earlier today we heard a heartbreaking
account of an event that affected our
entire community I’m here to tell you
about my experience with the aftermath
of that same effect event on October 1st
2017 a gunman opened fire on the route
91 Harvest Festival a country music
concert held in Las Vegas hundreds were
injured and 58 were killed almost
immediately
spontaneous makeshift memorial started
to pop up all over the city people have
flowers candles stuffed animals in
median strips along fence lines and in
front of buildings eventually two main
sights became the largest and West’s
best well known memorial one the Las
Vegas community healing garden was
created in the days after the shooting
specifically to be a memorial the other
at the iconic welcome to Fabulous Las
Vegas sign the memorial formed around
white wooden crosses dedicated to the
victims
now this Memorial located at one of the
most visited sites in the city caused a
lot of issues for public officials how
to balance public safety concerns the
needs of tourists and the obvious needs
of the community to grieve it it brought
up a lot of questions how long should
the memorial stay up what should happen
to the items once the memorial came down
who should even be making these
decisions who were the stakeholders and
what rights did they have and how does
the city whose entire identity is built
around the idea of having fun deal with
a visual representation of tragedy at
one of its most visited sites now these
questions are interesting in the
abstract but they become a lot more
immediate when you become a stakeholder
within two weeks of the shooting it was
determined that the items left at the
welcome sign would be preserved since
the median strip where that sign is
located is on County property it was
only natural that it would go to the
Clark County Museum where I am the
Registrar
now for those of you who don’t know what
a museum registrar does and I suspect
that’s most of you
let me give you a rundown of my duties
I’m responsible for bringing in
collection items to the museum I do the
legal paperwork for those items catalog
them store them and keep track of them
I’ve been doing this for about twenty
years and before I came to Las Vegas I
worked at the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington DC so I
was no stranger to items that had tragic
histories I was perhaps uniquely
qualified to work on the items from this
memorial so the memorial was up for
about six weeks but during that time the
museum received deliveries of items that
were deemed too fragile or too likely to
become damaged we had no idea what we
were in for the first delivery came a
week and a half after the shooting in a
pickup truck a van and a 25-foot trailer
for the next month we received more
deliveries usually twice a week and
usually in that 25-foot trailer now I
have no idea how many items were
actually at the memorial if pressed I
would guess it was over a hundred
thousand things but most of those were
flowers and floral arrangements which we
obviously couldn’t preserve we also had
to restrict how many candles we accepted
and there were perishable items food
things like that that just wouldn’t last
in a museum collection that still left
over 15,000 artifacts they all had to be
catalogued photographed stored luckily
some members of the community stepped up
and I got an ice core of volunteers to
help me but that wasn’t even my focus in
the weeks after the shooting because
suddenly I was the spokesperson for the
museum and I had to answer everyone’s
questions about why we were taking the
objects and what we were gonna do with
them I heard from family members of
victims survivors of the concert people
who left items at the memorial the media
and just the generally curious and one
of the most popular questions I got why
is the museum preserving these items
honestly I didn’t really know I’d never
really thought about these memorials
before sure I’ve seen them in the
background of news coverage of different
tragedies I’ve been to places like the
Vietnam Memorial I even went to the
World Trade Center not long after
September 11th and as a museum
professional I did think about whether
they were being collected and what kind
of challenges they would bring up but I
never really thought about the emotions
behind them
what did these things mean to the people
who left them or just to all of us I
have to admit I’m a pretty cynical
person at heart so when I first started
to think about what these things might
mean my first thought was this was a way
for people to insert themselves into the
story to become part of this that’s
human nature and it’s not a bad thing
but it can sometimes come off as feeling
a little unfeeling in the weeks after
the shooting I combed through Instagram
photos of the memorial it was the
easiest way for me to keep track of what
was going on there and in most of the
photos that I looked at people were very
respectful people seemed to really care
but there were a few where people were
laughing look trying to look sexy or the
worst doing that jump thing in front of
and sometimes surrounded by thousands of
