---
layout:          post
title:           "SEAS Below Decks 6 - Decolonizing the Museum"
date:            2022-10-25 11:00:00 -0400
episode_type:      ["special", "belowdecks"]
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title_prefix:	"SEAS"
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prev_episode_num:		['007']
prev_episode_title:		["Shore Leave"]
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next_episode:	['008']
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next_episode_title:		["A Rigged Game"]
episode_title:   'Below Decks 6 - Decolonizing the Museum'
episode_number:  '007.1'
summary:         "Below the decks of the <i>Netaonsom</i> we get a peek into what makes the ship sail: Welcome to Below Decks!<br/><br/>In this special behind the scenes series we'll be diving deep into the process of bringing <i>Trice Forgotten to life.</i> Today, enjoy a discussion between Series Creator, Nemo Martin and Senior Researcher at the Natural History Museum, Natalie Cooper."
content_flags:   ["Discussions of: human remains & death, animal remains & death, colonialism & racism", "SFX: distant creaking & waves"]
acast_url:       https://play.acast.com/s/trice-forgotten/below-decks-6-decolonizing-the-museum
formats:
official:        true
unfinished:      true
---

##### [SHOW THEME -- INTRO] 

#### ANNOUNCER

Rusty Quill Presents: Below Decks, a *Trice Forgotten* deep dive.

Episode 6: Decolonizing the Museum. 

#### NEMO

Hello and welcome to the sixth episode of Below Decks, where we dig into some of the research questions, stories, and generally tangential interesting things that went into making *Trice Forgotten.* I'm Nemo, my pronouns are they/them, and I'm the creator and lead writer of the series. This episode's coming out after episode seven of the podcast, "Shore Leave," where we've just seen a treasure hunt, love of all kinds, and some final goodbyes.

Today on Below Deck, we're going to be talking about decolonizing the museum, which in my head is a part two to the conversation we had with Jon Ablett in the previous episode. And to do so, I'm excited to be joined by Natalie Cooper. Could you introduce yourself with your pronouns and tell us a bit about what you do? 

#### DR. COOPER

Yeah. I'm Dr. Natalie Cooper, my pronouns are she/her, I'm a senior researcher at the Natural History Museum in London. And so my job's a bit different from Jon's. He was a curator, so he's in charge of the collections and keeping them safe and and using them. Whereas my job is more research-focused, so I'm in charge of using the collections and the data that we get from them to ask exciting questions in ecology, evolution, and conservation, and things like that. 

#### NEMO

Yeah, it's really cool. Before I worked at the museum, I didn't know, really, that there were different groups of people and to have different jobs and the distinction between curators and researchers, and that there's kind of an ecology of museum workers behind the scenes. 

#### DR. COOPER

_(laughs)_ Yes, there's a taxonomy of us in the same way as *we* are doing this taxonomy and sort of ordering of things, but only, weirdly, at the Natural History Museum in London. So most other museums around the world, curators will do both jobs combined. So we're quite lucky that we get to split them out. 

#### NEMO

That is really interesting. Is there a specific reason, do you know why in the Natural History Museum in London that it's so split?

#### DR. COOPER

_(laughing)_ It's probably just one of those things that was started in 1881 and everyone's too frightened to change it.

#### NEMO

Oh yeah. Woo. Which is a kind of good way into this conversation about decolonizing the museum. And for our listeners' sake, I feel like saying up front, like immediately before starting this recording call, I was bottling it and being like, "I don't know if I want to talk about this." Mostly because I was reading this really great article by Samaya Kasim called "The Museum Will Not Be Decolonized," where Samaya was basically arguing that institutions like the Natural History Museum are impossible to decolonize in how we understand decolonization.

#### DR. COOPER

I mean, we, we could have a really quick up episode which would literally just be "burn it all down." That's -- 

#### NEMO

-- the only -- 

#### DR. COOPER

-- solution. Yeah. We're, we're done. I think that's the conversation, over. 

#### NEMO

_(laughs)_ Yeah, exactly. So, so maybe, um, other than "burn it all down," which I guess is the standpoint that I'm slightly coming from right now, I feel like people should go and read that article. It's a very good article and they say it better than I could.

But Natalie, for you, what do you think we actually mean when we're talking about decolonizing museums, and is there a difference in that between natural history collections versus places like the British Museum? 

