Curator Noelle Kahanu was in England earlier this month to unveil a new exhibit at the University of Cambridge Museum of Archeology and Anthropology.
“Fault Lines: Imagining Indigenous futures for colonial collections” represents the first time an international collaboration of Indigenous curators has assembled an exhibit for the 140-year-old museum.
Kahanu is an assistant specialist in public humanities and Native Hawaiian programs at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She said her relationship with the Cambridge museum began a decade ago.
"For Hawaiians, a vast majority of the most precious of material culture exists outside of Hawaiʻi, whether that is through gifting by our aliʻi, through exchanges, through sometimes outright theft, that reality has resulted in so much being gone. So I think for us here, the question is, how do we reestablish relationships with these ancestral kūpuna in a way, and that requires a relationship with the institutions that hold them," she said.
She said the exhibit "signals a new wave of the future."
Many American museums have been shutting down their Indigenous exhibitions.
"That's in response to a Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation regulation, which was looking at what things are on display and whether or not there's been consultation over what is present there, and many institutions have opted to just either cover up cases or shut down their exhibitions entirely and begin this process of consultation," she said.
But that federal law, known as NAGPRA, obviously does not apply in Europe.
"One of the positives is I think that you begin to work together, not based on a hammer from some legislative act, but by choice, and that has resulted in some amazing opportunities for repatriation," she told HPR.
"I think we need to think about distance not as a barrier, but as an opportunity. We are walking in the same footsteps of our ancestors, in the sense that they were very interested in the outer world. I mean our aliʻi, a multitude of them, traveled all the way to England to intentionally engage face-to-face with their aliʻi."
The Cambridge exhibit will run until December 2025. For more information, click here.
This interview aired on The Conversation on Dec. 18, 2024. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1.
