ASU Public History partners with Eastern Arizona Museum to document lost history
The Eastern Arizona Museum documents the history of the Gila River Valley. Courtesy photo
Nearly 150 miles southeast from Arizona State University’s Tempe campus sits the town of Pima, Arizona. Nestled within the Gila River Valley and established by Mormon settlers in 1879, Pima was a thriving boomtown at the turn of the 20th century due to its industries in mining, agriculture and cattle.
As mining decreased, though, the town declined and citizens' descendants moved elsewhere, according to Katy Kole de Peralta, associate clinical professor of global history at ASU’s School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies.
Though it is no longer the vibrant town it once was, Pima still holds history from the many cultures and people whose ancestors touched the valley that surrounds it.
The Eastern Arizona Museum has housed this history for more than 60 years. While the museum had been largely organizing and storing its documents in filing cabinets within the building, it is now beginning to digitize these holdings through a partnership with the ASU Public History program.
The documents are digitized through Omeka, a free website that is conducive to hosting archives. Along with these, the partnership is establishing a digital finding aid to streamline the process of locating the museum’s physical archives.
"There's just a really rich family history here," Kole de Peralta said. "And now the records are so much more accessible, which is in line with the ASU Charter."
Forming the partnership
The partnership began when Darwin Weech, managing board member of the museum's preservation project, met Riz Rizley, who has since graduated from ASU's Master of Arts in history program. Both Weech and Rizley’s families are from Pima, and the pair quickly learned that they were cousins.
At this point, Weech said the museum’s efforts were being carried out by two or three volunteers. “I needed to learn some basic things,” he said. “I needed organization.”
The timing was kismet, as Rizley was in the midst of pursuing his degree and had just finished his practicum, which he spent working in archives of the Latter-day Saints church in Salt Lake City. Rizley offered advice about a more effective way to store digital files, which opened the door for a larger collaboration.
Meanwhile, Rizley began speaking with his professors about how best to aid the museum in their mission. Through a donation from his family foundation to the Public History Endowment, the public history program was able to hire student workers, aiding the museum while also providing hands-on experience to its students.
Giovanni Barberio, a student pursuing his bachelor’s degree in history, is one of the young historians compiling and digitizing the museum’s contents. Barberio began working with the public history department through an Undergraduate Research Experience in fall 2024, where he worked at the Tempe Historical Society. He became a student worker for the department in January, when he learned about the partnership and began his work.
“It’s really interesting building from the ground up,” he said, “and being able to do some actual museum work, which was really cool and meaningful work that they wanted to get done.”
Barberio’s main task has been uploading identification cards for the museum’s artifacts onto a database and then the museum’s cataloging site. When he began, Barberio said there were around 100 images loaded into the database. After working on the project for 15–20 hours a week for four months, he says he is nowhere close to finishing, which has opened his eyes to the need for archivists, and how much work goes into creating a digital database.
And this isn’t the program’s first time working with a local museum.
“It’s something that they've done multiple, multiple times,” Barberio said. “So when I came on, they already knew exactly what needed to be done and had everything planned out for me before I was even there.”
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A class photo from the Eastern Arizona Museum's Unknown People collection.
Photo courtesy of Eastern Arizona Museum
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A black-and-white photograph of an unknown young teen boy wearing a suit and hat.
Photo courtesy of Eastern Arizona Museum
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Black-and-white photograph of an unknown group of people posing in front of the post office in Eden, Arizona.
Photo courtesy of Eastern Arizona Museum
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Black-and-white photograph of seventh and eighth grade classes in Pima, 1914.
Photo courtesy of Eastern Arizona Museum
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A black-and-white photograph of a large family posed in front of a brick house.
Photo courtesy of Eastern Arizona Museum
Museums in a digital world
Rizley emphasized the importance of digitizing a museum’s offerings, citing a decrease in field trips due to public school funding. Without a budget to physically travel to museums, digital spaces may be more important than ever for students to learn about history, he said.
Reflecting on his own family, Rizley says he is the only one of his siblings who still lives in Arizona. As much as he would love to get his family together to visit their history at the museum, he said the chances are much greater to get his family to sit down together and look at the museum’s holdings on its website.
“I’m all about audiences,” said Rizley, who spent many years working in cable television programming. “The audience for a small museum in a small town is never going to be great, but the audience that you can attract through a website and the stories you can tell in a digital format can go all the way around the world.”
And the museum’s stories are becoming more accessible and interactive than ever. Along with images, Weech has been conducting oral history interviews with older members of the Pima community to preserve their memories and experiences. Though these aren’t on the website yet, he plans to add them in the future.
“You can read a written story, but it’s not the same as if you hear them telling you — if you can see their face and hear the inflections in their voice,” he said. “Their lives are intertwined with history in such a way that it can’t be separated. Their life is the history we are looking for.”
A call to the community
The museum is asking its community for help in preserving the Gila Valley's history, with a multitude of ways for individuals of all ages to get involved.
The museum’s digital holdings are organized into different collections based on certain categories. One of its most unique collections is the Unknown People collection, which is made up of images that are missing information. Each image has an option to submit comments, and the museum is asking for the Pima community to look through these photos and comment on the names of any individuals they may recognize.
“We need the community to help us identify these people so we can get a better understanding of the story,” Barberio said.
If community members have a story about any of the images in the collection, they can share these through the comments as well.
Along with virtual engagement, Weech invites individuals to get involved with digitizing the museum’s collection.
“We’re a totally volunteer organization — we have no employees at all, and so we’re trying to find people with an interest in history that will come and help us collect and populate this database with photos and then research the history of them.
“There’s just so much work to be done,” he said.
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