Delivering Difficult, Human Stories of Incarceration

Category: On-Demand Programs
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This is a recorded session from the 2025 AAM Annual Meeting & MuseumExpo. The Old Idaho Penitentiary (OIP), a prison that operated from 1872–1973, holds difficult stories and controversial subjects. Navigating these topics requires significant thought, community engagement, and public trust. The Idaho State Historical Society, along with scholars and advisors, crafted a master plan for the OIP that incorporates perspectives from tribes, law enforcement, the judiciary, educators, currently incarcerated individuals, and criminal justice professionals. Find out how the museum is deploying this knowledge to create a compelling exhibition that shares complex stories of tragedy and redemption.

Speakers:

  • Janet Gallimore, Executive Director and State Historic Preservation Officer, Idaho State Historical Society  
  • Gloria Totoricagüena, Dr., Idaho Policy and Consulting  
  • Courtney Kleinman, Director, Projects, nFusion  
  • Nolan Brown, Shoshone-Bannock Tribes Original Territories and Historical Research Program Manager, Shoshone-Bannock Tribes  
  • Anthony Parry, Historic Sites Administrator, Idaho State Historical Society

Transcript

Janet Gallimore:

The focus of our conversation this morning is the process of reimagining the visitor experience in exhibitions at the Old Idaho Penitentiary. The Old Idaho Penitentiary is one of four sites in the country that is open to the public as a museum that’s a territorial prison. I’m Janet Gallimore, executive director and SHPO for the Idaho State Historical Society, a system of cultural and historic resources made up of the state museum, state archives, SHPO and historic sites.

Joining me this morning, our team members, Anthony Parry, historic sites administrator and project manager, Nolan Brown, original territories and historical research manager of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes and project advisor, and Courtney Kleinman, project director at nFusion, our design-build partner. And regrettably, Dr. Totoricaguena was not able to join us this morning, but I will fill in for her as the data geek.

The Old Pen is a four-acre complex and includes 30 individual buildings. You can imagine that the scope of this project was pretty large. It involves a number of elements including interpretive signage, immersive experience, visiting the cellhouses, an orientation, multimedia presentation, and a survey exhibition. And today, it’s our hope to discuss this master plan and design development process with you around this idea of challenging content and how do you build trust around the content that we design in this regard.

And with a focus on community engagement and utilizing audience testing data, we are informing the exhibition design process and we aim to really demonstrate how we ensure not only accuracy, but build trust with the community and build trust with stakeholders like our funders and donors and our government and other relevant parties to make sure that we could create this authentic content and deliver it with very high levels of integrity. It’s now my privilege to turn the program over to Anthony Parry.

Anthony Parry:

All right. Good morning. Thank you so much, Jan. Yes, I am Anthony Parry. I’m the historic sites administrator for the Idaho State Historical Society. I’ve been basically dedicating my life over the last decade to telling these difficult stories of the Old Pen. By a show of hands, how many people have been to a historic prison in here? Okay, excellent. Yeah, yeah. How many have you been to the Old Idaho Penitentiary? Anybody? Couple of folks that have been on our teams in the past. All right. Excellent. So, the Old Idaho Penitentiary is located on sacred tribal ground of the Boise Valley people in Idaho’s capital, in Boise, just a short drive from downtown Boise.

And it’s located between the Boise River and the Boise Foothills, both essential resources for the Old Pen. The Foothills contained sandstone, which served as the literal building blocks for the prison and the state capitol as well and several buildings throughout the state of Idaho and throughout the country. Now the cornerstone of the territorial prison, the Old Pen, was ironically laid on Independence Day, on the 4th of July in 1870. Two years later, the first 11 prisoners arrived from a jail in Idaho city, 40 miles northeast of Boise, thus beginning a century of incarceration.

Between 1872 and 1973, over 13,000 men and 217 women served time at the Old Pen, hailing from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and every corner of the globe. The prison became a state penitentiary in 1890. And during this century of incarceration, prisoners were sentenced to hard labor, resulting in the construction of all the buildings you see here at the main site as prisoners quarried sandstone in the surrounding foothills around the prison and constructed the cellhouses that they served time in. The prison was self-contained city behind walls. Prisoners grew their own food. They raised chickens, turkeys, pigs, cattle. They had their own butcher shop and apiary and multiple large farms, including an island on the Boise River called Eagle Island.

Besides food production and preparation, prisoners maintained the grounds, made their own boots and uniforms, dug ditches, and created and maintained the site plumbing and electrical units. They were involved in industry in the 1920s manufacturing t-shirts, over 200 men, five days a week, making a dozen shirts each. In the 1930s, Great Depression ushered the end of this industry, and prisoners were sent out to construct docks and roads through treacherous mountain passes. They also started making license plates and street signs for the state of Idaho, which our current residents still do in the Idaho Department of Corrections. Oops, there we go now.

