Past, Present and Place: Getting to Know Your Local Natural and Cultural History

This past weekend I had the opportunity to visit one of my favorite museums, the High Desert Museum near Bend. As I stopped and read a plaque in the birds of prey exhibit about the founder of the museum, Donald M. Kerr, I had a moment of realization about the importance of natural history museums. The fact that they are important has never been lost on me, neither has their intrigue, wealth of knowledge, or fun. I was noticing new things in the museum on this day that I had not picked up on during my childhood visits; orange flagging tape and beer bottles by a display of buzzards with roadside carrion, a giant discarded shotgun shell incorporated in the giant plaster beaver lodge in the children’s play area, and then this plaque about Donald Kerr which I had been too young to notice before. The juxtaposition of modern human presence interacting with nature and the interaction between past and present jumped out at me. The plaque read, “Out of the belief that we can make well-informed decisions if we understand all the sides of an issue, he envisioned a new kind of museum that would show the close connection between people and their environment.” The connection between people and their environment. In this context, a visit to a museum becomes much more than something fun to see or a way to pass the afternoon. It gives us some real food for thought. How are we connected to our environment and how does it affect us? How do we affect it? Our surroundings are not static, they are ever changing and made up of the history, present, and future possibilities, as are we. In all these ways, a trip to a local museum can offer us a rich and vast education.

My love of natural history museums goes back to childhood and our trips to the Royal BC Museum in Victoria. I loved walking through the cedar plank longhouse in the first peoples exhibit, and the old town with a Chinese market that smelled of herbs and spices. Sometimes I walked back through over and over again just to keep the experience going and feel like I had really stepped back in time. Living in the same place until I went away to College, I really took for granted how large a role my knowledge of local history played in my sense of place. I grew up knowing what place names meant and stories behind them, like the name of a creek or a mountain. I knew the history behind the places I frequented. Home was made up of all these things.

It takes time to feel at home in a new place, and when you don’t have any history of your own there, learning about the local natural and cultural history is a great beginning. I started with hikes around the Masonic Pioneer Cemetery in my neighborhood when I first moved to Eugene. Many of the family plots have interpretive signs placed there with information about the first settlers in the area, from which I recognized street names and landmark names right away, and the plaques for identifying the native plants were extremely helpful as well. Little by little, I explored my neighborhood and began feeling more at home there. Then as I hiked, camped, visited museums, and read about the local history, the greater area became familiar and more of a home than a new, strange place.

Here I would like to share a handful of local favorites.