Today we’d like to introduce you to Elise Park.
Hi Elise, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
After graduating high school, I served as an AmeriCorps and attended four different colleges before I was sure of what I wanted to study. Inspired by Obama’s election, I immersed myself in the world of politics and government at Western State (now Western Colorado University). I took summer classes to graduate faster, and one summer I took “The Sociology of Rock and Roll” and “History of Latin American Revolutions” at the same time. Those two classes combined were pivotal in my professional development. Raised by hippies, I had been infatuated with countercultures ever since I could remember, but this was the first time I realized it could be possible to incorporate those interests into an actual career.
After college, I worked for a youth-development nonprofit and paid the bills with a restaurant management job, but I didn’t feel like I was doing “enough”. So, I went back to school – this time attending Rutgers University for an emerging professional field: Peace and Conflict Studies. In grad school, I studied everything from misunderstandings between two coworkers to civil war and genocide. I learned a lot about modern Buddhist warfare and restorative justice efforts in post-apartheid South Africa. I gobbled up every assignment my professors gave me, even though I wasn’t really sure how I would apply it when I returned to the workforce.
I earned a fellowship with Rutgers Law School’s Center for Law, Inequality, and Metropolitan Equity studying the effects of state and national legal policies on individual neighborhoods. I was also selected for an internship studying the religious and cultural importance of Siberian tigers to Shamans in the Amur River region at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City (where the movie Night at the Museum is set). Before working there, I had always been the nerd that loved to visit museums everywhere I went, but I had never given a second’s thought to the idea of working in one. Only then, two semesters into my graduate studies and walking the back halls of one of the greatest institutions in the world did I actually have an intentional direction for my professional career that I was determined to succeed. Working at AMNH under Dr. Laurel Kendall gave me a crash course in museum operations, collections management, and exhibit curation. At the same time, my studies in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology gave me the skills for analyzing and interpreting complex issues.
After graduating, I helped to launch a small open-air museum in Crested Butte, Colorado and supported its sister museum in Vienna, Austria. For a few years, I still had to make ends meet with work in the service industry, but after a few years of de-facto-volunteering for museums or balancing two jobs, I became the Operations Director for the Jackson Hole Children’s Museum and in 2022 I became the first Museum Director for the Moab Museum of Film and Western Heritage.
This position allows me to combine my passion for museums and countercultures with my training in conflict analysis. The concepts we tackle in this museum’s collection are complex-real and fictitious Cowboys and Indians, economic development in rural communities, the American West as part of our national mythos, BIPOC representation on the silver screen… the list of hard topics go on and on. I feel fortunate to be trusted to tell these complex stories, and I am grateful for the long, winding road that led me to this role.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
I think anyone who has a smooth road probably had that road paved by privilege. To be honest, most of my struggles came from the fact that I couldn’t pay rent doing the work that I found to be the most meaningful to my community. I was forced to gain more skillsets in order to “earn” more competitive pay.
Beyond the pressures of income inequality, I have been guided by personal ethics and a desire for greater justice, and the people and cultures I have met along the way. In truth, I’m still on the road and I’m still not sure where this winding road will take me!
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
Whenever people hear that I studied “peace and conflict”, they often ask my opinion on what factors contributed to this conflict or that war or the latest political controversy. But those questions only cover half of the picture. One of the most important lessons I learned in my studies is that “peace” is not the same as “absence of conflict”. “Peace” is actually the result of cultural practices, intentional policies, equitable systems, etc., designed to facilitate healthy interactions. This is a relatively new question in the academic world, something that we’ve only studied for a few decades. We’re just starting to build our collective understanding of how we design peaceful political and cultural systems.
At Rutgers I studied under Dr. Brian Ferguson, who started in the field with his analysis of the importance of potlatches in the Pacific Northwest – the tradition of sharing one’s harvest/hunt/bounty with neighbors – as a cultural practice that in effect reduced conflict over resources and encouraged peaceful relations. For my master’s thesis, I studied systems employed to “recover” from violent conflict once it’s already happened – the actions and gestures we take to mend our communities. More specifically, I studied the effectiveness of memorials/memorialization like the tribute to 9/11 in New York City. And the truth is, our current strategies for healing from conflict and hurt are messy and imperfect, but it’s important to remember that we’re just starting to understand these paths to recovery and that we can improve the ways we heal from conflict and build a society around peace-building processes.
My work at the Museum of Film and Western Heritage gives me the chance to practice the concepts of memory and memorialization with almost every object in our collection. Almost every film made here and every theme of Western Heritage tells a story of peace and conflict. Whether it’s a John Wayne movie that portrays Native Americans as “savages” and glorifies their extermination, or a chick-flick that challenges gender norms, or a sci-fi epic commenting on finite resource use, there are examples of things that encourage conflict or peaceful relations. Telling those stories in ways that enable our communities to reflect, remember, and (hopefully) learn from the past, is what makes me passionate about the role museums play in our society.
What has been the most important lesson you’ve learned along your journey?
Avoid gatekeeping. It is far more important to establish a platform that feels welcoming and encourages individuals to stand up and tell their own stories than to be the definitive voice on a subject. The best stories are told in the voices of the people who lived them.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.moabmfwh.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/moabmfwh/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MoabMFWH
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYIou_ui9gbITIg4nPIu9rg
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@moabmfwh
Image Credits
Moab Museum of Film, and Western Heritage
