Connecting Pacific Communities with Collections
One of the largest Pacific Islander communities in the United States is based in and around the Salt Lake City area of Utah, home to more than 40,000 Hawaiians, Tongans, Samoans, Fijians, CHamoru, and other Micronesians. Two thousand miles away, Harvard’s Peabody Museum in Cambridge stewards an extensive collection of cultural materials from the Pacific Islands region. A new community-based program, the Harvard Oceanic Collections Engagement Fellowship (HOCEF), was launched last year to help connect the two. Members of the Oceanic diaspora living in Utah were invited to apply for two fellowships to engage with the Peabody Museum’s broad collection of materials from the Pacific region. In addition to monetary support, awardees are provided individual assistance in navigating and researching collections by our Curator of Oceanic Collections, Dr. Ingrid Ahlgren, and our collections stewards and archivists.
A goal of the program is to prioritize the Fellows' vision and how they’d like to engage with the collections, while museum staff provide guidance and support as needed. This has included creating a Guide to Searching the Oceanic Collection to help applicants navigate our online database and identify collections of interest. While sometimes database searches can be straightforward, they can also get very complicated due to a variety of terminology and language the Peabody has used through its more than 150-year history. When is a canoe not a canoe? When it is a boat, or watercraft, or sailing vessel instead!
In addition to having conversations about vocabulary and other challenges in catalog records, staff also compiled relevant documentation in our archives, and provided background information on what we know of the history of specific collections and how they came to the museum. Our Registration department arranged for new publication quality photographs of selected objects for use by the Fellows in their projects and our Conservation staff helped closely analyze as well as stabilize items to prepare them for study and photography. Peabody staff were also able to collaborate with our colleagues in the Museum of Comparative Zoology’s mammalogy department to identify materials, such as the species of whale ivory in this necklace, giving an even deeper understanding of the collections.
Spending extended time with the collections is a vital part of engagement with the HOCEF Fellows, and we were excited to host the two groups of awardees in studying collections closely, one onsite at the Peabody and one virtually through a videoconference.
Our first visiting group included members of the multigenerational team comprising Laneta Fitisemanu, Nu'uausala Eliga Tilo III, Kimo Watanabe, and Jacob Fitisemanu Jr. Their group is studying collections and documentation at the Peabody Museum to recreate the nineteenth-century Samoan 'ula lei seen above. By revitalizing the long-dormant practice of Samoan ivory work using similar materials, tools, and techniques, the group also hopes to inspire and stimulate discussion about symbolism, cultural permanence, and artistic "authenticity" among modern urban Pasifika identities.
For the second group, Curator Ingrid Ahlgren and Collections Steward Diana Zlatanovski hosted a virtual visit, with community members joining in from as far as New Zealand.
'Amelia Afā Niumeitolu Tavai is collaborating with a diverse group of Pacific Island cultural leaders and artists in Utah, including Susan Alik, Poli O'toko, and Tagielu Tavai, to explore the collective and mobile nature of rest shared across Oceanic cultures. Reflecting upon several headrests from the Oceanic collections at the Peabody Museum as well as historic photographs, the group aims to underscore the healing importance of resting and sharing culture as a group, as understood through the Chuukese expression asoso meaning "our rest."
The conversations with both groups were wonderful, whether we were all in the same room, across the country, or across the world! We were all learning from each other and sharing excitement in seeing details like inscriptions carved into a headrest or analyzing how a cord was so intricately and beautifully twined.
The HOCEF program has truly been a team effort, both at the Museum and beyond our campus. Our staff worked with our HOCEF partners: Harvard Alumni for Oceania, the University of Utah's School for Cultural and Social Transformation, and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts to select and support the two fellowship recipients. We’ve already learned so much from working with the Fellows and hope we can continue to improve how these collections are shared, used, and documented through close collaboration with origin communities. And we look forward to sharing the completed projects!
Author: Diana Zlatanovski
Detail of Fijian headrest, 00-8-70/55295