tributes to the people who had died now
I probably shouldn’t blame them this is
Las Vegas and they were probably
tourists and this was what they come
here to do but it was a little jarring
and it didn’t really and it kind of fed
into my thoughts about this but as I
started to receive the items from the
memorial and more importantly as I
talked to people who left items there I
began to change my mind just this year
number of items
never mind the time that was clearly
spent on creating them seemed to say
that something deeper was going on here
so again I still needed to figure this
out what was the meaning of these
memorials I work at a History Museum my
first thought let’s look at these in
historical perspective how do these
memorials fit into the history of public
morning and what can it say about our
time so obviously human beings have been
leaving evidence of grief since we were
running around with the Neanderthal and
over the years we have left some pretty
spectacular monuments to grief the
Egyptian pyramids the Terracotta Army
and the Taj Mahal just to name a few but
the Victorians famously codified public
mourning they literally wrote the book
on it there were rules on what you wore
when you’re in mourning what kind of
activities you could participate and how
your responsibilities changed based on
your relationship to the deceased but
culture changes over time
world war one definitely rushed a lot of
changes in was hard to have these
elaborate time-consuming mourning
rituals when people were dying so
quickly and a lot of times you didn’t
even have a body for the funeral
modern funeral practices became more
popular which meant people spent less
time with the bodies of their loved ones
which of course changed the way they
grieved and you could even argue that
modern medicine and better health meant
that people had less experience with
death in general as society changed
people were expected to be more stoic to
repress those feelings of course they
still had the feelings so it doesn’t
really surprise me that feelings of
grief would sort of express themselves
in a variety of ways including through
memorials now people who study these
memorials trace their beginnings to the
opening of the Vietnam War Memorial in
1982 the Vietnam War was the first
televised war which meant that for the
first time people were exposed to
violent death in their homes mixed and
passionate opinions about the war also
made it hard for people to remain stoic
and keep those feelings repressed and
then you had this wall this dark wall
with all the names carved into it it
really hit home the scale of loss people
started to leave items some of them had
a personal meaning to one of those names
on the wall but some of them were just
general mourning items that actually
became more important to the people who
came after them to look at the wall
after the death of Princess Diana these
memorials kind of started to pop up all
over they’re no longer tied to a public
permanent memorial people left the same
flowers candles stuffed animals at
places that were important to her life
and to her death by the time we had the
Columbine High School shooting the
memorials were an accepted background to
any kind of news coverage to these
tragedies and with the terrorist attacks
in September 11th
such a big attack that the memorial
spread far away from the cities that
were affected every town in America
seemed to have a memorial inevitably in
Las Vegas the New York New York Hotel
and Casino became a memorial people left
shirts from first responder units from
all around the country now museums of
course are paying attention they
understood that these memorials meant
something important to us as a society
and they began to record them and in
fact those first responder t-shirts from
the New York New York Hotel and Casino
are in the UNLV library collection as we
had more tragedies and therefore more
memorials became obvious there were
similarities in the way that we reacted
each memorial was specific to the event
and the city where it occurred but there
were meaningful and fundamental
similarities between them people left
candles flowers stuffed animals objects
that may have a personal meaning to the
people who had died or just may
represent grieving in general items that
are may seem unimportant when taking at
face value but each item tells a story
and taken together they show an
important part of our modern lives but
what do the memorials mean to the people
most affected by these tragedies the
loved ones of the victims while doing
this research I came across a study that
acted as a turning point for me a
sociology professor at the University of
Dayton named dr. art jibsen interviewed
three hundred and nine people who had
been involved with erecting memorials
after the death of a loved one every
single person
that he interviewed said that the
memorial was more meaningful to them
than the gravesite in the cemetery and I
could see some of those feelings here in
Las Vegas to the family members of
victims that I talked to were grateful
that the museum was preserving items
from the memorial they saw it as a way
to remember their loved ones and have
