The Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum has received a $1 million grant from The Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation that
the 132-year-old institution plans to use in a new curatorial program informed and shaped by indigenous science, culture and
people.
“We are grateful to the Mellon Foundation for their generous support and belief in the power of the arts
and humanities to fuel
our imagination and sustain
our spirit,” said Melanie
Ide, Bishop Museum president and CEO, adding that the program is aimed to
engage indigenous communities in understanding
the past to envision and achieve a thriving future.
The “Building a Pacific Pipeline: Bishop Museum
&the Te Rangi Hiroa Pacific Curators and Caretakers Program” is named for the museum’s first director of Polynesian ancestry. Te Rangi Hiroahe, born in Aotorea to Maori and
Irish parents, led the museum from 1936 to 1951, helping establish its preeminence on the cultures and natural environment of the Pacific.
“The plan is to build a pipeline of people trained within an indigenous framework and open new pathways for doing museum work,” Ide said, adding
that Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders have
historically been under
represented in the profession.
The Mellon grant will be used to create new positions, including two curators, a collections manager and a collections technician, in order to build capacity in Bishop Museum’s Cultural Resources Division, which has been underresourced for many years, Ide said.
“We have the world’s greatest collection of
Hawaiian and Pacific resources and materials, including about 25 million artifacts and scientific specimens representing generations of ancestral knowledge, and we need to build capacity,” she said.
Marques Hanalei Marzan, a Bishop Museum cultural adviser and an artist versed in traditional ways, said
he was thrilled by the award and the opportunities it offered to bring young islanders into the museum field.
“We have a lot of passionate young people who have gone through aina-based learning or Hawaiian
language immersion programs and want to do the hands-on science of daily life our kupuna practiced,
understanding the waves, the limu, the birds, all
the things around us and how and when to do things to allow for success.”
Such young people also could provide the next generation of curators, “but a lot of them don’t realize there’s jobs where they can use those passions and earn a living doing this in a museum context,” Marzan said.
Caretaking is central to Hawaiian culture, he said, and the grant proposal included paid internships and fellowships “to give young people incentive and keep them around long enough to learn indigenous understanding and care of collections, and share that information with the community in the best possible way.“
The program also provides for an international advisory board, Ide said, including representatives of partner institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.
In recent years, she said, Bishop Museum has been reexamining its collections, revealing and rejecting Western assumptions and prejudices while tapping into indigenous knowledge and perspectives.
A current exhibit, “(Re)Generations: Challenging Scientific Racism in Hawai‘i,” on view at the museum through October, explores photographs
and plaster busts of Native Hawaiians made by anthropologist Louis R. Sullivan in order to measure and classify physical traits in the now-discredited field of eugenics.
“‘(Re)Generations’ is a good example of curating from an indigenous perspective,” Ide said, adding that materials were included for the exhibit
only if descendants of Sullivan’s subjects could be found and were willing to participate, helping select what would be shown and telling their side of the story.
“Institutions are made up of the people in them, and people are made up of their time, and that’s why we’re changing how we do things,” she said.
“We have so much potential at this museum that has been lying dormant for too long, and I think it’s the Bishop Museum’s time.”
