LYNCHBURG, Va. (AP) - Emily Kubota, the Lynchburg Museum System’s curator, was in high school the first time she came face-to-face with the complicated truth about history.
As her class was learning about World War II, Kubota quickly noticed certain parts of the story were missing.
“I recognized that the Japanese internment camp story was not told in school,” said Kubota, whose grandfather spent time in the camps during World War II.
This realization led to more questions than answers.
“Like, why is that left out or why is that interpreted that way? Why is that said about it?” Kubota, 33, recalled wondering. “… If this is missing, then what else is missing from the history books?”
Kubota, who is of both Asian and Amish descent, has made telling the stories of minorities and indigenous groups a major focus of her career as a curator.
In January, she will take the next step in that work when she heads to Charleston, South Carolina, to participate in the Smithsonian Institution’s Interpreting African American History & Culture Workshop.
“Just to be connected to that institution, to that program, is really an honor,” said Ted Delaney, director of the Lynchburg Museum System, who notes that entry into the workshop is extremely competitive.
Growing up in the village of Lowell near Marietta, Ohio, Kubota always expressed an interest in history.
She read tons of historical fiction and even played with historically-themed Barbie dolls from Mattel’s American Stories Collection.
“There’s a Colonial Barbie doll I had, and I had the pioneer one,” she said.
Kubota eventually took her passion outside toys and books, volunteering at the Campus Martius Museum in high school and interning at the Athens County Historical Society & Museum during her time at Ohio University.
After graduating with a degree in Classical Civilization, Kubota worked as a field tech on various archaeological digs throughout the Midwest.
“Any time infrastructure is getting put in, the builders are required to have archaeological teams come out and make sure they’re not disturbing any sites,” she said. “And so, I was part of those teams that would come out.”
Less than a year later, she returned to museums, landing a job at the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum, located on the Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation in Clewiston, Florida, where she interpreted the history and culture of the Seminole people for visitors.
“I loved working on the reservation, because I feel like it’s an experience that hardly anyone has (if they aren’t) a tribal member,” Kubota said. “I felt like it was a huge honor to get to hear their stories firsthand, to get to tell their stories.”
Working on the reservation helped ingrain a cultural sensitivity in Kubota that has been beneficial to the Lynchburg Museum, where she joined the staff in 2015, two years after moving to the Hill City, Delaney said.
“She’s always thinking, ‘Whose voice have we not heard from?’” Delaney said. “Are we giving people a chance to speak up and tell their own story, or are we telling the story for them or telling them what we think should be their history? She thinks about things in a way that people don’t always do.”
Kubota started at the Lynchburg Museum as an assistant curator. This past summer, she was promoted to curator.
Before the promotion, Kubota spent most of her time working with museum’s 40,000-item collection of artifacts. She would inventory older items - a job that involved photographing, transcribing documents, labeling and figuring out how each piece connects with Lynchburg history - as well as researching newly donated items.
“We have a big backlog of large collections,” Kubota said. “So if something comes in in one or two pieces, we get through that pretty easily. Sometimes collections come in in thousands of papers.”
These items play a crucial role in the museum, because they can tell many different stories, Kubota said.
Take a teacup in the parlor room of Point of Honor.
“How the white family would have interacted with that teacup is totally different than how the enslaved people would have interacted with that teacup,” she said. “It’s the same cup, but it meant different things to different people.”
As curator, Kubota no longer manages the day-to-day handling of artifacts and record-keeping, something she said she deeply misses.
However, her new role has allowed her to help shape the direction of the museum’s focus. Kubota now spends much more of her time interfacing directly with the public, attending events as a representative of the museum and answering questions from the public.
“She really has a special combination of skill and expertise in the field but also the people skills to engage people in meaningful ways,” Delaney said. “It’s not always the case that in a curator, you have somebody who’s both really proficient at their job but who also can really engage the general public and talk to people, whoever they are, about history … and that’s where she really excels.”
As curator, Kubota also is much more involved in exhibit planning and research and creating other programs for the museums. She has been a major part of the museum’s push toward exploring the history of the enslaved people who lived and worked at Point of Honor.
In November, the museum held its first tour that told the history of the house entirely from the perspective of an enslaved person. Delaney said Kubota was one of the core staffers who conceived and planned the event.
Kubota also is involved in a project researching and documenting the history of Daniel’s Hill. Just last week, she attended the city’s public meeting on the Dearington Neighborhood Plan.
“She has brought in a lot of this push and drive to get all these new voices into the … historic interpretation here,” said Christian Crouch, who replaced Kubota as assistant curator when she was promoted. “Her relentless drive forward is really good. It’s really good, and it makes you also push forward and doing that kind of stuff as well.”
The workshop Kubota will attend next month on a full scholarship will help further her work in this area.
Organized through a collaboration between the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Charleston County Park and Recreation Commission, the workshop’s goal is to “recognize professionals with the potential to make the greatest contributions to their museum or historic site in the field of interpretation” and provide them “resources (and) training in the ethical interpretation of history,” according to the Smithsonian’s website.
Participants leave the 32-hour workshop with a certification from the National Association for Interpretation.
Upon her return, Kubota will be better equipped to share the training with others at the Lynchburg Museum as well as other historic organizations in the area.
“Those really are the thought leaders in the museum field when it comes to African American history; they’re really the leaders who we look up to, and they’re doing the most cutting edge work in the field,” Delaney said. “And so, for her to be there to have that experience, it’s really wonderful for Lynchburg to get the benefit of that training.”
While Kubota said she never set out with the intention of focusing on minority history in her museum career, she is glad to have ended up on this path.
Everyone, she said, should be able to see themselves in the history we’re teaching.
“As far as interpretation goes, whether that’s exhibits or tours or programming, museums have been part of the problem for a really long time,” Kubota said. “It’s up to us now as professionals in 2019 to realize our mistakes that we’ve made in the past and address them, come to terms with them and improve.”
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