Honolulu Weekly

Bishop Museum, Hawaiian Hall / Anyone who attended grade school on Oahu is more than likely to have memories about field trips to the Bishop Museum and its Hawaiian Hall. Most will remember the “big whale” most vividly, the massive sperm whale that has hung from the ceiling for many years. Others will remember the hale pili, the grass shack that greets visitors at the entrance on the ground floor. Those iconic features of Hawaiian Hall remain after the restoration of the historic building, but the transformation that this Victorian museum has undergone sees Hawaiian Hall emerge from a static memory into a present and future blazing with life.

“I remember dancing hula on the Great Lawn when I was little,” recalls Bishop Museum spokeswoman Donalyn Dela Cruz. As she slowly walks each floor and discusses the artifacts, she’s candid about the recent renovations to Hawaiian Hall and their impact on her personally. “I still have so much to learn.”

Renovations began in 2006. Over the years since its construction in 1889 the building had decayed into a musty reliquary. The problems–many of them common to historic buildings, like lead paint and termite damage–rendered Hawaiian Hall unable to meet modern standards and concepts of what a museum’s function in the community should be.

Standing among three floors of regal columns filigreed in gold and the unmitigated dignity of great spans of lustrous koa wood, it’s clear that Hawaiian Hall has assumed its rightful place.

That said, the redefinition of the museum as an institution was as important as its physical reconstruction. Conceptualization was guided by an understanding of the importance of honoring Hawaiian history and culture as a single, living experience. The first floor, Kai Akea, represents the sea, from when Hawaiian gods, and Hawaiian people, came. The second, Wao Kanaka, represents the earth, where people live and work in harmony with the land. The third floor, Wao Lani, represents the mountains and heavens, the realm of the gods. The concept of providing layers of experience and meaning in Hawaiian Hall has proved parallel to the physical design, construction and future of Hawaiian Hall.

Kai Akea

While actual renovations began in 2006, preparations began much earlier. Betty Tatar, the museum’s strategic initiatives director who led the Hawaiian Hall content committe for the renovation, strides the first floor in a classic muumuu discussing some of the artifacts on the first floor and how the final design came together.

“We were interested in learning more about how to use objects to teach,” Tatar says. The museum met with WGBH public television in Boston to that end and hired Ralph Appelbaum Associates, the world’s largest interpretive museum design firm. Appelbaum is uniquely gifted at making the social and cultural aspects of history accessible. He has worked all over the world, sharing his vision at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial, the National Museum of Scotland and at the Museum of World Religions in Taiwan, among a great many other notable institutions.

“Ralph Appelbaum is particularly strong on the importance of interpretation,” says Tatar. “There is a responsibility to the culture. It’s more than just displaying artifacts.”

One of the priorities of the renovation was to restore the beautiful koa wood and to uncover the grace of the original design of Hawaiian Hall. Making state-of-the-art improvements in accessibility and presentation was of paramount importance.

Displaying artifacts and providing accurate information is, traditionally, at the core of the museum’s purpose. What is unique about many of the artifacts in Hawaiian Hall is that they were gifted by alii and their families. In many cases, determining the original date of the work is impossible. An item as simple as a poi pounder may have been gifted to a family in, say, 1850, before making its way into the collection at Hawaiian Hall years later.

Then again, the precise age of a ceremonial pahu drum, perhaps, becomes immaterial when it is before your eyes, both polished with care and worn with use. Naniuaola was sounded as a herald during times of royal births at Kukaniloko in Wahiawa, where the mothers of future chiefs and consorts were brought to deliver living gods to the people. Studded with human teeth and seething with meaning and mana, Naniuaola is not just a symbol but a physical means with which Hawaiian culture has connected the divine with those who would aspire to it.

Wao Kanaka

Wao Kanaka, the second floor of Hawaiian Hall, is dedicated to more corporeal matters, the ways in which native Hawaiians have traditionally lived and worked. The people’s relationship to the land and the management of limited resources are explored on this floor. Limited resources necessitated a practical approach to daily life in traditional Hawaii, much as the museum needed to undertake the physical restoration of Hawaiian pragmatically.

The project, the cost of which is in the neighborhood of $21 million, encountered construction challenges unique to the rehabilitation of historic buildings. Termite damage was severe. Lead paint, a very real health hazard, covered the columns in the hall. There were serious accessibility issues. The use of natural light and ventilation no longer met modern conservation standards.