Fortunately for historians today, the primary source material, mugshots, photos, reports, punishment records, prison newspapers and files for every person who is sentenced to the prison exchanged hands from the Idaho Department of Corrections to the Idaho State Historical Society when the prison closed in 1973 and opened up as a historic site in 1974. Unlike many historic prisons that could be visited today, the records of the men and women incarcerated at the Idaho State Penitentiary are intact, organized, and accessible to all. Many are also available on Ancestry.com.

These two individuals here in the middle, number 3821 and 4188, that’s Harmon Waley and William Dainard. They met at the Old Idaho Penitentiary and ended up committing one of the largest kidnappings in the nation of the Weyerhaeuser child and ended up serving time in Alcatraz here. Now, every person who served in the institution had a prison file full of information about their lives, their education, their upbringing and work experience, and even personal thoughts and opinions expressed in letters. These letters display feelings of hope, desperation, love, heartbreak, and provide us insight into the human story of incarceration. The source material is extremely abundant.

This fellow in the bottom right is James Erard Blue Eagle, and he was a portrait artist. And while he was incarcerated, he painted beautiful murals in the prison chapel and wrote letters about the rehabilitative process that he went through while painting these beautiful murals. So, we strive as an organization to tell these stories in accurate and sympathetic ways and work with partnering organizations to accomplish this mission. Understanding the human realities of corrections has been at the heart of staff and volunteer training at the Old Idaho Penitentiary.

Since the development of our interpretive master plan, penitentiary staff and volunteers have toured prison facilities from maximum security to minimum security and community reentry centers to see the shift from the past to the present. This has created a sensitivity for staff and volunteer tour guides who don’t make light of the serious nature of incarceration. We also have an active women’s reentry center on the grounds of the Old Pen, and we work with the women there to volunteer at the site and help us with offense.

In June 2022, we hosted a dozen currently incarcerated men and women at the Old Pen and held a survey. These men and women serving for crimes ranging from murder to drug distribution were open about sharing their stories on what serving a sentence in Idaho is like. Noting a lack of work and educational opportunities, overcrowding and the fear of being sent to an out-of-state facility away from their family and friends, and the constant threat of violence that is ever present in day-to-day activities. Many of these contemporary concerns echo voices from the men and women who serve time in the Old Idaho Penitentiary.

This survey was the beginning of my relationship with the chief of prisons, who you can see in the left of this group here in the green plaid, Chad Page. Chad and I had become good friends since this process began and collaborated on several projects including the creation of a Write to Someone in Prison postcard activity at the entrance of the Old Pen. Visitors are provided with blank postcards and access to colored pencils to draw and decorate messages that are sent to the many prisons throughout the state. We have received extremely positive reviews from correctional officers and chaplains who have noted that these small pieces of art have a huge impact on institutions providing a feeling of connection to the outside world and a small token of positivity and beauty to a place that has so little.

We have also developed the Captivating Conversation series, which is free to the public. The series features a variety of guest speakers and topics ranging from the history of the Old Pen, to issues facing correctional institutions today. All are filmed and uploaded to our YouTube channel for later access. Guests have included the program manager for the Department of Corrections, the former director, the deputy director, the chief of prisons, volunteers who run programs at the institution, as well as six formerly incarcerated individuals who spent many decades within the system.

Our very first Captivating Conversation was actually with a man who served at the Old Idaho Penitentiary in the 1960s. You can actually visit our YouTube channel and watch all these today. These connections have informed how we approach discussing difficult history and brings humanity to the center of our interpretation. While attempting to tell someone’s story in a 300-word panel during the creation of our Faces of the Old Idaho Penitentiary exhibit, we discovered that there’s a lot more to an individual that you can pack into those 300 words.

So, me and a co-worker decided that we wanted to start a podcast and have a long form to tell these people’s stories. So, since 2019, we have, every week, released episodes about one man and one woman who lived and worked at the prison. And now, we have a hundred full length episodes documenting the origin story of individuals, where their criminal behavior began, and their lives as we can find them after incarceration, all with this heavy addition of Idaho and national history. We also have an interview series called Stool Pigeon Saturday that’s released on the weekends on Saturdays. And we interview authors, historians, correctional officers, wardens, and former prisoners with connections to the prison’s history and corrections today.

And this has resulted in community members requesting that we cover their family members’ histories and the donation of several artifacts, photos, and different things as we create this community connection with the prison. We’ve also worked with local artists and filmmakers and developed the 32 Cells Art Show and 13 Stories film competition in which we provide a biography of an individual who lived and work at the site and the freedom to the artist to interpret the story and their pieces. And this has resulted in the publication of our first book that catalogs the first five years and includes nearly a hundred local artists and the stories behind the art that they’re interpreting.