everyone else remember them too and they
were comforted if only a little by
knowing that the items were in safe
hands
so obviously cultural effects other than
social media and trying to put yourself
into the story are in effect here as I
talked to people who left items at the
Las Vegas memorial I began to hear the
same refrain over and over again people
just wanted to do something but they
didn’t know what again with no clear
rules as how to express our grief they
just need an outlet many people donated
money to those affected by the shooting
and many gave blood on the surface those
may seem more useful reactions to
tragedy but they didn’t seem to have the
same emotional impact as leaving an item
so it seems that these memorials are
accomplishing what the people who left
items at them set out to accomplish
they’re doing something for the people
who left the items for the families of
the victims and for the community as a
whole this is why it’s so important for
museums and other cultural institutions
to record these memorials it’s hard to
recognize history while it’s happening
but it is clear that these memorials are
telling us something about our society
and future generations will thank us for
acting now to save the items to tell
this story so it’s been a long journey
for me both in the practical aspects of
cataloguing and dealing with the objects
and the emotional aspects of discovering
what these memorials mean I went from a
cynical viewpoint
to what I hope is a wider understand
of how these memorials help a community
through difficult times by learning
about the history of public mourning by
talking to people who left items at the
memorial or who just visited the
memorial and by talking to my volunteers
I feel I’ve reached a deeper
understanding of what these memorials
mean they are useful they help people
and they represent our community and
again they will be important evidence
for the future so I along with about 20
dedicated volunteers are cataloguing
photographing and rehousing thousands of
objects we were recording the physical
description the condition and the
dimensions of candles flowers painted
rocks and hundreds of handwritten notes
and I recognized as I do this work that
I’m recording not just the items but the
stories they tell and the people who
left them there I’m honored to have the
responsibility to preserve these items
for posterity and I hope that I’m giving
back to the community in some small way
but most importantly I’m glad that
through this work I too can do something
thank you [Applause]
account of an event that affected our
entire community I’m here to tell you
about my experience with the aftermath
of that same effect event on October 1st
2017 a gunman opened fire on the route
91 Harvest Festival a country music
concert held in Las Vegas hundreds were
injured and 58 were killed almost
immediately
spontaneous makeshift memorial started
to pop up all over the city people have
flowers candles stuffed animals in
median strips along fence lines and in
front of buildings eventually two main
sights became the largest and West’s
best well known memorial one the Las
Vegas community healing garden was
created in the days after the shooting
specifically to be a memorial the other
at the iconic welcome to Fabulous Las
Vegas sign the memorial formed around
white wooden crosses dedicated to the
victims
now this Memorial located at one of the
most visited sites in the city caused a
lot of issues for public officials how
to balance public safety concerns the
needs of tourists and the obvious needs
of the community to grieve it it brought
up a lot of questions how long should
the memorial stay up what should happen
to the items once the memorial came down
who should even be making these
decisions who were the stakeholders and
what rights did they have and how does
the city whose entire identity is built
around the idea of having fun deal with
a visual representation of tragedy at
one of its most visited sites now these
questions are interesting in the
abstract but they become a lot more
immediate when you become a stakeholder
within two weeks of the shooting it was
determined that the items left at the
welcome sign would be preserved since
the median strip where that sign is
located is on County property it was
only natural that it would go to the
Clark County Museum where I am the
Registrar
now for those of you who don’t know what
a museum registrar does and I suspect
that’s most of you
let me give you a rundown of my duties
I’m responsible for bringing in
collection items to the museum I do the
legal paperwork for those items catalog
them store them and keep track of them
I’ve been doing this for about twenty
years and before I came to Las Vegas I
worked at the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington DC so I
was no stranger to items that had tragic
histories I was perhaps uniquely
qualified to work on the items from this
memorial so the memorial was up for
about six weeks but during that time the
museum received deliveries of items that
were deemed too fragile or too likely to
become damaged we had no idea what we
