The cultural treasures of ancient Hawaii were scattered to the four winds during the six decades after the Europeans and Americans first arrived in the islands.

Hundreds of sacred items of enormous value — including feathered cloaks, capes, carved figures and statues of gods — were given away, traded for goods from overseas or simply stolen by foreigners.

Many have ended up in public museums or private collections in Europe, accessible only to ethnologists or VIPs.

But this year, exhibits in England and Germany are bringing together objects that had been held in widely dispersed museum collections, presenting a rare opportunity for people who love Hawaii’s antiquities to see things that are usually locked away in storage.

Courtesy of British Library

“This is an interesting year to write about these things,” said Noelle M. K. Y. Kahanu, an assistant specialist in Native Hawaiian programs at the University of Hawaii and one of the leading experts on Hawaii’s precious patrimony.

This year is the 250th anniversary of Captain Cook embarking on his voyages of discovery, she said, adding that many institutions have prepared special shows to highlight items in their Pacific collections.

In London, at The British Library, a new exhibit just opened, titled “James Cook: The Voyages,” featuring some of the original documents produced on Cook’s three expeditions, including his visits to Hawaii. Scheduled to run through Aug. 28, the show features maps, artworks and journals from Cook’s trips, including illustrations and paintings prepared by John Webber, the Swiss artist whose work revealed Hawaii’s beauty to the outside world for the first time.

Also in London, the Royal Academy of Arts will be opening its Oceania exhibit, which will run from Sept. 29 to Dec. 10. It will include a late 18th century feather god image from Hawaii from the collection of The British Museum, one of five held at that institution, and a cloak that once belonged to King Kamehemeha II.

The first of the three big museum exhibits this year, at Stuttgart, Germany, ended recently. The exhibit brought together some 215 items, including wooden sculptures, several rare cloaks and other holdings from collections in England, Switzerland, Scotland, Denmark and elsewhere in Germany.

Courtesy of Linden-Museum Stuttgart

Among the highlights: A vibrantly colored tabooing wand given to American explorer John Ledyard by a Hawaiian priest he had befriended, now held in a private collection, and a bright-red image of a feathered god that belongs to the University of Gottingen.

That image ended up at Gottingen because the school’s financial patron, the British King George III, who also sponsored Cook’s expeditions, was of German descent, said Ulrich Menter, oceanic curator at Stuttgart’s Linden-Museum, who organized the exhibit.

For visitors, including Hawaiian antiquities expert Kahanu, who previously worked as an exhibition curator for the Bishop Museum and as counsel on Native Hawaiian repatriation issues for Sen. Dan Inouye, the Stuttgart exhibit offered an unusual opportunity to see items rarely on display, including objects she had never seen before herself.

Menter, the Stuttgart curator whose studies have focused on the Gottingen collection, agreed that many of the items are only rarely made available for viewing.

“Most of these objects are not on permanent display in their respective museums,” he said. “This is the first show in Germany, perhaps in all of Europe, that focused on Hawaii.”

From 30,000 to 40,000 people attended the exhibit, Menter said. The audience reception has been satisfying, he said.

“People are extremely impressed by the feather cloaks,” he said.

In the past two centuries, objects from Hawaii have ended up in many cultural institutions overseas.

Courtesy of Linden-Museum Stuttgart

“In almost every major museum in the world you’ll find a few Hawaiian objects, and in some places more than others,” said Adrienne Kaeppler, curator of oceanic ethnology at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., who has spent a lifetime tracking the whereabouts of the items that were shipped from Hawaii during the early years after Cook’s arrival.

The items are being exhibited in Europe at a time that the discussion of “decolonizing” collections, which could mean repatriating artifacts to their homelands, is gaining currency.

The San Diego Museum of Man, for example, which holds a wide variety of ethnological materials, is viewed as leading the decolonization movement, which its officials say means increasing its interactions with indigenous peoples, particularly those whose ancestors crafted the items on display, and by making items more widely available to the people who want to see them most.

Kahanu called this an “extremely positive” development, and one which she hopes other museums will follow.

In an essay in Royal Hawaiian Featherwork, Maile Andrade pleaded for more and better access for Hawaiians to Hawaiian antiquities.

She called them “lifelines of the Hawaiian people, a pulsing continuation of ancestry.”

Some people would like to see officials in Hawaii demand repatriation of these items, making the case that objects that are of marginal interest to people overseas should be returned to places that treasure them most.

Courtesy of Royal Academy of Art. London

But others note it is difficult to make a legal case that the items should be returned if they were given as gifts to sea captains or as tokens of respect to other heads of state.

Kahanu takes a more nuanced approach to the repatriation of objects.

She says that the foreign museums deserve some credit for tending carefully to objects that were sometimes destroyed in Hawaii.

When the Hawaiian rulers converted to Christianity, some of them ordered objects that had previously been venerated to be destroyed. The three images of the god Ku brought back to Hawaii for the blockbuster exhibition at Bishop Museum in 2010, for example, may have survived only because they were taken away, she said.

“They had to leave Hawaii to be saved, in order to return today,” Kahanu said.

Kahanu and others in Hawaii are working to build productive relationships with museum officials abroad in hopes that more objects will be brought back to Hawaii, even if only for short stays, so that people here can see them, she said.

The return in 2016 of the cape of Chief Kalaniopuu, as a loan from the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, was the fruit of those interactions, she said.

She sees reason for optimism. In the past, museum curators jealously guarded their collections and to protect them, frequently blocked them from the view of the people who would care the most to see them, she said. She sees that changing, in part because of what she called an evolution in how anthropologists see their work.

“The new generation of anthropology students care more about collaboration than division,” she said, with more museum officials therefore willing to allow members of their staffs to accompany objects to places where the items would be viewed not just as art objects but items of veneration.

“It’s about redefining the notions of ‘care,’” she said.

For now, however, and while the debate continues, the Bishop Museum is the best place here in Hawaii to view these kinds of items. Of about 150 feathered cloaks from Hawaii that have been identified, for example, 36 are at the Bishop Museum.

But for those with the means to travel abroad, the shows overseas are a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see objects crafted in Hawaii long ago.

In an article on the Royal Academy’s exhibit, for example, The Guardian called it the first show of its kind since 1979, when the National Gallery of Art in Washington explored the subject.

And for those who can’t make the trip, there will also be a chance to view the artifacts on television. BBC is planning a three-part series on Oceania, which will focus on 200 exceptional works, to be aired in late summer or early fall, according to a spokeswoman at the Royal Academy of Art.

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