Highlights from August’s ECHO Digital Session
Whose Story Is It? Repatriation, Repair, and Renaming at the Museum of Us
At August’s ECHO Digital, Micah Parzen, CEO of the San Diego Museum of Us, shared the museum’s bold, ongoing journey of repatriation, repair, and renaming. The headlines about changing the museum’s name were never the real story. They were evidence of a deeper transformation: one rooted in values, tested by resistance, and sustained by care.
Here are five takeaways that invite us to reflect on what’s possible when values become practice.
Care Is a Strategy, Not a Perk
The museum’s “culture of care” reshaped the workplace. Wage equity, salary caps, community-centered leave, and Holidays for All weren’t add-ons. They were strategies that built trust, retention, and the capacity for transformation.
Language Shapes Culture
Words carried weight. By shifting from collections to cultural resources, artifacts to belongings, and human remains to ancestors, the museum re-centered people and relationships over objects. As Micah put it, “When we started talking differently, we started thinking differently. And acting differently.”
Boards Can Break or Build Change
Governance set the conditions for moral courage. Micah was blunt: “If you change your board, you change your museum.” A litmus test – no room for the “smartest person in the room” who takes up all the space – freed the board to think differently. The budget itself became a moral, guiding, document.
Transformation Is the Long Game
Repairing relationships with harmed communities is fragile, slow, and full of missteps. Or as Micah described it, a “sticky thicket.” But showing up consistently and acknowledging mistakes began to shift trust.
Values Light the Way
National attention and controversy surrounding the renaming grounded the Museum of Us in who they were and what they stood for. When values became visible, pockets of resistance gave way, and the flywheel began to turn.
The Closing Invitation
Micah left us with a question:
“What is the lion’s version of the story at your zoo or aquarium? Whose voices, whose histories, whose relationships with animals and land remain untold? What would it look like to flip the script?”