were in for the first delivery came a
week and a half after the shooting in a
pickup truck a van and a 25-foot trailer
for the next month we received more
deliveries usually twice a week and
usually in that 25-foot trailer now I
have no idea how many items were
actually at the memorial if pressed I
would guess it was over a hundred
thousand things but most of those were
flowers and floral arrangements which we
obviously couldn’t preserve we also had
to restrict how many candles we accepted
and there were perishable items food
things like that that just wouldn’t last
in a museum collection that still left
over 15,000 artifacts they all had to be
catalogued photographed stored luckily
some members of the community stepped up
and I got an ice core of volunteers to
help me but that wasn’t even my focus in
the weeks after the shooting because
suddenly I was the spokesperson for the
museum and I had to answer everyone’s
questions about why we were taking the
objects and what we were gonna do with
them I heard from family members of
victims survivors of the concert people
who left items at the memorial the media
and just the generally curious and one
of the most popular questions I got why
is the museum preserving these items
honestly I didn’t really know I’d never
really thought about these memorials
before sure I’ve seen them in the
background of news coverage of different
tragedies I’ve been to places like the
Vietnam Memorial I even went to the
World Trade Center not long after
September 11th and as a museum
professional I did think about whether
they were being collected and what kind
of challenges they would bring up but I
never really thought about the emotions
behind them
what did these things mean to the people
who left them or just to all of us I
have to admit I’m a pretty cynical
person at heart so when I first started
to think about what these things might
mean my first thought was this was a way
for people to insert themselves into the
story to become part of this that’s
human nature and it’s not a bad thing
but it can sometimes come off as feeling
a little unfeeling in the weeks after
the shooting I combed through Instagram
photos of the memorial it was the
easiest way for me to keep track of what
was going on there and in most of the
photos that I looked at people were very
respectful people seemed to really care
but there were a few where people were
laughing look trying to look sexy or the
worst doing that jump thing in front of
and sometimes surrounded by thousands of
tributes to the people who had died now
I probably shouldn’t blame them this is
Las Vegas and they were probably
tourists and this was what they come
here to do but it was a little jarring
and it didn’t really and it kind of fed
into my thoughts about this but as I
started to receive the items from the
memorial and more importantly as I
talked to people who left items there I
began to change my mind just this year
number of items
never mind the time that was clearly
spent on creating them seemed to say
that something deeper was going on here
so again I still needed to figure this
out what was the meaning of these
memorials I work at a History Museum my
first thought let’s look at these in
historical perspective how do these
memorials fit into the history of public
morning and what can it say about our
time so obviously human beings have been
leaving evidence of grief since we were
running around with the Neanderthal and
over the years we have left some pretty
spectacular monuments to grief the
Egyptian pyramids the Terracotta Army
and the Taj Mahal just to name a few but
the Victorians famously codified public
mourning they literally wrote the book
on it there were rules on what you wore
when you’re in mourning what kind of
activities you could participate and how
your responsibilities changed based on
your relationship to the deceased but
culture changes over time
world war one definitely rushed a lot of
changes in was hard to have these
elaborate time-consuming mourning
rituals when people were dying so
quickly and a lot of times you didn’t
even have a body for the funeral
modern funeral practices became more
popular which meant people spent less
time with the bodies of their loved ones
which of course changed the way they
grieved and you could even argue that
modern medicine and better health meant
that people had less experience with
death in general as society changed
people were expected to be more stoic to
repress those feelings of course they
still had the feelings so it doesn’t
really surprise me that feelings of
grief would sort of express themselves
in a variety of ways including through
memorials now people who study these
memorials trace their beginnings to the
opening of the Vietnam War Memorial in
1982 the Vietnam War was the first
televised war which meant that for the
first time people were exposed to
violent death in their homes mixed and
passionate opinions about the war also
made it hard for people to remain stoic
and keep those feelings repressed and
then you had this wall this dark wall
with all the names carved into it it
really hit home the scale of loss people
