The Wages of History: Emotional Labor on Public History's Front Lines

2. “Our Seat at the Table”: Interpreter Agency and Consent (1985–1996)

{ 55 } chapter 2 “Our Seat at the Table” Interpreter Agency and Consent (1985–1996) In 1980, Gavin saw an ad in one of the local Twin Cities newspapers advertising a job for a blacksmith at Historic Fort Snelling. College educated and in his early thirties, Gavin admittedly did not have experience blacksmithing, but he had read books on the subject with great interest. He applied for the position, got the job, and began his first season at the Fort in 1981. Thrust into a living history work culture that—given the antics of Company H—he described as “literally, a madhouse,” Gavin nonetheless relished this new job, which not only allowed him the opportunity to learn blacksmithing skills, but also gave him a chance to engage in meaningful public service, a charge which he took seriously: “We are serving those people who walk in by themselves , or with their families or their groups, and want to see a historic site that is preserved for them by public money.”1 Although he loved his job at the Fort, for many years working as a historic interpreter at Historic Fort Snelling did not guarantee full-time seasonal employment, nor did it offer job security. Every year for two decades, Gavin formally applied to the Minnesota Historical Society to be considered for work at the Fort from spring through fall. He did so, he noted in an interview in September 2002, always with a bit of fear that he might not be asked back: “[Until 2001, we] always had to get rehired, and had to apply to work at Fort Snelling every spring. At the discretion of the management we would either be, or not be hired. And it tended to work out that as a surprise every year, they would { 56 } chapter 2 dump somebody just to keep the rest of us in line, and sometimes they’d dump several people.” In his interview Gavin referred to the times when Fort management did not rehire several former employees at once as “periodic purgings.” Gavin himself may have benefited from one such periodic purging, as he and the “five or six others who were hired with [him]” were given a chance when several of the Fort’s regular “troopies” were not hired back for the 1981 season.2 In Gavin’s recollection, the “next big periodic purging” occurred after several Fort workers (some of whom had worked at the Fort for about a decade) were not rehired after having expressed concerns about state budget cuts that were trickling down to affect work hours available for interpreters at Minnesota historic sites around the state.3 In fact, they had expressed these concerns on Minnesota Public Radio, during a live call-in portion of an interview with a top Minnesota Historical Society administrator, and confronted the administrator on the radio (and, apparently, during the lunch break) about why historic sites were seeing cuts even as the MHS was embarking on plans for a new multimillion dollar building. As one interpreter who worked at the Fort at the time noted, “several troopies and troopettes called in to ask . . . why their hours had been reduced 25% while the society was spending so much money on a new building. [The administrator] was not amused.”4 The new building that was drawing the ire of some interpreters in the wake of cuts to historic sites, was a yet-to-be-constructed “large new facility called the History Center,” which would be located in the heart of St. Paul, a half-mile from Minnesota’s majestic capitol building .5 Intended to further the MHS mission of preserving and promulgating Minnesota history (a regional story told within the context of the developing nation-state),6 the building was slated to have space dedicated “to the storage, maintenance, exhibition, and study of collections ranging from canoes and thimbles to books, diaries, maps, and government records” as well as for “attractive and convenient public amenities, such as a restaurant and museum stores.”7 By 1986, the MHS’s vision for its History Center was poised to become real, after the legislature “approved a bonding bill appropriating $50 million to construct the center, $5 million of this amount contingent upon the Society matching the sum from nonstate sources” in the private sector.8 That same year the Upper Sioux Agency historic site (a MHS historic site near Granite { 57 } “our seat...