San Juan Historical Museum Analysis

At 10:30 am April 20th, 2018, 13 students trekked to the San Juan Historical Museum in Friday Harbor. The tour was to start at 11 o'clock sharp. However, even though the museum is a colonial/ settler type museum, all the students were tasked to look for Indigenous representation in the buildings, etc.
On the property there are still 4 original houses (the house, the carriage house, the dairy barn, and stone building), as well as other historical buildings that the owners bought to preserve (for example, a house that used to hold 2 adults and 9 children).
After the tour ended, the only representation of Indigenous peoples and culture that was shown was through a picture of a women from the Tlingit tribe that could easily be missed through the walk-through of the living room; in the 1970’s jail where the first posters seen depict a drawn mug shot of Kanaka Joe, half-Hawaiian Half-Native American, captioned with “THE KILLER” with the tale of his convictions; and some small comments from the presenter Kevin Loftus, who was kind enough to give us a tour, mentioned how Natives might have been the first to create fishnets and on the prairie fields the Natives used to grow camas which the settlers changed to grow

As Gloria Jean Frank mentioned about museums “ironically, for many people, this will be their only contact with First Nations cultures.”[1] As Kevin Loftus said one of his most popular requests of kids through field trips was to visit the jail. When these kids first walk through the jail they are going to see first and foremost on the table the Native man who is the murderer, which does not paint a good image for Indigenous people. And the point that Natives might have been the first or how their camas fields were eliminated for other crops already shows the erasing of their culture, achievements, and past. Native peoples were also important in catching canning of salmon and other native fish, which was also conveniently