biographies of makers from different times and places? So, obviously essays from collections like The Social Life of Things, which I'm sure all you graduate students have memorized by this point, what they haven't. Isn't that how we do things here at Berkeley? When I was a graduate student, we had to memorize that. But, yes, you can see how the questions of materiality and making the very complex, sophisticated, and interesting intellectual ideas were trying to be distilled here for public audiences. Now, our next exhibit is called Face to Face, looking at objects that look at you. And that will open March 10. And we'll focus on ways that faces and bodies are represented through material culture. Some of the key objects include our amazing collection of Taiwanese puppets and the sometimes controversial portraits of Carol and Meitinger. Now, the exhibit is curated, and I'm very proud of this, by Berkeley freshman from a Berkeley freshman seminar that were taught and mentored by Adam Nilsson, our head of interpretation and education at the museum. So, again, that'll open March 10. So, our ethos, our exhibition design ethos, if you will, is based on the philosophy of flipping the gallery. Flipping the gallery in ways, in this way, we seek to cede interpretive authority to stakeholders. Bay Area community members are called upon to select objects and sometimes compose meaningful responses that are exhibited in the gallery. Some community curators are invited back to speak in the evening and in weekend public programs. Opinions about our first exhibit, people made these things, have been rather polarized. We did a lot of testing, like exit interviews and testing and polling. It's one of Adam Nilsson's strengths as a museum professional. And I find this polarized opinion fascinating. Those visitors who crave exhibits rendered in an empathetic and accessible voice are thrilled with the approach. However, other museum visitors find the narratives distracting and unprofessional. So, for me, the fact that the exhibit has received such decisive opinions tells me that our approach is starting conversations about how exhibits should represent stakeholder communities, especially the communities that the Hearst serves. Now, the museum has also established or re-established its evening and weekend programming to highlight specific aspects of the current exhibit. The museum continues to offer a monthly lecture, usually on a Thursday evening, and it features a scholar or a community member with subject area expertise from an object that's currently exhibited. You can see here an exhibit of, this was a workshop that we did with a weaver named Bertina Lopez-Cumez, who is from Guatemala. And her huipos were on display for most of last year. And thanks to a gift from a major fan of Bertina, Bertina's quite the rock star here in the Bay Area when it comes to the global textile community. One of her fans passed away while our show was up. And through a generous gift, we were able to bring Bertina and her two daughters to Berkeley for a week. She gave a very well-attended Thursday evening talk about her method and how she feels about in her life, her life story. It was delivered entirely in Spanish. And so Adam, who's also fluent in Spanish, was able to translate it. But it was a very warm and vibrant event that led to many follow-on gifts directly to Bertina. In fact, a few members of the crowd were so inspired by what Bertina said that they later in the evening offered to fund Bertina's daughter's college education. So it was quite a night. Yeah, it was quite a night. And of course, I wasn't there. I was like on the East Coast. So I take no credit for it. This again is the sort of the work of the staff who are doing such a great job. Again, Bertina's work is so well-renowned. She was able also to sell some of her work the following day on Saturday to people who were visiting to learn how her weaving techniques, backstrap looming, weaving. And we do have a few of these for sale in the gallery too if you're interested. So we're also holding a Saturday family events about once a month that we call Hands On at the Hurst where people of all ages can engage with makers and performers. And here's another example of a Maker Mercado where we had, again, the spirit of our exhibit. We had a December Maker Mercado getting ready for the holidays where we had both performances as well as objects for sale. So it was this great opportunity for local makers to use our facilities to sell their products. And they kicked off the Mercado in this fashion. So it's quite a beautiful photograph. So these events, we only offer one or two a month, but they're extremely well attended by people throughout Berkeley. We would love to be doing these every weekend, but again, it's a staffing and bandwidth issue. It's a great way to get people to campus. Of course, we always do great things on Cal Day too. So the Hurst Division of Education is also in the process of reinventing its K through 12 student program. As many of you know, the museum, much like ARF, has had a K through 12 program for a long time. The Hurst Museum's program fell dormant due to the renovation projects. So we just completed a successful fundraising campaign