Local filmmakers who have participated in our 13 Stories film competition have actually gone on to win several competitions with their short films, sharing the history of the site. So, this deep understanding of focus on the humanity of the men and women who lived and worked at the Old Idaho Penitentiary has resulted in a site with challenging history that is cherished by both the community and visitors. Through the continued partnership with the Idaho Department of Corrections and several other partners, we are taking steps to reimagine the bizarre experience and humanize the history of the site.

We have a strong commitment to our statewide scholars and representatives. Our next speaker, Nolan Brown, is an example of an essential voice who has participated in the process of reimagining the bizarre experience from the beginning, helping us to share the sacred tribal history of the land. So welcome, Nolan Brown.

Nolan Brown:

[foreign language 00:11:51], Everyone. [foreign language 00:11:53] Nolan Brown. [foreign language 00:11:58] Indian Reservation, [foreign language 00:12:07] Language and Cultural Preservation Department [foreign language 00:12:12]. Well, I’m Nolan Brown. I work for the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes Language and Cultural Preservation Department, and I manage the original territories and historical research program. The mission of OTHR is to preserve and interpret the historical and cultural legacy of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, strengthening connections to original territories among tribal citizens, all levels of government and the public.

Through historical research, education, and advocacy, we safeguard tribal rights and interests while ensuring that the knowledge of our ancestors remains accessible and meaningful for future generations. Tribal partnership with the Old Idaho Penitentiary, I believe, embraced relationality. And relationality is, in my definition, the indigenous knowledge concept that all of creation exists together in an interrelated field of existence, knowledge, action, and being. Relationality in Shoshone language thought is, Damme semma’i naakande. We exist together as one. Other definitions, our reciprocal relations with all of creation and with past, present, and future generations.

So, engaging in successful tribal partnerships in historical or museum research and interpretation, in my opinion, requires embracing the principle of relationality between peoples, land, and even relationships with the seemingly intangible, like tribal spiritual practices. Dr. Sammy Matsaw, also of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes has said, “Indigenous knowledge is knowledge that originates from and has relationality with plants, animals, waterways, and lands, all of creation evolving over space and time.” With research and interpretation, research needs relationships, proper authentic relationships to have meaning. And people need relationships and purpose to have meaning.

The ecosystem of knowledge is not purely geographic or environmental. It is about relatedness thinking, the interdisciplinary and contextualized nature of knowledge. When researchers explicitly contextualize the community, beings, and land where knowledge is collected, incorporating non-linear views of time, shaping understandings of the complex interaction between the knowledge, people and events of past, present, and future, the knowledge becomes holistic, rich, and interrelated. Knowledge itself becomes an ecosystem connecting the participants with each other and the world. This is a very essence of relationality. This is from white, 2021.

So what I’m trying to communicate here is that, in the broader context of interpreting tribal history at Old Idaho Penitentiary, there’s a much larger web of relations that must be considered in discussing the history of OIP, because the time that the prison was actually in use, around a hundred years, pales in comparison to the millennia of time that our peoples, many different peoples used, lived and flourished in the area where Old Idaho Penitentiary now stands. A useful tool that was developed at Idaho State University, our closest university to the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, is the six R’s. It is a framework for ethical native-engaged research in indigenous communities, and it was developed by Dr. Laticia Herkshan, a Shoshone-Bannock tribal member, Dr. Elizabeth Redd and Dr. Georgia Hart-Feredeluces.

And these six R’s, I’ll just list them off and then I’ll read what our partnership has looked like in practice. Relationality, of course, responsibility, representation, relevance, reciprocity, and respect. So, what does this kind of partnership look like in practice? Well, start by researching tribe’s history and tribal government structure. If appropriate, politely ask the tribe for resources that accurately reflect the tribe’s current government status and history. Make sure to understand a tribe’s capacity and choice, including resources and staff time to engage on a particular project. Engage with tribal partners early and often.

And the tribal participatory process is one that exemplifies the need for non-tribal partners looking to work with tribes to acknowledge tribes as sovereign governments with their own distinct procedures, policies and protocols that must be incorporated into project planning. Engaging in this manner can help ensure adequate time and opportunity for tribes to share their experiences, skills, and expertise during project development and for tribal knowledge, preferences and protocols to be thoughtfully incorporated into planned activities. And consider even how to move beyond things like near-land acknowledgments and other tribal recognition messages to more meaningful actions regarding tribal homelands, such as securing access for tribal citizens to natural and cultural resources, on historic properties, land trusts or conservation easements, or even returning lands to tribes.

