I'm taking a full-time job at the Chicago Field Museum.
When we visited back in April,
they brought me into this conference room,
and they sat down, and they asked me
if I would like to come work for them at the Field Museum.
And not only that,
they want to continue to help us produce The Brain Scoop.
So,
they wanted to take us out of this collection
and let us film out of theirs.
We have 24,000 specimens here and they have 25 MILLION in their museum.
So it's kind of a dream come true.
And...
So...
I'm...
I'm gonna do it, and we're gonna move to Chicago.
The day before we flew to Chicago,
I knew our curator was leaving.
He had told me that he was taking a job across the country,
and he had asked if I would take over here as curator.
And, so that's what I thought I had in store for me.
I ended up having a conversation with the Dean of our school here,
the day before I left, and...
he wasn't sure that he could pay me.
He wasn't sure that they were going to keep the position open,
and they weren't sure that they were going to fill it at all.
So, I was really disheartened,
because I've put a lot of work into this place,
and I really want to see it do well.
I do love this place,
but I just feel like I've fought...
so hard,
and it hasn't,
hasn't gotten me anywhere with
expanding our space or getting more funding.
We've gotten a lot of publicity!
But...
It's gonna be hard to leave...
This poor shark shouldn't probably be sitting over here.
This -- The bottom of this box is ruined.
It's just...
about to fall out.
Well, I just came down here and there's
a bunch of fluid all over the ground,
and luckily,
a lot of these boxes have been put on pallets from the last time
there was a leak in this collection.
And this entire stack of boxes collapsed
and a bunch of things broke.
So we learned,
and we put them on pallets but some of-- not all of them are on pallets,
and there's
fluid running underneath all of 'em.
So some of these boxes are...
soaked.
I mean, what do you expect is gonna happen
if you put things down here?
It's pretty sad.
I think it's coming out from the wall.
The wall is all wet.
There's moisture leaking out
from here,
you can see it coming out...
What you you think is going to happen to the collection
after you leave?
The new mammology professor is being tasked
with checking in on the collection, at least.
So, I guess that's better than nothing.
But...
What-- Who's-- I don't know what's going to happen with this stuff.
If all this stuff gets lost,
what are we losing?
Well, we're losing 3,400 natural history specimens,
2,500 fish, 500 reptiles
500 birds and mammals,
a hundred years of natural history.
We're losing data, we're losing records-- So much information!
It's all information and data and things that you can't replace
and you can't get back.
You can't go back
to Flathead Lake in 1900 and collect another sturgeon...
This is it.
It's all here, in this room,
the entire natural history of fish in Montana.
It's the history of the university, it's a lot of hard work
that a lot of people
have put so much passion and time and energy
into a place like this.
And that's what you're losing.
People just don't see the value in it.
They would rathar spend their money in the sports team
or in the business school
or...
I don't-- I don't really know.
It's j-- It's no one person's fault.
It's not like you can go back in the history of the University of Montana
and find one person to point the finger at.
It's just years and years of neglect and oversight.
I really hope they get moved.
I don't really think that this is the place for a natural history collection.
Our grandchildren are going to be pretty upset with us
that we didn't put a little more effort
in taking care of what is going to be their collective past.
I kinda wish I could take it all with me!
Do you think the university would notice it was missing?
No.
The bugs aren't doing too hot right now.
They haven't had anything fresh put in there since we did the wolf.
They're kind of in a lull right now. There's still a few.
A few hungry ones left, but...
they need maintenance.
Then need someone to take care of 'em.
This is like where everything fun happened!
I mean, from like skinning my first mouse, when I was, I was super terrified of it.
And it was like...
my friend, my coworker, Emily, brought me in here and she's like, "We're going to stuff a mouse today."
I was not prepared at all, so I just had to go and do it.
I just had to like go through it. And I was really nervous but I didn't tell her that.
And then I did it and I was...
kinda... I felt really strange about myself for a couple of weeks afterwards
because I enjoyed it a lot,
and I thought there was something wrong with me.
And I thought that I was kind of
sick or perverted or,
like maybe I wasn't alright in the head or something,
um, but that's not the case.
I mean,
I'm pretty normal.
But...
I've made a lot of friends in here, a lot of really great friends.
Um,
had a lot of really awesome conversations, talking about life,
talking about what it means,
talking about the fact that we're all these weird biological machines;
we're just a bunch of, um, squishy cogs and pulleys, levers...
There've been some not-so-great moments in here too, for sure.
Like, a couple months ago, somebody spilled
a container of gear lubricant
in the utility room upstairs that leaked into my dermestid colony
and uh, left a big greasy spot.
