Step by Step, San Diego's Museum of Us Sheds its Colonial Past

by Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO – Old-style anthropological museums used to collect things that didn’t belong to them and refused to return these cultural resources to their rightful owners, Micah Parzen, CEO of the Museum of Us, recently told me during an interview.

Recently having celebrated his 13th anniversary as the executive director, the Balboa Park institution formerly known as the Museum of Man is making amends under his direction — especially as the museum builds back trust with the Indigenous Kumeyaay peoples.

Skeletal remains of Kumeyaay ancestors since have been returned, Parzen said. “We had held them for decades and refused to give them back” but now “essentially all the ancestors at this point” have been restored to the Kumeyaay.

“I’ve heard our Kumeyaay partners say ‘We have ceremonies for laying the dead to rest, but we don’t have anything for reburying people. It is unfathomable that someone would be dug up, taken for decades, and all of a sudden we’d get them back.’”

Parzen and his staff have “been in situations multiple times where we have witnessed Kumeyaay people in tears that their ancestors are coming back and how to make peace with that,” Parzen said. “So, we see that as a very private endeavor for them.”

In what the museum director describes as a process of decolonization, the museum is returning parts of its collections to the Kumeyaay and consulting with their experts on how best to display and interpret those items that they are willing to leave in the museum’s keeping.

In asking Kumeyaay representatives what they would change about the Museum of Us, Parzen said, “We got a lot of interesting answers. One was how the façade of the California Building (in which the museum is housed) honors the missionaries and conquistadors who raped and pillaged the Kumeyaay peoples and other Indigenous peoples and took their stuff. … They said, ‘If you want us to feel welcome and that we belong in your space, for us this is a site of great pain and suffering. and we hope that you could address that.’”

In response, the museum created online a virtual exhibit about the façade “that unpacks the history of harm that these nine colonizers, all men, eight Spanish and one English, who committed these atrocities and truth-tell about that,” Parzen said. He said the museum also is looking into what might be done physically to the façade, without any particular course of action yet proposed.

He said the Kumeyaay representatives also were unhappy with how they were portrayed in the museum’s exhibits. They said, “The exhibit is about us as an extinct people of the past. We are alive and well and resilient. Yes, we have challenges, and the government has treated us in all these horrible ways, and we’ve faced racism, but we’re still here, and those are the stories that we want to tell.”

In response, Parzen said, “we began a process of reimagining the existing Kumeyaay exhibit.”

The Kumeyaay told the museum staff that the cultural resources on exhibit at the museum “are not just things; these are living, breathing animate beings that have a life energy to them. It is not right that you acquired them in the way that you did.”

Parzen said the museum, in response, inaugurated a “colonial pathways policy,” which, he said, “to my knowledge is the first of any museum, certainly any mainstream museum.” The policy says that “anything that came into the museum’s possession by way of a colonial pathway, very broadly defined – privileging Indigenous evidence and knowledge over science evidence and knowledge – we will return it to that community. There is a law called NAGPRA (the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) that requires you to return remains and certain affiliated items, but it doesn’t cover the gamut. We are going above and beyond our legal duty, and we are going to return, if you would like them, these items back to you.”

Besides the Kumeyaay, “many other Indigenous communities” will benefit from the policy, Parzen said. “We have resources from 186 Indigenous communities around the world. There is a mechanism now for identifying the belongings that we are holding, reaching out and saying, ‘We would love to consult with you to see if you might like these back,’ engaging in that process of return, or taking other steps based on Indigenous preferences.”

Parzen said one alternative to returning the items is that “they might want us to continue to steward them but they want a different type of access, so it is not only academic researchers who are entitled to come in and study them, but somebody has to give back to their community to study those items, and there has to be approval from an authorized body of the Indigenous community to grant someone access.”

“We’ve also learned a lot from these consultations in terms of how these items should be taken care of from an Indigenous perspective,” Parzen said. “That has really helped us be better stewards and care for them in traditional ways that honor Indigenous knowledge systems.”

Not every museum is thrilled by the approach of the Museum of Us, Parzen acknowledged. “Many museums feel really threatened by this idea. ‘What happens if you give all the stuff back? What happens to the museum if there is nothing there?’ What we have found is that we have fewer items in our holdings, in our cultural resources, but the ones that we have are there with informed consent and we have better information and knowledge to properly care for them.”

Parzen was chosen by the museum’s board of directors for the executive director position even though he had never been a CEO before, nor had he ever worked in a museum. He did have a doctorate in medical and psychological anthropology and had done his extensive field research with the Navajo nation in Arizona and New Mexico. After becoming disillusioned with academia, he decided to go to law school, eventually working in San Diego for the long-established Luce, Forward, Hamilton & Scripps firm both for corporate and nonprofit accounts.

“It was nonprofit work that I was doing that was feeding my soul as opposed to the corporate work that taught me a lot and developed a lot of tools in my toolbox but was kind of eating away at my soul every time,” he said.

The Luce Forward firm had been providing the museum with a board member for many years, and initially Parzen came to the board’s attention as a possible new member. Instead, when the vacancy occurred, he asked to be considered for the job as the top staff member.

The decolonization effort did not come about immediately. Parzen said he knew that “we had to move the museum in a more relevant way if we were to be sustainable in the long term.” Collaborating and partnering with communities to tell their stories, rather than having scholars appropriating those stories and telling them sometimes in very stereotypical ways, became the mission and vision of the museum under Parzen’s direction.

“It gave us a springboard to talk about difficult topics and to create a space for discourse about issues that really matter to our community, whether it is race or immigration, or colonial harm, or whatever the case may be,” Parzen said. “As we kept going deeper and deeper into these spaces, it became evident that this was the path that we needed to address as an institution if we were going to make those kinds of changes from inside out to be really authentic.”

“I would say that I have had amazing partners along the way,” he added. “Often my Indigenous employees and other staff members of color have partnered with me and have helped me as sort of a privileged, educated, White male to understand how my privilege can be used in ways for harm, for evil, for good, or for healing.” Such partners as well as those from the Kumeyaay community and other communities helped Parzen embrace “the idea that you do as well as you can until you know better and then once you know better you do better.”

Parzen, whose grandfather was a sixth-generation rabbi, grew up in a Reform congregation. He said he was both attracted and repelled by aspects of Judaism. The idea of Jews as a “chosen people” repelled him, he said, because “I’ve always been a cultural relativist in the sense of not better or worse, just different, and that we all have a lot to learn from each other.” On the other hand, “being raised Jewish imprinted a set of core values in me, and I think ideas of welcoming the stranger and tikkun olam (repair of the world) are deeply embedded in how I see the world and who I am as a person and in many ways that is the work of the museum.”

“We are doing it from a different angle and a different way but we’re applying the same kind of concepts as we continue down our path, said Parzen.

As the museum went down that path, changes in its vocabulary were necessitated. Three years ago, the museum changed its name from the Museum of Man to the Museum of Us. The name change had been sought in the 1990s by the National Organization of Women, but they didn’t prevail at that time. However, the museum board in 2020 disagreed with its predecessors and endorsed the more inclusive name.

Also, the museum staff no longer speaks of “artifacts” to describe items on display, rather it refers to them as “cultural resources.”

“’Artifacts’ refers to scientific objects of study,” Parzen explained. “For Indigenous people, these are their belongings and cultural resources, which really privileges the people who made the items.”

Donald H. Harrison is editor emeritus of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via [email protected]. This article is republished from San Diego Jewish World which, along with The Moderate Voice, is a member of the San Diego Online News Association.