Glen Mason Architects and Heath Construction Services were contracted for the construction work, two firms widely respected for their restoration work at other Hawaiian historic sites, including ‘Iolani Palace, Washington Place and Shangri-La, Doris Duke’s private home near Diamond Head.

And just as the structure itself was in dire need of improvements, the project of restoring the artifacts in the many collections that are featured in Hawaiian Hall was a massive undertaking.

The artifacts in the collections were created by master crafters and artisans, in some cases hundreds of years ago. Like the hall, these artifacts were subject to the ravages of time. They demanded diligence and care in restoration. Whether it is weaving lauhala or re-thatching the famous hale pili, the work becomes a sort of prayer, an end in itself. Traditionally, it is not enough to simply fashion an implement, that implement must work. A fish hook must catch fish. An adze must be strong and sharp. And newly restored artifacts must speak to visitors of the people that made them and the purpose they served.

The fine carpentry also reflects that sentiment. The koa wood in Hawaiian Hall is not just a building material, it is a representation of the beauty of the land and of the Hawaiian culture. It is not there only to serve as a banister or molding. Great care was taken to bring out its natural luster and visual texture.

One of the most amazing achievements of the restoration in that respect is a display of traditional olona fishing nets. The delicacy of the original work is mind-boggling. Surely, making a large net was a long, laborious task. This concept is elucidated beautifully by kupuna Sam Kaai, who provides invaluable insight for visitors in a video at an interactive multimedia station near the case that holds one of the olona nets. Such stations are located throughout Hawaiian Hall. And while touch screen monitors may not have the heady provenance of the artifacts themselves, they are nonetheless new tools used to educate and to preserve Hawai’i’s cultural resources.

Wao Lani

Wao Lani, the third floor of Hawaiian Hall, seeks to tell the stories of those closest to the heavens: The alii, monarchs confronted with a virulent colonialism that sought to extinguish the very cultural and spiritual flame that burned in the heart of Hawai’i’s people. These noble figures, from Kamehameha the Great to Queen Liliuokalani, were charged by destiny to lead their people into an uncertain future. The gravity of that onus on the royals is not glossed over in Wao Lani. The struggle they faced is illuminated with quotes from the monarchs and through the display of some of their most cherished personal items. A feather cloak belonging to Kamehameha, The “Annexation Flag,” the very banner that was stricken from ‘Iolani Palace at the time of Queen Liliuokalani’s overthrow, is an artifact with the power to make that dark day dawn again each time someone views it for the first time.

Throughout the collection of royal artifacts are statistics that are shocking in their stark representation of the losses Hawaiians suffered as the outside forces of mostly bloodless conquest took their toll. The amount of land lost to that conquest and, sadly, the number of people also lost, are foreboding reminders of how vulnerable the Hawaiian culture was and is to external influences.

There are other artifacts in Wao Lani to spark wonder in visitors to Hawaiian Hall. There is an old recording device, for instance, that looks like it might sell for a quarter at a Kalihi garage sale. It is actually priceless, a true relic of the humble origins of post-colonial Hawaiian music: Mary Kawena Pukui’s tape recorder. The preservation of a significant amount of Hawaiian musical tradition was preserved on this unassuming little box. It may look like an archaic contraption that not even a second-hand store would take, but its display is treated with the reverence and veneration it deserves.

The legacy of Duke Kahanamoku, the original and definitive “ambassador of aloha,” lives on at Hawaiian Hall as well. His most recognizable surfboard, a wooden plank by modern standards, holds a place of honor among the many immediately recognizable artifacts. Pukui and Kahanamoku are elevated from nostalgic figures to historic icons of a great nation.

Among the last things visitors to Hawaiian Hall will encounter is a work of art comprised of 40 panels entitled Hoohuli. The work was created by charter school students in collaboration with a handful of native Hawaiian artists and cultural practitioners. It is meant to depict the changes Hawaiian culture has undergone since pre-contact times. It is a vibrant work, alive with the hopes of a new generation of native Hawaiians.

Surely that new generation will make contributions to Hawaiian culture and history that will find their way into Hawaiian hall in the future, and the restoration was undertaken with that goal in mind: to be able to adapt. Collections are to be rotated in and out of display as time passes, so that new interpretations of ancient themes can be brought to light for the benefit of all of the people of Hawaii.

In a video presentation at the Hoohuli display, Bishop Museum’s Noelle Kahanu sums the intent of the piece, and, indeed, of the Hawaiian Hall restoration, while talking with the student artists about conceptualizing the message.

“The point,” she says, “is the process.”