So, with the Shoshone-Bannock engagement at OIP, the engagement reaches beyond individuals into the larger web of relationships. So, I wanted to share these two photographs. The top one is from the Return of the Boise Valley People event that is held each year at Chief Eagle Eye Reserve, directly across the street from the Old Idaho Penitentiary. It’s a gathering of five tribal nations, Shoshone, Paiute, and Bannock peoples across state lines that return every year to this portion of our homelands and reconnect and acknowledge the deep tribal history that we have. This photograph at top is of our morning prayer ceremony where we as a people use our languages and prayer and look for renewal and healing and reconnection with that site.

The area around OIP is sacred to us. It is lands that we hold dear. And the prayers that we lay down each year when we return are only one of many, a long, long unending chain of prayers that has been said at the area for millennia, as I said. And so, the bottom photo shows this engagement with our tribal cultural practices. I was asked and most humbly accepted the opportunity to give a blessing, prayer and smudge for our advisors and Idaho State Historic Society staff working on this project. And I think that level of deep respect and engagement can go a long way. And relationship building and the larger web of relationships extends just beyond me in my role as a staff and tribal historian, to individual relationships, even tribal relationships as our sister tribes and others. Shoshone, Paiute, I’m sure, will also be engaged with this work at OIP.

So, relationship building goes deeper than just quick phone calls and can you approve this text. I serve the Shoshone-Bannock people as staff, but that means I serve the people who are elders, youth, culture bearers, family and tribal historians, professionals and leaders, all working together to make a better future for our communities and tribal nation. And we draw from our roots in the landscape to tell our story. We follow a process of review to end with the final product that we can be confident reflects our culture, history, and ongoing relationships.

So in the future, when our interpretive exhibits are complete, all of those things, the six R’s, reciprocity being one of them, I would like to return to the exhibits with my family and be proud to show the younger generation, including my daughter, the interpretation there, and the older generation, including my grandfather, the interpretation there, and have that experience for them be something positive and memorable and bring pride and connection to the site for my people, Shoshone-Bannock people, and also to connect that history and that feeling to the general public.

So very grateful for the opportunity to work with the staff at Idaho State Historic Society and everyone else, nFusion, on this project. And I’ll turn it over to Courtney. Thank you. Oh, Jan.

Janet Gallimore:

Thank you, Nolan. It’s an honor and a privilege. So, I’m going to take us on a dive through some visitor engagement. And I think as any of us create projects like this, one of the big questions we all have to answer is what do visitors want, what do they expect and how do we deliver it, and then how do we know that it actually got delivered? So, we have worked purposefully over 15 years to reimagine the interpretation at the Idaho State Museum, the Idaho State Capitol and other state facilities. And through that process of developing those exhibitions, we created a statewide engagement process with Dr. Totoricaguena as our lead.

This intentionality really enabled us to look at how do we create authentic content and measure our impact and results. And we leveraged that knowledge and that experience while we were planning on this visitor experience at the Old Idaho Penn, and we really wanted to make sure that we had demonstrated our ongoing commitment to broad, honest, and collaborative engagement. We’re very grateful for the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities who allowed us to convene scholars, our Idaho tribal members, local and national scholars, museum professionals such as Dr. Brent Glass, and Sean Kelly, who’s joining us today in the audience. Thank you, Sean. Our staff, our board, our foundation, and community members in this effort, and to create a bold interpretive plan that really allowed us to move forward addressing this very difficult content.

We wanted to foster open and respectful dialogue and make sure that the stories we were telling were grounded in truth and in accuracy. This master plan was approved by our board and then formed the basis of our request for proposals process as well as the spring 2024 selection of [inaudible 00:24:28] National nFusion as our design partner.

So, audience testing really played a crucial role in informing our storyline matrix and understanding our public priorities. Gloria created a multi-layer process to understand public attitudes about and interest by our visitors in the Old Pen. These included statewide surveys, on-site surveys, in-depth focus groups with a range of people you can see on the right side here. I hope everyone in the back can see a really, really, really broad stroke of engagement early in the process. And this information really provided us with key insight as to what people would expect from us about this visitor experience and new exhibitions.

So, I think that it won’t be very surprising to share with you the key findings include that people had a very high level of interest with exhibits that had original artifacts, that’s not unusual for our field, inmate biographies and engaging and critical questions about the justice system. Due to the size and scope of the project, remember, four-acre campus, and that’s just the main area, but there’s opportunities, again, for interpretation outside those walls. But there’s a very high interest in learning about the architecture and usage of the buildings over time. And then, of course, the humanization of the convicted criminals and their daily life also rated very highly.

Gloria tells us anything over 65% percent in these surveys mean that you are really tracking well on these numbers. And so, these top ones really show high levels of engagement and impact to us. But I also wanted to share because it’s reams and reams and reams of information, that data also indicated that people wanted concrete experiences of the convicted criminals at the Old Pen, more so than just abstract concept of justice. And that visitors should also be able to understand as a result of their experience, the complexity of fairness, justice, punishment and rehabilitation. And of course, it was validated that the early history of the site, the tribal involvement in the site and the Idaho’s territorial aspects of the site should be shared.

