Over the last two centuries, objects of immense value to Hawaiʻi have been spirited away on the ships of explorers, in the luggage of collectors. Today, they are dispersed in some very far-flung places:
Kū kiʻi (carving of a god) at the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts.
feather temple and feather bust of a god at Vienna’s Weltmuseum.
feathered Kū at New Zealand’s Te Papa.
Capes and cloaks like this extraordinary ‘ahu ‘ula, thought to have been brought to Europe by James Cook, now held in the French city of Lille.
One associated with Kamehameha II, also known as King Liholiho, now in a museum in Edinburgh.
The Charleston Museum in South Carolina possesses this mahiole, or helmet.
Australia’s National Gallery holds this one.
Even museums as distant as Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Stuttgart, Göttingen, Berlin, Philadelphia, Madrid, Geneva, Copenhagen, Dublin and Cambridge, have ancient objects from Hawai’i.
And that’s not all. It leaves out the opaque world of private collections, such as the 1,100-item collection that went to auction in 2017 in Paris and included what was described as a rare spear from Cook’s third voyage, an 18th century war helmet, and a war drum.
Is it not the moment to build on and accelerate what is already underway to make this patrimony accessible to kānaka ʻōiwi and Hawaiʻi locals?
Courtesy The Trustees of the British Museum, Photo by MKH
