Kneeling on plastic protecting the floor from paint splatters, Guam Museum curator Michael Lujan Bevacqua painted leaves sprouting from a coconut on a large mural taped to the wall of the East-West Center Gallery in Honolulu as a dozen others watched and contemplated what they would be contributing to the design.
“The perfection of things is not what we’re going after,” said Meleanna Aluli Meyer, a Native Hawaiian visual artist and filmmaker who was guiding the group on the mural project.
When complete, the work will visually represent the Pacific Island cultures of those in the room, members of a professional development program that launched in January with six months of virtual classes.
The program, Weaving a Net(work) of Care for Oceanic Collections: A Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Museum Institute, was organized by the East-West Center in partnership with the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s Department of American Studies.
Following the twice weekly virtual sessions, the participants from Guam, the Northern Marianas Islands, American Samoa, Aotearoa, Fiji, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Palau, Papua New Guinea and Samoa joined their Hawaiian counterparts in Honolulu for a monthlong, in-person institute that culminates in an exhibit opening Sunday at the center’s gallery.
Members of the cohort, who work in museums and cultural heritage centers, have been visiting historic institutions and learning from experts on collections care, conservation and exhibitions.
“What I had hoped to gain was one, just knowledge of the types of equipment we need to best preserve the materials that we hold and that we are generating and collecting, which includes to CHamoru language materials,” said Elyssa Santos, special projects coordinator at the Kumision i Fino’ Chamoru who manages the commission’s CHamoru Archive.
“So there’s the … practical side of things, but I’m also interested in learning about indigenous ways of collections care, which is what I love about this program,” Santos said.
“They always allowed us to compare Western practices as well as Indigenous or Pacific practices in collections care. So basically, I’m interested in how to indigenize these practices in our space back home.”
And, as the name of the program indicates, the creation of a network across the Pacific that will continue beyond July has been one of the institute’s primary goals.
“For those of us who come out of like academia and work in Western institutions, we don’t often get the space … to be able to share openly our challenges, the microaggressions and sometimes … our cultural values that are central to the kind of work that we do,” Santos said.
“This program really provides us the space to kind of unpack all that. So, what’s great is that we learn from each other and we also see a lot of like parallels in our experiences, and we’re able to find solutions just in sharing and crying and talking through things together.”
The depth and impact of these newly created bonds among cohort were visible even to program organizers.
“The biggest surprise was how quickly they formed a sense of togetherness and support for one another,” said project director Noelle Kahanu, an associate specialist in Public Humanities and Native Hawaiian Programs within the American Studies Department. “And that it has very clearly crossed cultural boundaries. … It’s like coming together as a people, as a community, and that’s been evident in so many ways.
“I didn’t really understand what it means to bring them together to see these relationships form, to see like, people laughing and crying and joking around,” Kahanu said. “We know that we’ll have succeeded because we created a network, and so when there’s a typhoon in American Samoa … they’ll have us, but they’ll also have each other to reach out to.”
“It’s been such a powerful, amazing, blessed, wonderful project — beyond measure.”
She discovered a precedent for the program at the university: about 50 years ago, the East-West Center had offered a six-month training in ethnomusicology, museology and archives management to individuals from the Asia Pacific region, according to a flyer about the institute.
The center agreed to co-host the 21st century version of the institute, and with the help of the Pacific Islands Museums Association, they developed a focus and format based on a needs assessment of regional institutions.
“In the Pacific, we have issues regarding climate control, so even just caring for your collection is so difficult because you have infestations, you have mold issues, and so just even having the professionals that they’re talking to about conservation issues, it’s incredible for them to now have these resources, these professionals they can go to and know what to do about those kinds of things,” said Annie Reynolds, exhibitions and collections curator for the East-West Center Arts Program.