#### DR. COOPER

Yeah. So I think it's one of those weirdly emotional subjects for people at the moment, because people think about museums and think about their childhood and, and get very upset and, uh, sort of blaming the "woke wokerati" for coming in and stealing their childhoods and giving back their dinosaurs and things like that. But, you know, this is something that people have been talking about for a really long time.

So one of the things I think most British people have as part of their kind of the cultural understanding is this whole idea of the Parthenon Marbles, or the Elgin Marbles as they're often called, and thinking about sending those back to Greece and the fuss that that's caused. And I realized earlier that I must have known about this for a really long time because up until I was 14 and went to the British Museum for the first time, I thought they were actual marbles. Um, so like children's toys that somebody had stolen.

#### NEMO

It's so cute. I love that so much for you, and I wish that was true. 

#### DR. COOPER

It was so confusing to me and I was like, "oh, right, there's statues."

And actually, brilliantly, I went to Athens a few years ago and in their beautiful new museum where they've got the other marbles, there's actually a sign on the wall that says, "We don't have these. They were stolen by the British." Like, Yes, go. You just, like, straight in there -- _(laughs)_ don't sugarcoat.

So I think that's part of the problem, is people hear "decolonizing" and they start thinking about, you know, giving stuff back. But I think in a natural history museum's context, it's maybe even more complicated, cos of course they are colonial institutions, and perhaps more so than places like the British Museum in some ways. But actually, how we go about dealing with that is, I think, a little bit more complicated than this debate of "do we send it back or not."

#### NEMO

With the "do we send it back or not," I feel like there are different understandings of how you can -- whether you can't just send things back or how you send things back, or the idea that it would be easy/simple to/possible to. All of these questions about repatriation. Do you have thoughts about how that is different between natural history museums versus other collections? 

#### DR. COOPER

Yeah. So I think part of the problem with natural history collections -- and that's not to say that we shouldn't send stuff back -- and I should have said at the start, these are all my opinions, none of this is the opinion of the Natural History Museum in London. There's a debate about whether things should be returned to the countries they were taken from, but some of it is newer and was done with permits. And as Jon mentioned in his episode, we do still do collecting now, but we work with local people and we get permits from the countries that we're working in to collect specimens. And often we'll either leave those specimens in country or we'll kind of split it, so there are duplicates that that come back with us and we leave the originals in the country that we're working in. So some of it is not quite so bad as all that.

The funny thing often with the, what most people come to use our collections for -- so this is the stuff that's behind-the-scenes that we use for research -- is people are coming to use it for taxonomy. So taxonomy is the naming of things, when we're trying to discover new species, and I can be rude about taxonomists because I'm not one, I love them -- 

##### [NEMO LAUGHS]

But the joke I have with my taxonomist friends is that essentially they turn up a collection and they take all the specimens out that they want to look at. They line them up and they just look at them. So you come into the office and you just see them with this little parade of species like, "Oh, hello, doing some taxonomy today."

#### NEMO

Basically "spot the difference."

#### DR. COOPER

It really is. I mean, it's cool, it's the kind of differences as well there -- as an untrained person, I just can't see those differences, but they're really clear to the taxonomists. But yeah. So one of the issues there is that when you name a new species, you have to deposit what's called the "type specimen" in a museum. 

#### NEMO

Mhm.

#### DR. COOPER

And so this is, like, the perfect example of that species. So then if you want to come back and name another species, you have to compare it to all the other types. And so in many ways it's easier if many of those types are in the same place, rather than you having to travel to a hundred different museums to look at them all.

#### NEMO

Mhm.

#### DR. COOPER

So in some cases it's almost easier if they're all in one place at a time. But again, of course that's a really colonial attitude too. So maybe we're just back to burning it all down again.

#### NEMO

Yeah, I was going round in circles in my head with that, because part of my job was digitizing. And so the idea of not having to have people come to one place and they can access high-quality photos or scans or all of these things. But then does that mean, then, that if fish or snails or whatever were repatriated to the places that they were caught in or belonged to, are there places that can hold onto it?

How granular do you get, I guess is maybe another question that I would have. If there's two or three museums, do you send it to the closest one? Do you send it to the place with the best ability to hold those fish?