to support the initiative. And right now we're in this curriculum development and testing phase that we hope to roll out in the fall. You can see here, in one instance, we partnered with Johns Hopkins who runs a program throughout the country to bring what they call, these aren't my words, what they call gifted students from a local region to a museum or a cultural center to take a one whole day complete dive into a subject. And so this particular program was dedicated to learning about California Native Americans and California archeology. And so we had great participation from students and staff that day. We hope to be continuing to work with Hopkins in the future. So my dream, if you will, for the museum's education program would be to have a dedicated car or vehicle, I call it the Hurst Mobile, that would move staff and our teaching kits to the Bay Area schools and beyond. One of the most difficult things for especially public schools here in the Bay Area to afford is the transportation to get to the destination, to get to the museum, if it's the Oakland Museum or BAM PFA or us, that's quite an expense. And so if we can actually get out on the road and go to them, we can lower that barrier of accessibility. And that's going to take some fundraising or going down to the Subaru dealer and asking for a donated car. So it worked for the Penn Museum we just found out. They got two Subaru cars. So we're gonna find out who they're talking to. So we'll get three. We'll get three. They're Toyota, they're advertising. Well, I was gonna go to Tesla, but if you wanna go to Toyota, that's cool. Yeah, I mean, doesn't that make sense that? Doesn't it? Yeah, okay. I'm glad we made that decision today. You would be the driver? Yes, okay. So while we're increasing the museum's accessibility and refining these public facing programs, the museum is not ignoring the legacy of European settler colonialism in California. And nor does the museum ignore its past participation in the practice of collecting Native American human remains and material culture. The museum and the campus is fully compliant with the Native American's Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NEGPRA, a two-member cultural policy and repatriation division manages claims, requests for information and tribal visits from both federally recognized and non-fedrally recognized groups. Tribes visit frequently to consult with staff about the collections. And these visits are conducted in a respectful manner. Tribes have opportunities to carry out rituals, such as blessings and smudging during their visit in the museum's commemorative garden beyond Kilbur Hall. I'm glad to report that the division is a very difficult, challenging job. They recently won a Berkeley Chancellor Staff Award for their efforts. Native American communities also visit the Hearst to further their own research interests. The museum's collection of 8,000 baskets from California and Nevada continued to be a resource for basket makers. The museum's early 20th century wax cylinder sound recordings of Native American speakers are key documents for those groups who want to revitalize their languages or are training a new generation of speakers. And I hope we all know that those wax cylinders are currently being digitized in a joint project between the Berkeley labs, the linguistics department, Hearst Museum, and I think the bank, is the bankrupt involved, Ira? The library is involved so that those very fragile wax cylinders can be easily remediated into digital formats and made more accessible to tribes and speakers. So that project is halfway through. We should finish in 2020, Ira. Kind of, see what I mean? That's the actual digitization. Yeah, right, good. And we also received a grant from the William Randolph Hearst Foundations to digitize the American Indian Film Project, which is a documentary film project that was conducted by Sam Barrett between 1960 and 1965, shortly before his death. So we'll have sound as well as video materials. And digital versions of all of this material will be made available to groups who appeared in these recordings and they will be consulted about access issues. These sound and moving picture recordings are frequently requested by tribes during the annual Breath of Life Conference that brings Native Americans to the Berkeley campus to study and experience the language resources at the Hearst, at the Bancroft, and the California Language Archive that's in the Linguistics Department. Another way the museum engages the Native American community is through its Native American Advisory Council. The council was an initiative of former director, Marilyn Salvador, as a way to create and sustain relationships across California and Nevada. The 11-member council consists of tribal members from federally and non-fedrally recognized tribes. Members are from a variety of backgrounds, including tribal historic preservation officers, crafts persons, museum professionals, and environmental activists. We meet four times per year and at least once in person on campus. We're aiming to do two campus visits this year. They come from all over the state, so imagine getting 11 people plus in one room for a non-campus visit, it can be