So, what does that mean in terms of really helping to inform the way the project was going to work? So, the information gleaned from the audience testing and from storyline matrix, draft exhibit designs, potential media treatment and more. And Gloria likes to say we operationalize this data. So how that will work, at least thus far, because it’s still a work in progress, is, at this beginning entry experience into the Old Pen, there’s two very important experiences. One, you get to immerse yourself in what it would’ve been like to be brought into the prison as a prisoner and then work your way through that experience as an inducted inmate.

And then this area is the theater area, which will be an opportunity for us to share the context of the territorial era and the tribal relationship to the land. Then as we move through the rest of these cellhouse experiences, there’s an opportunity for us to have immersive noise to give that sense of what the daily life would’ve been like, full of noise, activity and what have you. And then down in this area is the city behind walls survey gallery. And this really allows us a huge dive into the story of the site.

And some of the topics that are being looked at for the storyline here, it’s about 5,600 square foot exhibition, is, who’s a prisoner, where visitors get to examine prisoner demographics and how attitude towards crime and punishment have evolved. Doing time, which showcases the regimented structure and culture of incarceration, highlighting how individuals spent their time and formed social bonds. Hard time, where visitors learn about riots and escapes and the realities of confinement. Habits of industry, which is one of my favorite areas, where people get to really understand the work that people did there that helped provide job skills to prepare prisoners for their release.

And then learning life skills, where vocational training provided education and shaped rehabilitation efforts. And then getting out, which explores sentencing, parole, and many other factors that determine the path to freedom. Also, there will be 22 interpretive signage areas that will describe the usage of the buildings and what happened there, again, reflecting what the visitor wanted to know.

And so, once we had framed the experience throughout schematic design, then we went back to different groups and did storyline testing with tourism professionals, educational professionals, the general public and Old Pen volunteers and tour guides to see if we were on target. And storyline testing revealed the exhibitions were highly rated for interest and impact, and then were also considered very important for teaching justice concepts, featuring exhibition panels, Idaho history territorial examples. And people also felt that the plan had good traffic flow. That data tells us that we are on target for an experience that is honest, accessible, and emotionally powerful.

In conclusion, just wanted to share that the transformation of the Old Pen goes far beyond a simple renovation. It really redefines how the public will engage with one of Idaho’s most compelling historical landmarks informed by national advisors, tribal partners, regional scholars, educators, focus groups, surveys, and a business plan. This initiative really invites visitors to have a more immersive and thought-provoking experience. And our intended impact, and then we’ll invite you all to see if we got there, includes deepening public understanding of how prisons function within the broader criminal justice system, shedding light on the Old Pen’s unique role in shaping Idaho and the American West, humanizing history by drawing visitors into the lived experience of those who were incarcerated and who lived there over time, exploring their routines and their realities, and fostering critical thinking about how changing laws and shifting public attitudes really have shaped the justice system in our country over time, reflected, of course, in this 100 year moment reflected by the Old Pen, inviting people to reflect on the values and choices that drive society today.

And this updated experience really just does not look at the past but looks at how do we have honest conversations about fairness, change, equity, and what does it mean to treat people with dignity in a place where once many people were confined. And I’ll hand it over to Courtney.

Courtney Kleinman:

Hello. Well, as the design builder for this new visitor center and museum at the Old Pen, the first thing we looked at in approaching this project was how to take this amazing breadth of work that had been done during the master plan, during the audience testing and outreach, the tribal partnerships, and for years before that by the Old Pen staff, and build on that foundation to deliver a compelling experience that can really tell these difficult stories in an approachable and engaging way for the audience.

So, we immediately saw that there were a few critical considerations for the exhibit design build planning process that we wanted to put into place. The first was building the right project team mix to carry on the work done to date, while also bringing creative and feasible design and delivery solutions to the table to make sure that this project could be built. The second was really adopting the themes and values outlined in the master plan as the guiding principle for the project. And then aligning the design build team with those values and shared goals from day one.

And the third was customizing the project delivery plan to respect, maintain, and uphold the relationships and the commitments that have been established during the master plan, and find ways to truly and authentically integrate those into the process. So, I just want to explore those considerations a little bit. So, when we talk about building the right team, due to the extensive work done on the master plan process, this project had a really impressive list of resources already involved when we were brought on at the beginning of the design phase.

So in partnership, in close collaboration with the historical society, we really recognized and appreciated that in order to keep moving forward efficiently, keep the team aligned around the work that had been done to date, not to backtrack, we needed and wanted to continue the involvement of as many key roles as possible while also augmenting that with the best design resources to shape, understand, and deliver the content. So, we were really excited to learn that the amazing team of advisors and stakeholders and partners would remain active participants throughout the project, while at the same time… Oops. At the same time, we were honored to be able to add in our team of trusted and talented partners into the mix.