#### DR. COOPER

Yeah, it's really complicated, but I think you're right in the -- I think eventually technology is gonna save us in this circumstance. I think some of the problem at the moment is we're kind of in that in-between stage where the technology is not quite good enough. Because the digitization that you were doing, for example, was incredible, but it took a huge amount of time and effort to get -- you know, I can't remember how many species you ended up sort of covering. 

#### NEMO

Not very many. _(laughs)_

#### DR. COOPER

Yeah. So the Museum has over 80 million specimens in its collections, which is just an insane number. And actually it's probably more than that because nobody's really actually ever gone and counted 80 million things; it's just a kind of guesstimate. So I think eventually if we can digitize everything to a standard whereby we have all the information that we need to be able to designate different species or do other kinds of research, then yeah, that sort of won't be a problem anymore. But then, you know, you get into these arguments of whether you even need a museum. I think you do still -- I think it would, it's still cool to have these physical objects, and I think part of that is, we don't know what they're gonna be used for in the future.

So it's been really cool chatting to one of my colleagues, and your colleague as well, Nemo -- Ollie Crimmon. So he's been at the Museum for 50 years, which is incredible. And he talks about how things have changed a huge amount in the time he's been there and that the specimens are being used now for the kinds of studies that he would never have even considered doing 50 years ago.

#### NEMO

Mm.

#### DR. COOPER

And so holding onto those physical objects I think is a sensible plan, but again, that there's gotta be equity and there's gotta be consideration of the histories of those objects as well. 

#### NEMO

And I feel like some of the conversations that I had with the people who are doing loads of DNA testing on specimens who wish that other museum staff handled the specimens in certain ways and stuff like that -- like, everyone has different desires for the handling of museum specimens. _(laughs)_ I feel like I remember some people talking about how they wish that in the 19th century preservation techniques have been different, because it's really hard to get DNA samples from wet specimens, I think.

#### DR. COOPER

Yeah. So basically anything preserved in formalin -- so the really old stuff we have, you can get DNA out of. But then anything that is there after the point that they discovered you could use formalin is useless because formalin degrades DNA; it's one of the main things that it does. It's why we don't use it anymore -- because it's also carcinogenic.

#### NEMO

Woo.

#### DR. COOPER

But that means that there's this whole time period of specimens that we can't get any DNA information out of. Whereas new stuff, we preserve them in a hundred percent in ethanol. So you can get DNA out of those.

But yeah, it's definitely interesting cos there's specimens now where we can do surface scanning, or we can take beautiful photographs where somebody in the early 1800s just sliced it up because they wanted to see what his stomach looked like, and so you then can't use the external thing. So yeah, there's a lot of cursing Victorians that goes on in the museum. _(laughs)_

#### NEMO

I remember a lot of, like, things stuck to boards and things rotting in my hands and just loads of gross oil coming out of places, and I'm like, "Those Victorians!"

#### DR. COOPER

_(laughing)_ Yeah. I mean, that basically sums up the Museum: gross oil coming out of things in weird places.

#### NEMO

So you mentioned briefly about still going on expeditions, still going and getting local involvement. Do you think there are better practices that museums can be doing is institutional racism and stuff like that, and it's linked to science -- still having an effect on how science is being done now? 

#### DR. COOPER

So yeah, I think despite the government liking to tell us that there is no institutional racism, _(laughs)_ unfortunately science is institutionally racist either overtly and... you know, we're seeing this frightening resurgence of race science in the last sort of five, 10 years. Um, so if you've read Angela San's book *Superior,* which is incredible --

#### NEMO

Mm.

#### DR. COOPER

And so if you haven't read that, I would definitely recommend taking a look if you're interested in how that's coming back into the mainstream in sort of a horrible way, but it's also racist in these really small ways. So people having research sites where they go out there and they maybe don't involve local people in the way that they should do. There's a lot of issues with what people refer to as either "parachute science" or "helicopter science" -- this idea of somebody from the global north coming in with their research team and doing this research project and then just disappearing off and getting all these amazing scientific papers and discoveries, but not really contributing to anything that's going on in countries. So you get a lot of local people being acknowledged as field techs or research assistants, but the projects aren't really being led by people from the local area. And so this is just, you know, nuevo-colonialism really, which is slightly disturbing.

