Museum and Gift Shop Manager

The Mai Wah’s seasonal Museum and Gift Shop Manager greets our visitors and provides guided tours of the museum. For 2013-14, we welcomed historian John Little (above left) as our summer manager. John is the author of a book on the Casino Theater, which stood in the heart of Butte’s red-light district when it centered on East Galena, about two blocks from the Mai Wah buildings.

Curator

Thanks to support from generous donations by Janet Sperry, the Mai Wah has enjoyed the services of a professional curator, Janna Norby (above right). Janna lives in Ennis and came to the Mai Wah following seven years as curator of collections with the Montana Heritage Commission, where she oversaw curation of artifacts in Nevada City and Virginia City. Those same artifacts are back where they started 70 years ago, in the Mai Wah Museum’s Wah Chong Tai Mercantile, on loan from the Heritage Commission. So Janna is uniquely qualified to document this collection of more than 2,500 artifacts, one of the most intact examples of a period Chinese general store in the United States.

Prior to the Heritage Commission, Janna worked in Petersburg, Virginia, with the National Park Service. She completed her graduate degree in 2003 at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, NC.