And then also getting to integrate the interpretive planner, the audience tester, and subject matter experts from the master plan process actually into the design build team to really maintain and uphold that knowledge base and those aligned values. And here’s a little shout-out to our amazing project team that is currently working on this, and some of them are in this room. So, thank you for your involvement. Once we had the right team in place, the next critical consideration became ensuring that the team was closely aligned around those themes and values that had been outlined in all of the master plan development.

So, the master plan for this project had resulted in three possible thematic approaches for the experience, all of which delivered on the audience and community engagement outcomes in very different ways. So our first step as a team was to understand the what and the why behind each of these interpretive themes, really understand and dive into the results of the audience testing and evaluation to date, and then gather for a work session with all the key stakeholders to collectively weigh which approach best aligned with the project goals and would deliver this important content in the most effective way for this place and this audience.

As a testament to the amazing groundwork done prior to the design phase, we left the project kickoff meeting with an agreed-upon thematic approach and direction, which was a really impressive process to be part of. So having that enabled us to efficiently and quickly move through the programming phase and on through schematic design, knowing that we had this aligned vision to fall back on. We’re now entering the DD phase for the project, and we continue to benefit from having this solid foundation as a baseline to measure against and build on. And having the strong platform has also really enabled the design build team and the Old Pen team to immediately start collaborating and figure out the best ways to deliver some really difficult stories and hard topics.

And the third big consideration for us was how to optimize a project delivery plan unique to this project and make sure we were both honoring and further developing the essential relationships and commitments that the historical society had been building for years and establishing during the master plan. This really included discussion and close collaboration to determine things like, when would future rounds of audience testing and evaluation be most effective to both serve as an update to the engaged community, but also support the design process at the right times? Who were the key stakeholders and when would they need to approve and provide input? And what did that process look like for each individual group, as it really varies? Are there unique considerations or accommodations needed in the project schedule to allow community partners to be authentically involved at the right stages?

For example, being able to plan ahead to bring all of the tribal partners from around the state together for in-person work sessions, or incorporating specific protocols or practices into the project schedule from day one so that it’s not an afterthought, or how and when to coordinate with the governor’s office around legislative sessions and when to do presentations and meetings. And lastly, we continue to explore a variety of ways to incorporate the various partners into the production process, including working with the Idaho Department of Corrections to teach currently incarcerated individuals how to fabricate some of the artistic sculptural elements we’re planning for the project, as well as discussions with correctional industries about hiring and training local labor for on-site installation work.

This definitely creates added layers of complexity to project planning and project scheduling and is an ongoing and evolving process, but we firmly believe that this will really pay off in the long run and that that authentic stakeholder involvement and buy-in will be evident in that final guest experience. So, I’ll hand it back to Jan to summarize our key takeaways before we jump into some interactivity.

Janet Gallimore:

Thank you, Courtney. I just want to say thank you to Courtney and Nolan and Anthony for their preparation of all of this work. We hope we’ve met your expectations, but we want to leave you with a few thoughts on takeaways and how engaging builds trust. So, a stakeholder advised, master plan develops trust and efficiency, which I think was one of the big surprises that we all took away, is that we were able to really move quickly. And as you all know, moving quickly in this environment and getting to your product is really important. And so that early alignment really enabled us to do both.

Strong ongoing relationships build trust. It’s not ever a one and done with anyone as we all know. Those conversations and honest conversations are imperative to making sure that the content can be respectfully and accurately conveyed. Audience and data-driven community engagement really provides a solid foundation. And I have Gloria in my head right now. She’s in Spain. She’s the ambassador to the Basque community from Idaho. So, she had to be there. But she will always echo in my ear saying there’s a big difference between what information is useful and what information is interesting, and you want to go for useful because that’s what’s going to be helpful in terms of prioritizing exhibition content, and then establishing the right team to deliver. And respect the vision and the stories and relationships is critical.

And so, I think now, our goal is to engage this community in a conversation. So, I’m going to turn it over back to Courtney. Thank you, Courtney.

Courtney Kleinman:

Yeah. So, I think we’ve demonstrated that we really like audience engagement and testing. So, we would be remiss to not try and do that with this room and really extend this conversation. So, we’re very interested, and hopefully this works. Oh, look at that. So, we’ve got a little Slido poll if you’re interested in joining. All right. So, we’ll go to the next slide and let everyone answer. So, our first question we wanted to engage everyone with is, what is your biggest challenge to delivering difficult stories? Be it at your institution or on projects that you faced. What do you feel is the biggest challenge?