So I know there's definitely been quite a few efforts recently to do something about this. As I always say, you have to know it's a problem before you can do things. A lot of scientific journals, for example, are asking now for an inclusivity statement -- so explaining how everyone is involved, and especially if you're doing work in the global south and you are not from the global south. There's also been lots of discussions about things which perhaps seem minor, but one of the ways that a scientist, we, get judged is by who reads our papers and then who cites our papers in other papers. And there's lots of research that suggests that's, again, massively biased towards citations of researchers from the global north and particularly our favorite straight white man norm in the global north seems to be the person who gets all the citations even now -- which is, uh, pretty depressing. So again, _(laughs)_ burn it all down.

#### NEMO

Yeah. I feel like from that it's probably likely that also papers that are written in English are probably privileged over other Languages. 

#### DR. COOPER

Definitely, a hundred percent. That's another really tricky problem. So there's some papers by a researcher who's based in Argentina called Martin Nuñez. And so he's been really angry about this on Twitter, which is always entertaining, _(laughs)_ and he's been trying to push for people not complaining so much about English language and publishing in different languages. A lot of journals will now let you translate your abstract into another language, but it's still, you know -- it's difficult, I guess, to get a PhD student in the UK or the US to learn 20 different languages in order to read all of the research. So again, hopefully this is a place where technology will save us.

#### NEMO

Yeah.

#### DR. COOPER

And then hopefully people will start reading these papers and these translations and then we'll have a much better global science undergoing. 

#### NEMO

Mm. It's interesting, I remembered that this is a *Trice Forgotten* podcast and was like, "Oh yeah, I should probably be making links to *Trice Forgotten."* But that was a really interesting link in that thinking about the characters of *Trice Forgotten* and the fact that they speak English -- all of them speak English. And when I was looking at what characters I was going to be making for this show, I picked places where Britain has had some colonial power. So there is some feasible reason why they're speaking in English, and they are speaking in English.

And it was something that Morgan and Raf and I talked about in, like, "Are we going to have these characters be speaking a different language, but as a listener we are hearing it in English because it's how *we* hear it, but actually if anyone else came across them they'd hear Arabic or Spanish or any other language?" And we decided that no, actually they *are* all speaking English unless they're not speaking English. So, you know, there is some Arabic, there is some Bengali and Tamil and Hokkien in there, but the only reason that I'm able to write this show is because I'm writing it in English _(laughs)_ and not in a different language. And the only reason that anyone is listening to it is because it's in English and not in a certain other language.

And the way that even that is a colonial feature of the show -- like they are not "free," I guess, quote-unquote in scare quotes, heavily scare-quoted _(laughs)_ --  they are not free to talk in Native languages or Indigenous languages. And then on the upside, that does mean that they can communicate with each other. They have found a language that they can communicate with each other, which is great. But it's always been a slightly messy feeling for me as well, with that.

#### DR. COOPER

Yeah, that's really interesting, actually, cos I'd never thought about that. Cos I think you kind of -- we've gotten used to watching TV programs where people speak different languages to each other and you just understand via subtitles and how you do that with the podcast. Yeah, yeah, that's a really interesting point.

#### NEMO

It's even come into the script and the transcripts. I believe the decision was for transcripts, if there is another language outside of English, it's actually translated in the transcripts for you. Whereas that's not something that is translated on the podcast. So when Nani is singing, obviously we don't hear that in the English translation, we just have to go and look up what those lyrics are. But if you are reading the transcript then you get translations. 

#### DR. COOPER

Yeah, I think -- so Miranda Lowe, I saw her give a talk recently about all this decolonization stuff and then she was saying, you know, the problem with a lot of this is there aren't any easy answers to any of it.

#### NEMO

Yes.

#### DR. COOPER

It's all just super complicated. But if there are any easy answers, I guess, uh, phone in and let us know _(laughs)_ 'cause that would be awesome. 

#### NEMO

Yeah, literally. One person's just like, "Oh, it's easy, you just go A, B and C and then it's fine."

#### DR. COOPER

Which would be great.

#### NEMO

So other than things like repatriation, other things that can really considered under the bracket of decolonization.

#### DR. COOPER

So I think, again, this is written about really beautifully in Miranda Lowe and Subhadra Das's paper, which again you mentioned with Jon. Their idea is that really a lot of this is about investigating the specimens that we have, finding out more about their histories and sharing that with people. Making sure that we have this context.

