‘Pacific Worlds’ in Oakland touts islanders’ ties to Bay Area

H18.1986 Barkcloth, or siapo, from Samoa, composed of painted paper mulberry bark and will be on display in "Pacific Worlds." Credit: Courtesy of the Oakland Museum of California Photographed by Ben Blackwell for the Oakland Museum of California. less H18.1986 Barkcloth, or siapo, from Samoa, composed of painted paper mulberry bark and will be on display in "Pacific Worlds." Credit: Courtesy of the Oakland Museum of California Photographed by Ben ... more Photo: Oakland Museum Of California Photo: Oakland Museum Of California Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close ‘Pacific Worlds’ in Oakland touts islanders’ ties to Bay Area 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

East Coast, West Coast — that paradigm, that rivalry, may be too old school, especially if you think of California as on both the West Coast of North America and the east coast of the Pacific Rim.

That reconsideration of California and its close ties to the Pacific islands is one of the major thrusts behind “Pacific Worlds” at the Oakland Museum of California. About 300 rarely seen artifacts — ranging from an everyday fish hook to an intricate headdress of porpoise teeth — from the indigenous people of Fiji, Guam, Hawaii, Palau, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, Samoa, Tonga and the Caroline Islands have been pulled from the museum’s sizable collection. The pieces will be exhibited alongside local Pacific Islander perspectives, gathered with the help of a community advisory task force, as well as newly commissioned artwork and portraits of the Bay Area’s Pacific Islander community.

The show is more than just another event commemorating the 100th anniversary of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. It also signifies a turning tide of thought. Previously, says Suzanne Fischer, the lead curator of “Pacific Worlds” and the museum’s associate curator of contemporary history and trends, “there was a sense that this Pacific Island collection didn’t have anything to do with California. Now there’s a scholarly and activist move to think of the Pacific as a unified place with its own history, and that story includes California.”

So a turn-of-the-century Samoan kava set will be exhibited, as will photos by community task force member Jean Melesaine of two Bay Area kava circles: a traditional men’s group and the very nontraditional women’s club. The museum’s 25-foot outrigger canoe from Manus, Papua New Guinea, will be displayed for the first time against the backdrop of the current revival of Polynesian canoeing culture and the Hokulea’s worldwide voyage this year.

Until she began work with the task force, the Maui-bred Carolyn Melenani Kualii didn’t even realize that Oakland Museum had a Pacific collection — much of it collected by Oakland dentist John Rabe, who traveled throughout the Pacific in the late 19th century and often traded dental work for artifacts. For her, the collection’s redwood surfboard and paper ephemera not only conjured up stories of the San Mateo-educated Hawaiian princes who introduced surfing to the Americas in Santa Cruz, and the cosmopolitan King Kalakaua, who died in San Francisco in 1891, but also provided reminders about the region’s intertwined histories.

“For me, the exhibit is about presenting who we are to the larger community of the Bay Area, but also to inform them that Pacific Islanders are not new to this area,” she says. “We have an ancient — and contemporary — history to the West Coast of the United States.”

Kimberly Chun gets back to her Hawaiian Islands roots in the East Bay. E-mail: 96hours@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kimberlychun

If you go

Pacific Worlds: Saturday, May 30-Jan. 3. Programs include welcoming June 5,

6 p.m., and “Voices of the Pacific Experience,” June 26, 7 p.m. Hours 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday-Thursday, 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Friday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday-Sunday. $6-$15. Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak St., Oakland. (888) 625-6873.