Custody Dispute Erupts Over Bishop Museum’s Hawaiian Antiquities

For years, the carved wooden figure with wide white eyes and a thick head of human hair was a fixture in Bishop Museum promotional materials. Her slogan: “Come face to face with the real Hawaii.”

The ancient Hawaiian relic was a treasure in the 111-year-old museum’s vast collection of Indo-Pacific antiquities. Now it--and dozens of other artifacts--are part of a custody dispute that has opened deep wounds in the Native Hawaiian community and led to accusations that the museum has acted irresponsibly, if not illegally, in giving them up.

The controversy also raises hard questions about how museums and educational institutions should atone for past transgressions against the indigenous cultures that are their subject matter.

“This is an extremely sensitive issue that all Hawaiians approach with great reluctance,” said Mel Kalahiki, a member of the Council of Chiefs of Pu’ukohola Heiau, a Native Hawaiian group. “These objects are not the sole provenance of any one group.”

The custody fight went public in March with employees’ revelation that Bishop Museum quietly transferred possession of the 2-foot-high carving of a woman’s image and 82 other artifacts to Hui Malama I Na Kupuna O Hawaii Nei, or “Group Caring for the Ancestors of Hawaii.”

The exact whereabouts of the artifacts are unknown.

Hui Malama is one of five Hawaiian groups, including Kalahiki’s, claiming the artifacts under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990.

The federal law allows American Indians, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians to repossess human remains and cultural objects from U.S. museums.

It has been used with little public resistance to repatriate more than 1,000 ancestral Hawaiian remains from Bishop Museum. Thousands more have been repatriated from mainland museums and schools, with Hui Malama overseeing the effort.

But the repatriation of popular, and valuable, museum artifacts has proved more controversial, with Bishop Museum’s handling of this dispute making the spotlight unusually bright.

Founded in 1889 by Charles Reed Bishop as a memorial to his wife, Hawaiian Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop, the museum has become the main reservoir of knowledge about Hawaiian history and culture and a leading source of information about Pacific cultures.

The museum’s collections include more than 1.1 million Hawaiian and Pacific cultural objects, along with millions of photographs and historic documents, library volumes, shells, and insect and plant specimens.

The objects in question were taken over the last century from ancient burial caves on the northwestern corner of the island of Hawaii and then donated or sold to the Honolulu museum.

The carved female figure--valued in the six figures by some experts--was taken from the caves in 1905 along with another wooden image, part of a feather cape, a wooden funnel and a bracelet. Human remains also were taken from the caves, part of a system of lava tubes in Kawaihae.

After learning that Hui Malama had received the artifacts in February and placed them in an unidentified cave back on Hawaii Island, 21 Bishop Museum employees protested to museum director W. Donald Duckworth.

Their letter accused the museum of violating the repatriation law and its own policies because other claims on the items had not been resolved. Potential claimants under the law have until May 5 to contact the museum, according to the Federal Register.

Duckworth initially told employees the museum merely lent the artifacts to Hui Malama after the four claimants at the time--the state Office of Hawaiian Affairs, the state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, and the Hawaii Island Burial Council being the others--agreed Hui Malama should have the objects while the repatriation process was being completed.

Last Tuesday, though, Duckworth acknowledged that was not the case but said officials believed the groups were in agreement.

“We regret not having documented the approval of all parties before the loan was made. That was clearly a mistake, and we apologize for it,” he said.

Kalahiki’s group has since joined the list of claimants.

Duckworth said the museum was only trying to abide by the repatriation law, which he said has encouraged museums across the country “to begin an inevitable process of renegotiating our social contract with those portions of our community [that are of] indigenous native ancestry for the first time in over a couple of hundred years.”

Legal issues aside, the artifacts’ transfer has touched off an emotional debate in the Hawaiian community.

Hui Malama spokesman Edward Ayau said the items were stolen from their original resting place and Bishop Museum now realizes it never had the right to possess them.

“Neither the general public nor the Hawaiian community has any right to the iwi and moepu [remains and burial objects], no matter how significant the items are deemed to be, because the iwi and moepu belong to po’ele’ele, the darkest of darkness,” he said.

But DeSoto Brown, the museum’s archives collection manager, said it shouldn’t be assumed that all the artifacts found in the caves were burial objects. It’s possible some items were placed there long after the burials, he said.

Brown, a Hawaiian who stressed he is not speaking for the museum, believes human remains belong where they were found, but the artifacts may not.

“Every culture has had terrible losses in one way or another, but Hawaiian culture, like Native American cultures, has been decimated not only in the people themselves, but also in the loss of so much of the material culture and the knowledge of how the material culture worked,” he said.

“In some cases, you can regain some of your knowledge by the study of the existing artifacts, and if those objects are gone you cannot learn from them.”