So I think, again, in one of your earlier, one of these shows -- I've been learning huge amounts from these Below Deck episodes, by the way -- somebody was talking about how a lot of these narratives, it's not that they weren't known about, they deliberately got wiped out because people wanted to be important and they wanted it to be this kind of narrative of these incredible explorers. So yeah, this idea of all these stories that we've hidden and actually having that information on the museum labels and in our catalogs and on our websites. And I think that's probably part of it that we're doing a little bit better on kind of telling those stories. So maybe that's one thing.

And another thing that Miranda talks about a lot is that we need to decolonize the kinds of *people* that work in museums. Meaning that if you look at the workforce, it's still predominantly white, middle-class straight people. So how do you make sure that you are creating not only an equal environment, but an environment that people feel that they can bring their whole selves to? And again, I think sometimes the museum does a good job at that and sometimes it does a terrible job of that. I think as an institution it might not always do a great job. The people I work with face-to-face tend to get on really well with, and we have these kinds of conversations, which is great. This idea of just trying to diversify the workforce, that it's ridiculous that Miranda, who's one of the very few Black curators, is doing so much of this work on top of her normal work.

#### NEMO

Mm. I mean, to be quite open, there is a reason why I asked Jon and you, Natalie, both white people, because I feel like it's all of our responsibilities. And I've said this over and over again at this podcast, even though I would class myself as a person of color, I still have two very imperial backgrounds, Japan and the UK. And so I always feel like I also have to specify, I also have to do a lot of decolonisation. And so a lot of this research that I've been doing has been because of interrogating my own background, interrogating my own upbringing, the people that I've always been surrounded by.

I mean, that's what decolonisation is, right? It's having a colonial mindset because of the way that you're educated. I've always been educated in the UK, and to decolonise that is to go and self-educate yourself and do research. 

#### DR. COOPER

Yeah, no, I'm glad you brought that up actually, about Jon and I both being white, cisgendered straight people. In that it's really tricky cos I wanted to come on here and to be part of the conversation, but at the same time really anxious about not centering my experience in that. So definitely had this conversation with a few other people at work about whether it was appropriate for me to come and talk about this. But I think, like you say, if white people don't get involved in the conversation, then we are just perpetuating the problem.

#### NEMO

Yeah. I've always been very frustrated with change not coming fast enough. _(laughs)_ I've always been a person who has been okay to do consultancy and to talk of other people and to genuinely be quite open about myself in order to educate other people. And that's also why I write this podcast. I do want people to learn from it, but when it's only people of color talking about decolonisation, then that's not decolonisation, because it's not really the people of color who have to learn about it, it is white people.

And it's white people who have to -- and not just white people, again, Japanese people, other imperial forces, Europe, blah blah blah -- everyone needs to decolonise themselves. And that has to be something that you just have to get the energy to do even though everything is awful all the time, _(laughs)_ and there's always so much to learn that hopefully being filtered through podcast medium is a slightly more accessible way of doing that.

#### DR. COOPER

Yeah. I mean, I think one thing that's somewhat a po-- I'm gonna take it as a positive take, in that actually, if we think about decolonisation, it really beautifully wraps up with all of the other things that we want to do in the museum. So you and I have had conversations about this idea of queering the museum and what *is* a museum in the 21st century, and how do we make sure there's space for LGBTQ+ communities as well as people from ethnic minority communities -- but also how do we do that in a sustainable way, in a green way, in a way where we've got this climate crisis and this biodiversity crisis?

And I think you can either be completely overwhelmed by the fact that there's all these problems that we're trying to deal with all at the same time and, uh, half of Europe's government seems to be fascist at the moment.

#### NEMO

Woo. Woohoo.

#### DR. COOPER

Or you can take it as a really positive opportunity and meet lots of really amazing young people through work, like young activists. And they're bringing together all of this knowledge and all of this good practice to try and tackle all these things at the same time.

And so yeah, whilst we're burning it down, maybe we're building it back up into something different, something better. 

#### NEMO

Yeah, it really reminds me -- I mean that was such a positive point and then I'm immediately gonna do it down, but hopefully we can come back up again. _(laughs)_ That's just what this is. It's just that highs and lows, burn it down, bring it back up again.