All right. That’s amazing. I think that this really aligns with a lot. And Jan and Anthony and Nolan, please pick a microphone if you have anything you want to add to this. And then we’ll do a couple of slides and then want to really give people the opportunity to talk about some of this.

Actually, I will just do that now. If anyone wants to speak, wants to elaborate on anything they put, please feel free to come to the microphone. We’d to hear anything you have to add. Yeah, go for it.

Speaker 5:

Sounds good. That’s better. I’m not really sure how to ask this question, but I was curious if you guys had trouble getting buy-in from, I guess I would say people who might’ve been impacted by the crimes committed by the people that you’re presenting. Was there any discussion on that or did you purposely leave space in the exhibit to honor that in some way? Or is that just outside of the scope and not something that you’re trying to do at this time, which is absolutely understandable. I was just curious if anyone brought that up. I’m going to go sit.

Anthony Parry:

Okay. That’s a fantastic question. We are working with IDOC and Victim Services and trying to get their voice in there. We’ve reached out a lot to try to tell the story of victims. And we’re very sensitive to these stories and try to include names and these individuals and try to avoid some stories that are more contemporary. So, we focus on the things that are 75, 80 years plus in the history, trying to avoid re-victimizing individuals that are currently around. As I said, our first interview was with somebody who served in the sixties.

So, he was in his seventies when he came out to the site and visited and told his story. And his victims… He committed a robbery. His victims likely were still around as well. But yeah. I don’t know if that answered your question. But it’s something we’re always very sensitive about that. And we have had victims who’ve come in and told the story and they’ve wanted to see the mugshot of individuals. So yeah. Oh, I’m sorry. [inaudible 00:43:33].

Speaker 6:

As far as sharing our story, I’ve always worked in museums that are a part of a larger, like a county, a city, a university. And so, every once in a while… I’m politics from administration. We’ll try to do an exhibit that is honest and isn’t just light and fluffy, but it shows our parent organization in not the best light. And that’s gotten a little dicey. I was wondering if… Now I know the prison isn’t currently still run by the state, but you are the state, the Idaho State Historical Society. And Janet, you mentioned that one of your favorite parts of the exhibit is talking about the job training and job skill training, and there’s a large community that believes that that’s not the benefit it is, and rather it’s cheap labor to produce something that the state needs.

I was wondering if that’s just an example of some of the dichotomy and the stories you’re probably dealing with, and if there was any struggle with showing some of the voices of discontent with the state and the prison system.

Janet Gallimore:

Well, I think my answer is a little different than it might’ve been like a year ago. But I think what we are trying to do is keep the major portion of the interpretation within the context of the site’s history itself, within that 100 years, with the exception of, of course, the early stories, the land stories. We will bring the stories up to the present through programming. But I think what we want to do is when visitors come, they can understand the lens of the story through evidence and through documents and through what happened there.

I don’t think we would… Anthony has a fantastic relationship with the Department of Corrections, but we wouldn’t put anything in the story that talks about our opinion about that because obviously we can’t speak on behalf of the department of prisons or the governor, and we would just be very careful about stating facts, using evidence, and then doing what you’re talking about through programming and through opportunities for more facilitated dialogue so people could actually take a dive into that together and not make assumptions based upon an exhibit experience. Does that make sense?

Speaker 6:

Yeah. I guess, was there ever an instance where the evidence told a not great story, and did you ever get any pressure to suppress that not great story because it made someone else look bad?

Janet Gallimore:

Maybe Anthony’s a better person to answer this, but what I was really shocked at the data is that people really wanted those gruesome stories. And I was really taken aback by that because what I thought, we’ve been very focused on the humanity of the site and the people who worked there and what they did and how they lived. And people want to see someone in a cage. And that’s pretty shocking to me. But we’re going to be careful. It’s going to be very clear that that’s rated X or rated B for violence, but that’s what people want. So, we’ll do it and then we’ll see what happens. I don’t know. Is there a better answer, Anthony?

Anthony Parry:

We try to tell every story utilizing public resources. And there are folks locally in Idaho who utilize our same prison files and different things and are very sensationalized in how they interpret the history into crime tours of Boise and a crime podcast that…. Ours is very, it’s probably boring to the majority of visitors because we try to keep a really high standard. And we aren’t edutainment. We’re more an educational podcast and not a true crime, blood guts core podcast. So, we, yeah, probably make it more boring than we need to, but we try to keep a really high level, just being sensitive to everybody involved in it. So yeah. Hi. Question.

Speaker 7:

Hi. Thank you. I guess I kept thinking about Alcatraz as you were talking about this. I’ve lived in the Bay Area for 30 years. And Alcatraz, I believe, does a lot of what you’re describing as far as the history, but it’s really turned into this tourist attraction where people mock incarceration. I mean, the gift shop is mocking prisoners in a sense of, I went to Alcatraz. And so, I appreciate it seems like you’re being much more mindful of that. But I also, on the flip side, when you’re talking about what people want, I think there’s a difference between what people need versus what they want.

