Honolulu Weekly

Bent over the wide table like surgeons operating, they are quiet as they work. In the sterile gleam of a high-ceilinged white room, the four women look small. Repairing and strengthening centuries-old kapa made from mulberry bark cloth is painstaking—and these women are not yet a quarter of the way through a conservation project that must be completed by the time the Bishop Museum reopens its Hawaiian Hall in August. The $21 million renovation of the hall, which will house the world’s largest collection of Hawaiian artifacts, has been ongoing since 2006.

“At this point, we need to complete about five items a day to be on schedule,” said Linda Hee, who leads the conservation team. “By May, we’ll be doing 15 a day so that we can stay on schedule. And there’s no guarantee that we’ll be able to do this by August when it’s supposed to open. There’s a lot left to do.”

Hee’s team, which also includes Shannan Chan, Kaori Akiyama and Liane Ikemoto, is into its third day of repairing the piece of kapa stretched out before them. It’s a rich tan color with a dark and intricate pattern repeated across the front. The cloth is thin and soft as tissue like most traditional Hawaiian kapa, which is the lightest in the Pacific.

“Just looking at kapa gives so much insight into traditions and use,” said Aaron Ho, a cultural collections representative for the museum. “Some of them are printed and others have watermarks. You can see them. Some are colored using dyes, others are beaten with silk threads to color them. Others of them are oiled. There’s a lot that has to be relearned by the people who are trying to learn that skill now.”

The decorated side of the cloth faces down, as the group makes repairs to the back, pasting wisps of Japanese mulberry paper to areas that are weak or torn.

“These are very fine, strong pieces of paper,” said Hee. “We use starch paste to adhere them and that’s because it’s water-based, so if we ever need to take all of these off, we can. If a researcher wants to come and see it, it’s possible to remove all of these repairs.”

It’s nothing short of awe-inspiring, the devotion that these women have to a process that is not only invisible once the piece is on display, but that they may well have to reverse. The work they’re doing now will extend the display lives of these artifacts 10 or 15 years as pieces rotate in and out of public view. The meticulousness of their work becomes almost religious, a ritual connecting them to Hawaiian ancestry, quiet as a prayer.

“For me, this experience is a gift because I have a chance to contact the source and core of Hawai‘i,” said Kaori Akiyama. “Especially when you can physically touch the kapa, you feel like you know what kind of person lived. It’s almost like a meditation.”

The team is starting with artifacts made from organic materials and will eventually move on to those made with inorganic sources. They’ve worked on everything from kapa and woven baskets to kahili and other featherwork. The primary focus is to maintain artifacts so as to minimize the amount of restorative work they’ll need.

“This points to the difference between conservation, preservation and restoration,” said Hee. “We’re doing conservation: taking what’s there and making it as strong as possible so that it can last longer, our heritage. Preservation is what Aaron [Ho] and the techs do. They take it and they house it properly and they put it in a good storage environment and make sure the materials in cases that are acid free. Then restoration is making it look good. We do a minimal amount of restoration.”

One of the many pieces that Ho oversees, now housed in a thick-walled storage room, is an egg-yolk yellow feathered pā‘ū, or skirt, that belonged to Princess Nāhi‘ena‘ena in the 1820s. The room, monitored by a network of security cameras, is kept locked like a bank vault. Even cultural collections staff with clearance to enter are required to go in pairs.

Nāhi‘ena‘ena’s pā‘ū, woven thick with more than one million feathers, is the only known featherwork of its kind. It represents the end of an era for the Hawaiian people in conjunction with the start of a heavy missionary presence on the Islands. Tips of red feathers pierce through a soft layer of sunny yellow. Bright red and black feathered triangles—a shape common in Hawaiian design—line the edges of the garment.

“It’s a whole story in itself,” said museum spokeswoman Donalyn Dela Cruz, who calls it one of her favorite pieces in the museum. “It represents a lot. The artifact itself is just incredibly beautiful and you see the yellow feathers, but right beneath that is a whole layer of red feathers. The netting behind it, it’s an incredible piece, and to think that they made this for the princess and also the fact that it was really worn at one point, mostly used. But then it’s a tragic story.”

The pā‘ū highlights a time of cultural crisis for the Hawaiian people as Christianity seeped into society, and it remained an important expression of identity for the troubled princess who wore it.

“So, Nāhi‘ena‘ena, her father was one of the most progressive people at that time,” explained Ho. “He was one of the ones who enabled Westerners to come in and build trade relationships. So this piece was made for her at a time of cultural confusion, having to live in the time when everything is Westernizing yet maintaining your own personal native identity. So what she did when she came to greet the bodies of her brother and his wife who had recently passed away, she knew she had to show a Hawaiian side but she had to stay true to her Christian upbringing, so she ended up dressing in a simple black dress with this draped over her as a kind of happy medium. But what is amazing about that is that she was 9 years old and she had the clarity of thought to do this.”

Just as her wisdom came early, Nāhi‘ena‘ena died young, in her early 20s. When she died, her heartbroken brother cut the pā‘ū down the middle so it could never be worn again. It became a funeral pall for monarchs—its last usage at King David Kalākaua’s burial. A thick seam where it has been resewn swells down the middle.

Nāhi‘ena‘ena’s pā‘ū is one of thousands of items in the museum that link us to local history but remain hidden from public view until the completion of Hawaiian Hall. The value of the pieces themselves is rivaled only by the quiet dedication of those who work to preserve and celebrate the richness of these artifacts, which live on with their help to tell the stories of our past.