Museum Technician, Doctoral Student Weighs in on his Summer Job at the Sault Museum

By Mitchell Harris

Like many who grew up in the Soo, my first experiences of the museum were school field trips and summer camps as a child. I vividly remember making papier-mâché compositions in the art room on the third floor during a summer camp in 2005 or 2006, when I was 7 or 8 years old.

​I am now 26 years old and a doctoral student of political science at York University in Toronto, specializing in the history of political thought with a focus on French Marxism in the twentieth century. During the school year, September to May, I work as a teaching assistant in the department of social science, helping undergraduate students learn about social theory, political economy and human rights. While I love teaching, there is one serious downside: the gig only pays during the school year. For me, this means that I need a summer job to keep the books balanced. This is what brought me to apply to, and become the successful candidate for, the museum’s summer student position.

Officially, I am a museum technician. The word “technician” is derived from the Ancient Greek word techne, meaning “skill” or “practical knowledge”. A technician is someone who possesses (or, in my case, learns to possess) the practical knowledge associated with a particular craft. A museum technician, therefore, learns to possess the skills of good “museumship”, that is, the practical knowledge of maintaining museum collections.


This, succinctly put, is what I did for the summer. My main responsibilities included digitizing photos and documents for electronic storage, cataloguing and organizing collections, and cleaning and encapsulating items in polyester film for preservation. In addition to these practical skills, I prepared research articles for publication on the museum’s blog, gave a tour to friends visiting from Toronto, and made a fresh pot of coffee for my coworkers every morning (a call back to my days as a barista many years ago).


I loved working at the museum this summer. The people here are great, I learned something new every day, and there is something magical about the building and its timeless, grandiose architecture. One of my predecessors has written about two paranormal encounters he experienced while working here, which I – fortunately, or unfortunately – never experienced myself. For students looking for a fun summer job with opportunities to learn about Sault Ste. Marie history and the work that goes into running a museum, I highly recommend applying to this position next summer.


As my time here is coming to an end, I find myself asking what this job has taught me about my research in political theory. My first inclination is to deny any connection. It is obvious that you do not need to read all 3,000 pages of Antonio Gramsci’s prison notebooks to know how to use a scanner for digitizing old photos. Nor do you need to encapsulate a map to understand the Hegelian dialectic or the Kantian categorical imperative. You certainly do not need to grapple with all three generations of the Frankfurt School in order to catalogue artifacts of bygone eras on a dusty shelf in the basement archives.


However, this does not mean that there is nothing in common between my research and my summer job at the museum. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, written in 1852, Karl Marx (please excuse his gendered language, still common in the nineteenth century) wrote: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”


Marx was writing about Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, who seized power in a coup d’état in 1851, dissolved the National Assembly of the Second Republic and established the Second French Empire. The radical republican aspirations of the French Revolution of 1789 were stymied by this new regime, which historians have identified as a precursor to modern fascism. The republicans who sought a freer and equal society could not make history as they pleased; the return of Bonapartism was an obstacle transmitted from the past that could only be overcome by the Third French Republic of 1870.


This quote from Marx draws our attention to a certain fact of political action: that it is not freely made. When we go out into the world seeking to change it, we encounter an assemblage of empirical facts, long-standing histories and deeply embedded traditions that resist our attempts to change them, and in fact may directly oppose us. This is why Marx continues: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”


So, for anyone seeking to become politically active, seeking to change the future – whether that is a future without climate change, without LGBTQ+ discrimination, without racial injustice, without poverty, or any other issues that inspire you – a good place to start is at the museum. When you are standing in an archive, surrounded by relics of the past, you gain insight into the circumstances of political action in the present, and knowledge of this can assist you in changing the future.


This, it seems to me, what my summer job as a technician at the museum taught me about political theory. It is at the museum that we can learn about the circumstances given and transmitted from the past, in hopes that we might one day make our own history – if not freely, then at least with some informed consideration.

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