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Ethnic Museums in Hawai'i: Exhibits, Interpreters, and Reenactments
EILEEN H. TAMURA
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OVER A THOUSAND YEARS before Columbus touched America, voyagers from a group of Polynesian islands, the Marquesas, traveled in voyaging canoes two thousand miles northwest across the Pacific and arrived in Hawai'i. Much later they were followed by Tahitians, who sailed northward to the Hawaiian island chain. Then came a period in which long-distance canoe voyaging between Tahiti and Hawai'i occurred regularly, then gradually lessened, and then stopped, and for hundreds of years Hawaiians lived undisturbed by the outside world. |
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In 1778 the English Captain James Cook, on his third expedition to the Pacific, came upon Hawai'i. News of this previously unknown place traveled to Europe and America. Before long other Westerners, most of them traders, arrived and brought with them artifacts, plants, animals, ideas and customs, and diseases. Also arriving, beginning in 1820, were American Protestant missionaries from New England, armed with their Bibles and their worldview of the islands as a heathen place ripe for missionary work. With the influx of Westerners, Hawai'i became a commercial hub, first for traders, then whalers, followed by king sugar, which grew to be the islands' leading industry from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. |
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Sugarcane cultivation required a pool of cheap labor, and with native Hawaiians dying from measles, mumps, whooping cough, and other contagious diseases for which they lacked immunity, sugar planters searched worldwide for other workers. Over the course of a century, hundreds of thousands of migrants arrived, mostly Asians (Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Filipinos), but also Europeans (Portuguese, Norwegians, Germans, Russians, and Spaniards), and some Puerto Ricans, South Pacific Islanders, and African Americans. About half of these migrants returned to their native lands or relocated to the mainland United States, but others settled in their new environment to make Hawai'i their home. |
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Because of this rich immigration and ethnic history, Hawai'i boasts an impressive number of ethnic museums and ethnic collections in museums, more perhaps than one would expect in such a small geographic area. This review discusses four major ethnic museums: the Bishop Museum, the Mission Houses Museum, Hawaii's Plantation Village, and the Kona Coffee Living History Farm. Each museum highlights a particular aspect of island history, using a variety of methods that result in different levels of effectiveness. |
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BISHOP MUSEUM | |
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(1525 Bernice Street, Honolulu, Hawai'i 96817; www.bishopmuseum.org)
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The Bishop Museum is the largest museum in Hawai'i. It was founded in 1889 by Charles Reed Bishop in memory of his wife, Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop, the last direct descendant of Kamehameha I, who united the islands and became its first king. Located near downtown Honolulu, the museum includes an extensive collection of cultural artifacts of Hawai'i and the Pacific Islands; a natural history specimen collection; traveling exhibits; an interactive science center; a planetarium; a research division; a publishing arm; and for visiting researchers, a library, photo collection, and archives. |
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