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Uncovering history:
Finding a future

By Sarah Chuby ’03

Rows and rows of small brown boxes are stacked from floor to ceiling.

Scanning the wall of boxes, Amanda Hagy, ’07, stands on a chair and plucks a rectangular package labeled “Tyra Archeology Collection” from the top shelf. She pulls out gray-colored pieces that vary in size. Gloves on, she handles each oddly shaped piece.

“These are from a Native American site in Northern Michigan. These are 1,500 years old,” she says. “A farmer found it on his land. There were human remains, shells, charcoal, ceramics, and pottery fragments. These are some of the pottery fragments.”

Holding up a larger pottery shard, she points to cracks in the piece. “This one was glued together in the 1970s,” she says. “Working in a museum, you learn the importance of Elmer’s Glue. A solution of water and Elmer’s fills the cracks and binds the pieces together, without harming them.”

Hagy says the Tyra collection is her favorite at the Museum of Cultural and Natural History. Her first task at the museum when she started in 2004 was to take inventory of the collection.

“I always liked museums, and when I found out CMU had one, I walked over, checked it out, and met with Lynn Fauver, the director at the time,” Hagy says. “Lynn introduced me to what I wanted to do the rest of my life.”

At the end of August, Hagy will attend graduate school for museum studies at The George Washington University in Washington D.C.

“I’ve been told that it is very difficult to get into,” she says, sitting at the table in Museum of Cultural and Natural History’s back room. “I believe my experience at this museum was a key factor in me being accepted.”

The Grand Rapids native says she visited Greenfield Village and the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum as a child, but she didn’t realize the effect they would have on her adult life.

“It was one of the things that I looked forward to for school field trips,” she says. “I would get so excited just walking into the doors. I didn’t know that as an adult, I’d still feel the same way. CMU helped me rediscover that feeling.”

History-making changes

Like many CMU friends and alumni, Hagy was stunned when she heard the museum was slated to close in 2005 because of $30 million in cuts at CMU from 2001-2005. She volunteered to help care for the collections.

Then, when it reopened in 2006, she accepted an invitation to run the museum with three other students, under the supervision of then Humanities and Social and Behavioral Sciences Dean E. Gary Shapiro until a new director could be hired to replace Fauver, who retired.

Museum funding, meanwhile, was secured by spreading funding between three CMU colleges instead of just the College of Communication and Fine Arts. With the Science and Technology and Humanities and Social and Behavioral Sciences colleges on board, two new directors – William Pretzer and Kirsten Nicholson – were hired.

Hagy still keeps in contact with Fauver and they enjoy lunches frequently, but she also sees the transition between directors as a good career experience.

“He is my mentor, my friend,” she says. “He’ll always be important to me. But I know museums change directors frequently, and now I can say that I have been through that.”

Pretzer says he and Nicholson plan to build on the foundation that Fauver set.

“Our predecessor did many wonderful things for this museum. We plan to continue that,” Pretzer says. “This museum really follows that dictum of William Butler Yates that, ‘Education is more like lighting a fire than filling a pail.’

“We are not trying to dump information into people, we are trying to inspire their love of learning, their curiosity, and their imagination. A museum can change the way that people learn – for students, faculty, and community members. That is my ambition.” •

A bidrd's-eye view

Exhibit: Fine Feathered Friends: Birds of the CMU Museum showcases the third largest collection of birds in Michigan. The new exhibit features the museum’s renowned mounted bird collection, from eagles to hummingbirds, turkeys to warblers, and everything in between. More than 400 mounted specimens, hundreds of bird skins, and dozens of eggs, represent over 125 species of birds.

When: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday until October 30.

Information: www.museum.cmich.edu