Internship program offers museum experience to qualified students

The Friends of the Royal Alberta Museum Society is giving a young Aboriginal student a head start. Hanako Nagao, an arts and cultural management student at MacEwan University, is spending her summer working for the museum’s marketing department as part of FRAMS internship program.

“I’ve been surprised by how much is directly relatable to what I’m doing in school. I’ve taken some marketing and publicity classes, and it’s different seeing a press release for a fake organization and then seeing an actual one here,” said Nagao, of her experiences so far this summer.

“It’s been really valuable and it’s kind of hands-on teaching what the courses might have taught more theoretically,” she said.

Nagao is Métis, and originally from Golden, BC. She has worked with organizations like the Métis Nation for the Columbia River Society, running youth groups and acting as a youth representative. Her position at the museum is only four months—from May to August—but should give her a competitive edge when she enters the labour market.

“Originally I was in art school until I decided I didn’t want to make art a career, I wanted to help artists connect with audiences instead. Marketing is a really great way of doing that,” she said.

While Nagao started her internship off wondering if the job was really her “cup of tea,” she is now convinced this is the path she wants to follow. She’s enjoyed everything she’s done from snapping photos to interviewing curators and writing online blogs for the museum website. The blog posts have been a key piece of her experience, and through them she’s had ample opportunity to tailor her work to her education.  

“I really got to pick and choose what was beneficial for me. It was a very open process… They had a schedule set out for me but it was like, ‘What do you want to learn this summer, and why are you here?’” she said, of how the museum collaborated with her on her internship duties.

And to her surprise, she also got a taste of just how exciting the behind-the-scenes life at a museum really is.

“There’s way more going on behind the museum than you’d expect. For every field of study we have here, there’s at least one (person) if not a team of people behind it doing research… There’s so much more to a museum than just walking in and looking at artifacts.”

The Aboriginal museum internship program has been around since 1998. However, it has existed in different forms and with different funders over the years, according to Peggi Ferguson, president of FRAMS. It was originally created after a report released by the Assembly of First Nations and the Canadian Museum Society emphasized the need for Aboriginal people to be involved in “museology,” she says.

“There was concern that young Aboriginal people were not interested in museums at all and in fact maybe a bit against them. So we thought how can we get people to understand what museums really do and how museums are interested in actually preserving culture?” said Ferguson.

The original sponsors for the program were Indspire—an Aboriginal education organization—Syncrude, and FRAMS. FRAMS now funds much of the program themselves, but with help from generous donors like Peace Hills Insurance, says Ferguson.

“We’ve seen a lot of benefits from the program and we decided as a group we were going to keep it going. We felt it was worth it… And I think it’s really opened up a lot of avenues for the students,” she said.

Photo Caption: Friends of the Royal Alberta Museum Society. President Peggi Ferguson-Pell (left) with Hanako Nagao.