The museum wants you

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Does archaeology, botany or Canadian history interest you? If it does, then you might want to take advantage of a summer employment opportunity at the Provincial Museum of Alberta.

For 15 weeks beginning on April 28, two Aboriginal students will start summer internships for the museum. The employees will have the option to work in a number of areas, including communications and marketing, conservation, entomology, ethnology, geology, mammology, ornithology or paleontology. The candidates for these two positions must be currently enrolled in college or university with an interest in museum studies.

Sponsored by the museum, Syncrude Canada Ltd., and the National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation, this is the sixth year the program has been offered.

Dr. Susan Berry, curator of ethnology at the museum, said the students applying should write a short essay that discusses what their academic interests are, as well as their interest in museums.

"So that we can see which programs they will be matched up with," she said.

Berry said the staff tries to include different activities for the students to do so that they do not get frustrated doing just one thing. Some of the skills that will be learned are artifacts cataloguing, collection organization, and artifact identification, care and research.

"We try to think of different things that would interest the students so that they are really contributing to something that will happen at the museum, so that it becomes a real-life experience for them," she said.

"We had one student last year who worked with our paleo-botanist doing some field work with her, and she worked with analyzing seeds and pollen that were recovered from archeological expeditions," she said.

"This program is what the three organizations decided upon when the Aboriginal gallery opened in the fall of 1997. This is when they said 'Yes we want to develop a relationship with the First Nations people and the Metis people, and this will be a good way to help people in the community.' And this is a good way for anyone who wants to go into one of these types of careers," said Berry.

The program is open to Native people from across Canada. For further information log on to the museum Web site at www.pma.edmonton.ab.ca