And I’m currently working in a prison, doing museum studies, internship with women in a prison. It’s the first time it’s been done. And I just think that we… I don’t know what it was like in the timeframe that you’re focusing on, but we don’t talk enough about the factors of how people end up incarcerated. The state gets a lot of ways of describing their side of it in the carceral system. And so, I’m just curious if, in part of your education and programming, if you’re including that, because I think it’s really an important aspect.

Anthony Parry:

That’s a fantastic question. And a lot of what we do is informed by my relationship with IDOC and asking, what do you think the appropriate level of this is? A onesie, a striped onesie with a prisoner’s number on it being sold in our gift shop? Questionable. Maybe not. Selling mugs with mugshots of individuals? Questionable. We stopped doing that. So, a lot of these things are very informed by that. I can’t remember the rest of your question there.

Courtney Kleinman:

[Inaudible 00:50:01].

Anthony Parry:

Yes. Demographics of why people came to prison. So, we do have a lot of statistics that we utilize in the interpretation in this survey master plan, talking about literacy and education levels, poverty levels, different racial backgrounds of the prison population. So that is a big focus in this new survey. And we discuss a lot of that for our educational field trips. We get fourth graders who are learning Idaho history, and we get thousands of fourth graders who come in every year. We talk a lot about the population and the trends and different things that brought people in. So yeah.

Courtney Kleinman:

We’ve already had votes. So, has your organization utilized a formal master plan to deliver difficult content? And if so, how successful was it? And then our last question was, what is your top consideration for incorporating community and tribal partners into your organization or project? We kind of have open-ended here. Or what is the biggest challenge you see? Or are there questions to how to incorporate tribal partnerships?

Speaker 8:

You guys are my neighbors. I’m from Moscow, Idaho. And we have a prison education initiative exhibit that happens once a year in collaboration with the university, but we haven’t engaged with the tribe. And that’s something that I’m trying to work on for this one, for the Nimiipuu tribe, and just how to go about that. And also, my question was about giving tours to kids because the artwork is so approachable. The kids love it. But we can’t talk about the prisoners because they’re still incarcerated. So how do you have these hard conversations but still have them see the beauty in what’s being made?

Anthony Parry:

[Inaudible 00:51:56].

Nolan Brown:

Well, with regards to the tribal partnership, my advice to everyone is just to do a little bit of research on whichever tribe is involved, could be involved, whose land your institution or project sits on, and look through their website. Most tribes have a website, and you can see, for example, if they have a tribal historic preservation officer or a cultural resources director or others that you might be able to reach out to.

For my tribe specifically, we’re lucky in that we have a large language and cultural preservation department with several different programs, language instruction, and then my own, original territories historical research, that has this function of being point of contact for educational interpretive projects. And now not every tribe will have a setup like that. That’s why I recommend you do a little bit of homework. I can say though; in working with the Nez Perce tribe, they do have a very strong cultural resources department and leadership there that they should be able to help you.

Anthony Parry:

Thanks. Yeah. Working with education teams, we have an education advisory committee. And so, we work with local and state teachers around the state to talk about what are you teaching in your classes, how can we expand on that? And so, our guided tours, we talk about the prison’s history, but we also talk about Idaho’s history, mining that brought people in in the first place, the tribal, the background of the grounds and the sacred space. So, we incorporate a lot of Idaho educational standards into our guided tours. And we don’t go into extreme depth on capital punishment and death and things like that. So mostly focused Idaho history, a little bit of the prison’s history. Yeah.

Janet Gallimore:

And Nakia Williamson is the person you want to reach out to at the Nez Perce tribe. And if you need his contact information, I’m happy to give it to you.

Courtney Kleinman:

Excellent. Well, I think we’re just about at our time, but I also just want to note, thank you for all of this input. This is really valuable, and I think resonates, as I see the answers come in, resonates with a lot of the things we’ve been talking about, and we really love to continue the discussion. So, we will be hanging around afterwards. Please feel free to come up and continue this conversation. Because obviously, this is all an evolving process. And I see a couple people in here talking about paying participants.

I think that’s something too as we look at involving community partners, tribal partners. I really love that Nolan talked about politely asking also for people’s time and not just assuming that community members have time or the ability to be involved, and how do you really go about making that a partnership that will work for the project. So, thank you for raising those things. I really appreciate it. Anyone else have anything to pull us on?

Nolan Brown:

In Shoshone language, the phrase [foreign language 00:55:18] means both thank you and that is all.

Courtney Kleinman:

Thank you.

Anthony Parry:

Thank you all so much.

Janet Gallimore:

Thank you.


This recording is generously supported by The Wallace Foundation.

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