challenging. The council advises the museum on a wide range of activities from collections care to exhibits and public programs. They're also an excellent sounding board to explore issues surrounding cultural sensitivities, collections care, and access. The Hearst has also joined in the vibrant conversation concerning the preservation of the West Berkeley Alone Shell Mound that's now at risk due to commercial developments in the high-end shopping zone and 4th Street, right? Bay Area Shell Mounds were documented throughout San Francisco Bay and many saw systematic excavations before their destruction throughout the 20th century. Berkeley archaeologists and their students conducted some of these projects and the Hearst Museum now cares for what was removed from sites in Berkeley, Richmond, Emeryville, and elsewhere. In order to disseminate accurate information about the Shell Mounds, as well as to raise public awareness about the implications of the development project, the museum is partnered with Malcolm Margolin, who is a writer, publisher, and advocate. He's the author of a classic volume called The Alone Way, Indian Life in the San Francisco Monterey Bay Area. A generous grant from the Chancellor's Community Partnership Fund is making this work possible. Activities include a public program at the Berkeley Art Museum on April 7th and community visits where Alone tribal members and other tribal groups can review the Shell Mound materials and interact with them as they see fit. The museum is also assisting Malcolm with a new book he's writing. It's a kind of follow-up to The Alone Way, which was written in 1978, I believe. Malcolm's new book will explore the Bay Area Shell Mounds in a well-illustrated book in an accessible voice. Now I want to thank Kent Lightfoot and Christopher Lohman and Gabriel Sanchez who are working on this project with us, as well as many others. So anthropology still matters at the Phoebe Hearst Museum. It matters because my staff and I believe that an anthropology museum can offer rich and meaningful ways for cultures to connect with each other. Anthropology museums can convey the ideas and tools of anthropology to interested public audiences of all ages. They can also be places for dialogue, healing, and remembering past traumas and historical injustices. As the museum looks back over its complicated past, we remain inspired by our founder Phoebe Hearst who we would like to believe would support our commitments to discovery and accessibility. So thank you for listening. I'm happy to hear questions. I didn't think I would take this long. I'm very sorry. Questions? Or comments? Or feedback? Yes, Christine. Can you say a little bit corner? Sure. Because it's sort of the most overly interactive in the museum and it's not always things. Sometimes it's just images. It's often landscapes and we'll soon have objects. So this is a technology that was developed in UC San Diego and it's part of a chancellor's grant. We received the funding through a chancellor, sorry, a president's grant that will put this technology on different UC campuses. And the virtual kiosk displays in both 2D and in 3D. And landscapes include, they're from Greece, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Wadikidron, Palestine, north of Jerusalem, and the UC San Diego campus. So we're hoping, because down at UC San Diego we're building this library of virtual materials that all the campuses can use. So as the four campuses develop new content, we'll be able to push that new content to the different kiosks. Just like when we're making these 3D models of our objects, we're putting them on that database and they can be used at Merced. So all of our Egyptian coffins, for example, that Rita Luccarelli has been scanning will be available to Egyptologists at UCLA, San Diego, and Merced. And we're in conversation to possibly build another kiosk over in the library. We're hoping that'll work out. So it's another Chris Hoffman project. In the main library. In the main library. Yes, Chris. I'd love to hear a little more about it starting this year. Yes, it's a four-week program. Students will earn six credits if they're interested, not through UC Berkeley, but through another university called Connecticut College. And my staff will be supporting these students as they come in. In the mornings, they'll be working on research modules, like developing a new fundraising campaign or developing a new exhibit or performing an inventory on a particular collection. In the afternoons, there will be lectures from people like Ira, me, and then maybe a few curators we'll pitch in to. And then on Fridays, we'll go out and visit other museums. We'll go to the Fine Arts Museums. We'll go to the Oakland Museum, BAMP-PFA. So it'll be fun. It's throughout the month of July. So we'll only have 15 students. We'll be very small. And we're hoping some Berkeley students will, even though this is not a Berkeley program, will participate in the program. It'll make it easy for us to hire them as work-studies students or URAP afterwards. So doing the program might lead to some employment opportunities afterwards. Yes. Other questions? Well, thank you for listening. I appreciate it. You're always welcome. Thank you.