A couple... I mean, this time last year our fish collection collapsed,
and I had to come in at eleven at night when the fire department was there,
and the police department. And...
Dave, our curator, and I and his, uh,
thirteen-year-old son were the only people
to clean up this biohazard mess.
We were being exposed to all these horrible chemicals and fumes
in a hundred and ten degrees conditions down there.
That wasn't fun.
Do you have any idea how many things you have dissected in here?
I mean, full disections, like full skinning and stuffing...
Probably a dozen.
Not that many, but
skinning alone,
I don't know,
probably another fifteen.
If we're talking about skeletal preparation,
that's what I've done the most of,
and I've probably
run --
I mean sometimes I'll run,
you know, fifteen or twenty birds through the box at a time.
I've probably done a hundred or more.
Oh, these are my favorite tweezers.
They have this little grippy thing on the end,
so they have two things, and a --
and then another prong that come together.
They're the best for pulling off tissue.
This is, uh, the first publicity I ever did for the museum.
This was before I had a tumblr, this was
two years before Hank ever
approached me about making a show.
Um, it's an article in the student newspaper,
"Campus museum fights for space and funding."
"Emily Graslie, a senior studying art, volunteers in the museum"
"and said she considers it an underutilized resource for students of all majors."
Yup.
I cleaned off my bookshelves.
Umm...
I took all my artwork.
Aand...
There's a little more space now.
Is this the last time you're gonna be in here?
That's a really good question.
I think probably so.
Unless I --
can't help myself and I come back in the middle of the night,
which, sometimes, I do,
but, um...
Yeah.
This might be the last time I'm in here.
The first time I came in here I was a semester away from graduating
with my studio art degree.
I had no idea what I was doing.
I didn't know wh-- if I was going to have a job after I graduated.
I didn't really think
that science was for me,
you know.
And I walked in here and all of a sudden it all seemed to make sense.
Everything I used to not really understand about
science or biology in a broader context,
seemed to all be a lot more clear once I actually came into a place
where you could see it physically.
And you could touch these things and you could interact with them
and you could get up close, it wasn't just looking at pictures in textbooks,
it wasn't just looking at slides underneath the microscope,
it was actually being really close with these objects.
And it was this epiphany, like
"I can do science."
" I can do science!"
"Yeah, science is a thing that I like!"
I mean, I couldn't change my major so, I got my art degree
and I didn't have a job for a long time so I just would volunteer here.
I got a job as a baker and I would bake during the morning
and then come here during the day
and do specimen preparation. And then have to go to my night shift of baking.
So
I'd make a bunch of food, and then come here
and like clean bones, and then go to work
and then, you know, be making sandwiches, and
realize that like twenty minutes before I had just been
pulling tissue off of a squirrel or whatever.
And eventualy I just stopped going to my baking job
and got into grad school
instead... so I could stay here.
The whole reason I applied for graduate school in museum studies
is because I saw it as a way
to continue my volunteer work here.
It was like I had to justify wanting to be in here
because I didn't have a major, it didn't make sense
for any kind of research purpose that I was here.
And I didn't have a job here,
nobody was going to pay me to do all the work that I was doing,
I just did it for myself. So I was like, "Well, I'll go to-- I'll go to graduate school"
"and I'll get my masters in museum studies"
"and then all the volunteer work will have made sense."
Will you miss it?
Yeah.
I'll miss it a lot.
This is like MY museum.
It's not mine, I don't feel
like an ownership of the objects, I feel
kind of an ownership of
the idea of this place.
I've put so much time and energy and love into this collection,
and I feel like I've been
helping to look after all of these animals,
all of these specimens,
and all of the data associated with them for two and a half years,
non-stop. I've been here all the time.
Until The Brain Scoop started, I was in here forty to fifty hours a week
regardless of whatever else I had to do in my life.
I don't think
there are a lot of museums in the world
where people get the kind of opportunity that I've had,
where
um, someone trusts me so much to just
let me do so many projects on my own, and let me learn on my own.
And, um,
you-- you just don't get that kind of opportunity.
What is it that you're doing now?
Well I asked our curator, Dave, before he left,
if it would be okay
to fill out
a, um, specimen invoice for
loan,
to take
the raccoon with me to the Field Museum.
And I called the Field Museum to make sure that they could
make appropriate accomodations
to house him, temporarily,
as a, um,
loan from the University of Montana.
And he's been approved.
How do you think Soon Raccoon feels about it?
You know, he's been pretty quiet about the whole ordeal.
They have a lot of really nice raccoons at the field museum.
I'm sure he'll make a lot of friends.