Getting students closer to local history just became easier.
The Juneau Community Foundation’s Empty Chair Project is making a donation to the Juneau-Douglas City Museum, with the funds providing buses for students to visit the museum. Jane Lindsey, director of the City Museum, said this will greatly simplify the process of getting classes to the museum.
“Many teachers have to pay for their buses, and it’s hard enough to schedule field trips anyway,” Lindsey said.
The museum did not disclose the amount of the gift.
The Empty Chair Project was founded in 2010 to raise awareness about the forced removal of Japanese-Americans from Alaska during World War II. The name of the project refers to the empty chair left at Juneau High School’s graduation in 1942 after valedictorian John Tanaka’s family was sent to the Minidoka Internment Camp before the ceremony. The group worked to raise a statue of the empty chair, which was erected in Capital Park in 2014, which honored Tanaka and more than 50 others from Juneau who were interned at Minidoka.
The organization emphasizes education, and has collaborated with the City Museum in the past. The museum had an exhibit, “The Forced Removal and Resettlement of Juneau’s Japanese Community, 1941-1951,” and has also held classes on the time period. The City Museum’s gift shop also offers Empty Chair Committee member Karleen Grummett’s historical book “Quiet Defiance: Alaska’s Empty Chair Story,” and the museum held a book signing for it as well.
After this collaboration for the past few years, Empty Chair members turned to the museum when they found they had a little extra money this year.
“We’ve just had an ongoing relationship with them,” Lindsey said, “and a few weeks ago they came to us and said, ‘We have some residual money from the projects we’ve been working on.’ We talked about how we can promote history in the community and help people come to the museum.”
The funds will go to use this coming school year, Lindsey said. Margie Shackelford, the Chair of the Empty Chair Project, wants the money to not only promote learning about the story of Japanese internment camps, but to get more students to learn about local history in general.
“We hope that the gift provides additional motivation for student visits to the Museum over time and into the future for lessons focused on Juneau’s past,” Shackelford said in a release.
The City Museum, located at the corner of Main Street and Fourth Street downtown, offers a wide-spanning look at the region’s history. It has permanent exhibits on mining, local businesses, a historic Native fish trap and the city’s evolving shoreline. The City Museum also cares for historic artifacts that are scattered around town at libraries, government buildings and other places.
The museum also regularly offers tours, classes and presentations. Thanks to the money from the Empty Chair Project, these programs will be easier to put on, Lindsey said. There’s very little parking at the museum and its location on a hill makes it that much more difficult to access.
Now, teachers will bring their classes to the museum or to museum functions with more ease, accomplishing a shared goal between the museum and the Empty Chair Project.
“That’s one of the things we both agreed on,” Lindsey said, “that education is important and our history is important, our local Juneau history.”
• Contact reporter Alex McCarthy at alex.mccarthy@juneauempire.com.
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