02 Erik Holland Curator of Education

And I knew that these stories were important and they were still alive and there are people that are impassioned by them connected to them and the land was still part of their memory and that was important but I didn’t know how to make a living in North Dakota as an interpreter because the National Park Service could hire me for the summer then there’s no job in the winter unless there’s a school group and then they’d hire me for a week and I’d go off of unemployment and work for a week and get paid and then go back on unemployment until the spring when I come back and work as so got married in some of that interim time and my wife and I decided that after 15 years if the world didn’t change in a year I needed to leave North Dakota I was trained in North Dakota as an archaeologist grew up in Grand Forks North Dakota boy lived on the Prairie but we needed to leave if economics didn’t change and they didn’t my dad is a college professor for 35 years teaching geology and when I got my bachelor’s degree in 1974 he gave me as a graduation present a master’s if or when I wanted it so I had a family scholarship that 16 years later I called dad and said hey is that graduation present still available and mom and dad scratched it together and said yeah where are you going and what do you want to do and so I went to the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee in museum education and public history which is the doing of history not the study and academics of history because I knew what I did interpreting at the sites in North Dakota worked but I didn’t know why and didn’t understand the theory behind and didn’t understand how education works of how people’s minds work and how do you process a question in a way so that it stays in their head and makes them continue to think about that question and how do you layer on perspectives information and I needed to study that so I went to it made the guy who is a major professor there and said this is what I want to do for the next two years I’m an older than average I’ve got it funded will you be my advisor so got a master’s in public history at University of wisconsin-milwaukee so now it’s 1993 and I’m unemployed again with a master’s degree and living in Milwaukee and a position at the Jamestown Settlement in Virginia Tidewater Virginia opened run by the Secretary of Education for the state of Virginia as an educational space that talks about the interaction between the Powhatan people pocahontas people and John Smith the first permanent English settlement here we are again at European contact and native corn growers living what an ideal possible position I get on a train from Milwaukee with my wife and we ride the train because I needed to know what the world looked like between where I was leaving and where I might go went in and sat down to interview and what they wanted me to do was be in buckskin in costume and that’s what they called it to talk about the power tends to all of the visitors this wouldn’t work sitting across the table and the interview was the daughter of the tribal chair of the poet ins of today Shirley McGowan and she said to the director of the agency I think he could tell our story and that’s what we need him to do I was hired on the spot and I worked there for five years as an interpretive supervisor in the Powhatan village I had 11 people working under me a full-scale not first person we weren’t acting as though we were Powhatan we were using our costumes and yes they wear costumes not regalia as tools to engage with visitors so I’ve got a piece of deer bone in my hand and this piece of sandstone in my hand and I’m standing there in leather and I’m rubbing one on the other when four hundred and fifty thousand visitors a year walk into my village and I say when Gobbo which is hello and Howard enter Algonquin and they sort of look at you like what but I initiate the engagement now their defenses are down they’re ready to come in to me and say what are you doing and I’m sitting here with this piece of bone and stone in my hand and say building a house what well let’s go over and look at this house see it’s made out of bark and see these stitches how do you suppose a needle like this threaded with a piece of reed could be pushed through that bark to build this house or do that needle come from you want to look at it and all of a sudden they’ve got the object in their hand and they’re investigating house building in a Powhatan village the Powhatan lived here for and I had you know we had specific things that we needed to relate to every visitor there were five the big five points they had to have before they left our village how gunky and people were Powhatan czar Algonquin speak you know if I can do this it’s twelve thirty years ago now but you know algonquian-speaking agriculturally based semi agricultural so they moved at times during seasonal rounds and so that was an important part of my life and the real experience there is an interpretive supervisor was to have people working for me that could effectively ask questions of the audience the Secretary of Education for the state of Virginia had done huge amounts of visitor studies with the University of Virginia to find out how things work and what visitors see as effective and if a visitor said that they had an excellent experience at the Jamestown Settlement 96% of them had four things happened to them one they were interacted with by an interpreter before they interacted so greeted when gobble - they had an object placed in their hands want to look at my needle three they had the opportunity to ask a question and four I asked a question of them if those four things happen there’s an excellent experience that happens I translate that to say there’s a learning opportunity there and it’s done so beginning of every day I would take my staff and say you asked this question you ask that question you ask that question you ask that question at the end of the day we’d get back together and say how did it work and we refined the questions to a skill set that was incredible I mean you want to talk about fire well let’s go look at this dugout canoe that’s being burned over here and this guy is burning it that’s how they carved wood they didn’t a steel tools and so you want to look at the tools well here’s a stone tool bottle you know so that’s the basis for why I’m here now but I did spend 12 years in Minnesota working at the State Historical Society and soda after leaving Virginia and what I did there was the inner interface between the big house and the 35 state historic sites so a site manager at a historic site wants to do a program and he doesn’t know how to do it or what kinds of objects that Minnesota Historical Society has or what kinds of information is backing it they would contact me I would go to the rest of the staff we would figure this out I would go out and train it to their staff and that’s what I did for 12 years so