Field Trip #2 - Minnesota Historical Society

Our second field trip at the Minnesota Historical Society with Carolyn Ogden was extreemly interesting. I found it interesting that they concentrated on one thing at a time, rather than the whole collection like at the Bindery. But it was also strange since they are in charge of some much. They have preservation responsiblitity for not just the collection at the historical society but also the Hill House, Ramsey House, and Mill City Museum.This made the 4 labs seem very reasonable since they don't work on tons of projects at once. The 4 labs were also really interesting, especially the Flag lab. I found it really strange that in every other lab they constantly washed EVERYTHING, but in the Flag lab they didn't at all! That did make sense when Carolyn explained that half of the historical value of the flag was where it had been flown, so the dirt and blood, and other stuff that make the flag dirty would be important and add value to the flag. I also hadn't realized that soldiers took parts of the flag with them....it makes me wonder if that is still done today.

I was also impressed with the security of the Preservation center. I had not realized that there would be so much. I does make sense that they would need to protect a lot of what the ywrok on as I'm sure some of it is very valuable, especially the things that are rare, like what is in the Mille Lacs Indian Tribe collection. I found it somewhat shocking that to some tribes the use of gloves was actually disrespectful. However I can see how learning about the culture attached to objects is important. It reminded me of Star Trek (yeah I'm gonna bring it up) and the Prime Directive, not to cause damage to another culture or to affect them. That seemed to be what Carolyn was getting at. I was impressed with the amount of work she had done to show other people interested in preservation the differences between modern american culture and the historical culture of Native Americans.