Um, so in the burning it down, it was really reminding me of the recent death of the Queen and the fact that during all of those conversations that were happening,  just after she died and into her funeral, when people were saying -- I think quite rightly -- that we should be on picking how her imperialism really affects everyone in the UK and abroad. Versus people who are saying things like, "She's like my grandmother who's just died. Now's not the time." So when *is* the time to talk about decolonisation? If not now --

It is kind of interesting because in *Trice Forgotten,* it's not the Natural History Museum of London that William works for. He works for the Queen's Museum of London.

#### DR. COOPER

Which is very different. It's --

#### NEMO

Super different and it's not the same museum.

#### DR. COOPER

Well, yeah. I mean, the patron, our official patron is, uh, Catherine, Princess of Wales. Is that the right title? Check me out with my Royal Knowledge. _(laughs)_

Um, so I mean we have some kind of remit there. I think it's a little confusing to me. I'm not really sure what a patron does other than occasionally turns up and shakes people's hands. 

#### NEMO

Sure, sure, sure. 

#### DR. COOPER

I would prefer it was David Attenborough, but you know, _(laughs)_ what can you do? 

#### NEMO

The only true royalty.

#### DR. COOPER

Yeah, I mean, it's really horrifying when you look back on the museum and the history of it and how it all started and how really, incredibly built upon enslaved people it is. That's where the money came from. That's where the specimens came from. I mean, Hans Sloane, who -- the collection is originally based on his stuff -- he literally sent enslaved people out into his plantations to collect things. So, you know, we have this pretty horrifying legacy.

And it does seem like we do need to talk about it more, because every time you talk about it, people go, "Oh really? I didn't know that." When actually if you looked it up on the internet, there's tons of stories on the NHM website and things like that. This is not hidden anymore. It just seems to be something people don't wanna think about. They wanna think about dinosaurs and Dippy versus The Whale. You know, that's the big controversies of our time.

#### NEMO

Yeah.

#### DR. COOPER

Rather than some of those pretty horrific stories as to where we got those specimens from.

#### NEMO

Mm. Yeah.

It seems like every time I write anything about -- and I'm fairly surface-level, as in I've only really known about these things for the last four years-ish. Every time I write about something I'm like, "Surely somebody's got to have written something about this before because there's so much, and it's so -- I mean, you don't have to look very hard to find at least the things that we've talked about so far." But no. _(laughs)_

And every time I'm surprised that institutional racism does exist and that people are scared of tainting something that is, like you say, this childhood memory of going to the museum. But for some people it can't be a nice happy childhood memory. And so that is also an inequality.

#### DR. COOPER

Yeah. I mean the one good thing about our -- well, there are many good things about our museum. One of the good things about our museum is it's free --

#### NEMO

Mm.

#### DR. COOPER

So you don't have to pay to go in.

#### NEMO

Yeah.

#### DR. COOPER

If you live somewhere in London, if you can get there, you can go in for free. But I think there's still a demographic of people that go to the museum more regularly than others, in that -- is that middle-class contingent. And so we're not really reaching lower-income families, perhaps.

Unless we're able to do that and we're able to give them a reason that they want to come to the museum, then yeah, we're failing at this mission to engage and inspire people about the natural world and to create advocates for the planet. I think we're doing a reasonable job with the people we get in the door, but there's so many people that just never come in the first place. And I think that's the trick, is how do we make those people feel like they're welcome and they wanna be in that space?

#### NEMO

Mhm. And not just in the space, but building the space behind the scenes. We talked about how a lot of people don't know that behind the scenes in the museums there are curators and researchers, and before I worked there, I didn't know that. I didn't know that that was a job that could be done, until I happened to watch a YouTube channel about it from someone in America.

And you don't see -- I mean, if you think about natural history and natural programs, you do think of David Attenborough. You think of scientists who go on TV and they do skew white cis male, now female -- I feel like there's a slight gender balance now in who you see on TV, but it still does skew middle-class and white. And so if you don't see yourself talking about natural history, then obviously you don't know how to get into those industries and then you don't know how to...

Yeah. How to change things and how to be there as a human being, not just as someone who is a decolonial tool. _(laughs)_

#### DR. COOPER

So one thing that is new at the museum, which is this incredible program called the Natural History Museum Explorers Club.

#### NEMO

Mm.