started to leave items some of them had
a personal meaning to one of those names
on the wall but some of them were just
general mourning items that actually
became more important to the people who
came after them to look at the wall
after the death of Princess Diana these
memorials kind of started to pop up all
over they’re no longer tied to a public
permanent memorial people left the same
flowers candles stuffed animals at
places that were important to her life
and to her death by the time we had the
Columbine High School shooting the
memorials were an accepted background to
any kind of news coverage to these
tragedies and with the terrorist attacks
in September 11th
such a big attack that the memorial
spread far away from the cities that
were affected every town in America
seemed to have a memorial inevitably in
Las Vegas the New York New York Hotel
and Casino became a memorial people left
shirts from first responder units from
all around the country now museums of
course are paying attention they
understood that these memorials meant
something important to us as a society
and they began to record them and in
fact those first responder t-shirts from
the New York New York Hotel and Casino
are in the UNLV library collection as we
had more tragedies and therefore more
memorials became obvious there were
similarities in the way that we reacted
each memorial was specific to the event
and the city where it occurred but there
were meaningful and fundamental
similarities between them people left
candles flowers stuffed animals objects
that may have a personal meaning to the
people who had died or just may
represent grieving in general items that
are may seem unimportant when taking at
face value but each item tells a story
and taken together they show an
important part of our modern lives but
what do the memorials mean to the people
most affected by these tragedies the
loved ones of the victims while doing
this research I came across a study that
acted as a turning point for me a
sociology professor at the University of
Dayton named dr. art jibsen interviewed
three hundred and nine people who had
been involved with erecting memorials
after the death of a loved one every
single person
that he interviewed said that the
memorial was more meaningful to them
than the gravesite in the cemetery and I
could see some of those feelings here in
Las Vegas to the family members of
victims that I talked to were grateful
that the museum was preserving items
from the memorial they saw it as a way
to remember their loved ones and have
everyone else remember them too and they
were comforted if only a little by
knowing that the items were in safe
hands
so obviously cultural effects other than
social media and trying to put yourself
into the story are in effect here as I
talked to people who left items at the
Las Vegas memorial I began to hear the
same refrain over and over again people
just wanted to do something but they
didn’t know what again with no clear
rules as how to express our grief they
just need an outlet many people donated
money to those affected by the shooting
and many gave blood on the surface those
may seem more useful reactions to
tragedy but they didn’t seem to have the
same emotional impact as leaving an item
so it seems that these memorials are
accomplishing what the people who left
items at them set out to accomplish
they’re doing something for the people
who left the items for the families of
the victims and for the community as a
whole this is why it’s so important for
museums and other cultural institutions
to record these memorials it’s hard to
recognize history while it’s happening
but it is clear that these memorials are
telling us something about our society
and future generations will thank us for
acting now to save the items to tell
this story so it’s been a long journey
for me both in the practical aspects of
cataloguing and dealing with the objects
and the emotional aspects of discovering
what these memorials mean I went from a
cynical viewpoint
to what I hope is a wider understand
of how these memorials help a community
through difficult times by learning
about the history of public mourning by
talking to people who left items at the
memorial or who just visited the
memorial and by talking to my volunteers
I feel I’ve reached a deeper
understanding of what these memorials
mean they are useful they help people
and they represent our community and
again they will be important evidence
for the future so I along with about 20
dedicated volunteers are cataloguing
photographing and rehousing thousands of
objects we were recording the physical
description the condition and the
dimensions of candles flowers painted
rocks and hundreds of handwritten notes
and I recognized as I do this work that
I’m recording not just the items but the
stories they tell and the people who
left them there I’m honored to have the
responsibility to preserve these items
for posterity and I hope that I’m giving
back to the community in some small way
but most importantly I’m glad that
through this work I too can do something
thank you [Applause]
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