The Hawaiʻi State Archives will debut a mobile museum at the 50th Queen Liliʻuokalani Keiki Hula Competition on July 24 at the Neal S. Blaisdell Exhibition Hall.
The museum on wheels will showcase the works of Queen Liliʻuokalani, highlighting her efforts in promoting gender equality, educational initiatives, philanthropy, writings, and music.
State Archivist Adam Jansen said the museum is to honor the last reigning monarch's legacy but also to inspire children performing at the three-day event.
“We’re really excited about this,” Jansen said. “This is an opportunity for the public to see some of the queen’s own writing, her diaries, her music, her artifacts in a way that is very approachable for them.”
The Queen Liliʻuokalani Keiki Hula Competition was created in 1976 by the nonprofit Kalihi-Pālama Culture & Arts Society with a vision for children to participate in cultural dance while also learning about Queen Liliʻuokalani.
The nonprofit partnered with the Hawaiʻi State Archives to help with the preservation.
Jansen said he hopes the museum will attract the younger generation to learn more about Hawaiʻi's last reigning monarch.
“We've gone into her manuscript collection, which she deposited with us — 27,000 pages of her writings and her letters that she saved to go into all of this and pull out what we feel are some of the core documents that most represent her, so that we can present them to the keiki and hopefully inspire them before they go into the competition to really much more deeply understand why,” he said.
The mobile museum will be up from July 24 to July 25.
