I finished up my basic research for a big 2nd Century Commission paper today. For those who aren’t up on NPS gossip, the Service is turning 100 in a few years, and so someone very important has created a group of equally important (read: well paid and over-educated, of which Sandra Day O’Connor is the only one I can think of off the top of my head) people to get together and decide whether they should continue to destroy the national park system or actually attempt to make it look like how we pretend in international circles it does look. Soooo…. My name might not be first on the paper (that honor will go to my boss), but it will be flashed up there on a marquis in front of several very powerful white men who may or may not decide that my job is worth the pennies a year I get paid to do it. Yeah, I’m pretty stoked.

It’s focusing on trends in the state of cultural resources in the National Park System. We’ve got inadequate storage for museum and archival collections, lack of planning for the management and maintenance of historic structures, entirely insufficient staffing needs (I even read about a park that has to use its writer/editor as a museum technician because they don’t have the money to hire anyone else), missing historical and other resource research (much of which is required by NPS regulation in order to develop management plans, which, funny enough, many parks are missing as well), and (my personal favorite) the fact that basically ethnography is treated like crap. I mean, we’ve been sh*ttin’ on the Native Americans and other minorities for centuries, why stop now? So the report has a lot to say, and I certainly hope that people listen. Or at least pretend to. Smile and nod. Or something.