#### DR. COOPER

Which is designed to help Black minority ethnic group students, and mostly aimed at younger people, to get careers in natural history and natural sciences. So if anyone listening to this podcast is interested or knows of anyone who's interested, they should definitely check that out on our website and sign up because they do lots of really cool events, get to meet awesome people like Miranda Lowe and find out about her career as a curator at the museum. Also, Patrick is involved -- Patrick Campbell, who's my officemate, who's again been at the museum forever and works on reptiles and is super cool. And so you get to meet the slightly more diverse end of our staff, which is great to hopefully inspire people to want to do these jobs in the future.

-- And like you say, Nemo, just to know that these jobs even exist. Cos I don't think I knew any of this existed until I was doing a PhD. I didn't really know what a PhD was until I was doing a PhD, which was a interesting experience. _(laughs)_

#### NEMO

Yep. Mood. Same, same, same.

##### [THEY BOTH LAUGH]

I hope that more people have this curiosity about museums and at the same time as deeply, deeply desiring to burn them down and repatriating things do also come out of this episode and do more research, I guess, for themselves, about museums and all of these conversations.

Obviously they do track to other institutions as well, universities and banks and literally everything needs to also be thinking about these kind of conversations. So hopefully if you are in any kind of institution, you will also be having these conversations and knowing that now is the time to be having them, because we need to continually be having them and we're not gonna reach an endpoint where we're like, "Well, we've decolonized. So -- _(laughing)_ great job everyone, the end!" Um, yeah.

#### DR. COOPER

Yeah. I mean, again, on a more positive point -- I feel like I've been very negative -- _(laughs)_ I love the museum. It is my favorite place in the whole world. And somebody once told me what I think is a really good way of thinking about people who work at the museum, is that we all love it and we all want to save it. We just have different ideas about how we should save it. _(laughs)_

So that's why -- I mean, these are my opinions, not necessarily the opinions of my colleagues and definitely not the opinions of the museum as a whole. But it is an amazing place. If you haven't been, I urge you to come and have a look around and check out some of the exhibitions and try and see some of the behind-the-scenes stuff if you can. It is a really, really cool place with issues, um, like every other place like you said. So it's not just the museum. This is my attempt to sort of pull it back from just museum-bashing.

#### NEMO

Mm. And I'm sure if you don't live in London, UK -- _(laughs)_ your nearest museum, listener, will also be doing very similar things or different things. I've learned about loads of different museums across the world, lot of nautical museums that are doing loads about whaling -- histories of whaling and stuff like that, which is something that is briefly touched upon in *Trice Forgotten.* Loads of things about Aboriginal people, First Nations, people from First Nations and Aboriginal people. And I do entreat you to go and look at what programs people are running at museums, cos usually they do have workshops and free events and stuff like that run by OwnVoice people, as well as museum staff and experts.

#### DR. COOPER

Yeah. And I think a lot of places have things on YouTube now. So certainly, yeah, we've done a bunch of recent behind-the-scenes tours on YouTube. So if you wanna see stuff, just look up museums you're interested in and see if they have a YouTube channel, and you can see stuff that way. You don't have to physically go to a museum.

#### NEMO

Yeah, that's how I got my interest started -- through museum YouTubes.

So I feel like that's a slightly hopeful, not quite as "burn it down," ending, uh, in parallel. I can contain multitudes, and the multitudes are "burn it down while also going on YouTube and looking at museums."

So thank you so much, Natalie, for joining us. It's been a delight to talk to you as ever and also to learn more. I love learning all the time.

#### DR. COOPER

Cool. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's great to be on the show and I'm really excited to hear the rest of the episodes.

#### NEMO

As am I. So that's it from me, Nemo, and goodbye from Natalie.

#### DR. COOPER

Bye.

#### NEMO

We'll see you next time, Below Decks.

##### [Show Theme -- Outro]

*Trice Forgotten* is a podcast distributed by Rusty Quill and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 4.0 International License. The series is created by Nemo Martin and directed by Rafaella Marcus.

Today's episode featured: Nemo Martin, Natalie Cooper. And was edited by Lowri Ann Davies and Catherine Rinella. *Trice Forgotten* is produced by Ian Geers, Lowri Ann Davies, and production manager Natasha Johnston, with executive producers Alexander J Newall and April Sumner.

To subscribe, view associated materials, or join our Patreon, visit rustyquill.com. Rate and review us online, tweet us @therustyquill, visit us on Facebook or email us at mail@rustyquill.com. Thanks for listening.