Focus on Cook Islands at NZ museum

THE Auckland War Memorial Museum in New Zealand has chosen the Cook Islands as the first Pacific Island nation to be the focus of their Pacific Collections Access Project.

The announcement was made during the opening of the Pacific Collections Access Project at the Auckland Museum on Thursday last week (CI time).

A statement on the Auckland War Memorial Museum website says the three year-long project, which will involve a large number of Pacific countries, is aimed at improving knowledge and understanding of the museum’s Pacific collection as well as increasing public access and engagement with the collection, especially for Pacific source communities.

“The first Pacific island nation to receive focus is the Cook Islands. Cook Islands ministers have blessed the collection, and community leaders gifted the project the Cook Islands Maori name of Akairo a te Taunga,” the statement said.

“The project is initially focused on the collections of 13 island nations which will be worked on in alphabetical order over the next three years and they are: Cook Islands, Easter Island, Fiji, French Polynesia, Hawai’i, Kiribati, Niue, Pitcairn Island, Samoa, Tokelau, Tonga, Tuvalu, Wallis and Futuna.”

Over the next three years over 5000 items from 13 island nations will be worked on, and the Cook Islands part of the project will run from now to early September this year.

The Pacific Collection Access Project is a project of partnership and discovery where the museum and Pacific communities will work together to share and exchange knowledge and programming about individual works, and the cultures they came from.

“Items such as tools, ornaments, musical instruments and carvings will be brought out of storage and examined, cleaned, measured, photographed and re-housed into safe and accessible storage.

“Improving information about each item in our museum’s records is crucial, and priority when possible, will be given to languages, dialects and specific cultural knowledge for each island nation through the inclusion of appropriate names and terminologies.”

“As the team start to work on items from each Pacific nation, the first step in the community engagement process will be to find leaders from Auckland-based Pacific communities who can suggest an appropriate project name using their own Pacific language and terminology.

“This will give each component of the project its own unique identity.”

The Cook Islands collection contains over 785 items and on May 28 (CI time), church ministers blessed the collection in preparation for the work that is now underway.