HAWAI‘I – Museums with world class Pacific island collections are suffering major funding cuts forcing them to look for ways to pay their own way.

The latest is the Bishop Museum in Hawai‘i which has announced the outsourcing of funding for all its cultural and scientific researchers among a raft of self funding initiatives.

The emotional return of Polynesian artefacts originally gifted to Captain James Cook over 200 years ago has come at a time of financial uncertainty for the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum – one of the world’s leading museums for Polynesian, Melanesian and Micronesian culture.

New Zealand’s National Museum Te Papa Tongarewa recently “long-term loaned” a cape and a helmet to the Captain Cook was given the full-length red and yellow feathered cape and matching helmet by Hawaiian chief Kalani‘opu‘u in 1779, weeks before he was murdered by locals.

The chief personally placed the cape on the British seafarer’s shoulders when he landed at Kealakekua Bay on Hawai‘i after his gruelling third voyage to locate the north-west passage in Alaska.

The cape and helmet are made of feathers from around 20,000 birds – just a few feathers were taken from each bird so they could be released back into the wild.

Cook took the pieces back with him to England. They passed through the hands of various museum owners and collectors, and eventually made their way to New Zealand.

Last month they were effectively returned to Hawai‘i after 237 years.

The cape and helmet have now become the centrepieces of an exhibition at the Bishop Museum called He Nae Akea: Bound Together – a name chosen to reflect chief Kalani‘opu‘u’s connection to his land and people – and the connection between the nations that have cared for the artefacts.

The exhibit opening is a welcome distraction from ongoing government budget cuts which seen the museum lose a third of its operating revenue.

Government funding now makes up just four per cent of its budget, down from 40 per cent a few years ago.

The museum is just one of a number of institutions with world class Pacific Island collections – including Sydney’s Australian Museum – facing shrinking government funding.

A new survival strategy at the Bishop Museum means all its cultural and scientific researchers will need to find their own funding if they want to keep their jobs.

A programme of asset sales is also part of the strategy which will see the museum sell its ethno-botanical garden and land holding in the Waipi‘o Valley which has an unbroken connection with native Hawaiians going back thousands of years.

Large numbers of the museum’s artefacts, photographs and documents will be sold, gifted or transferred to new owners.

Blair Collis, president and chief executive of the Bishop Museum, said the Pacific collections will be spared.

“We will not be selling any Polynesian, Micronesian, Melanesian and Hawaiian collections of any type,” he told ABC’s Pacific Beat.

New Zealand ecologist and planning consultant Haikai Tane fears the new strategy will be a deadly blow to the mana of the Hawaiian museum.

“The cuts will effectively degrade the Bishop Museum into a tourist location and a place of entertainment instead of a true museum,” he said.

Founded in 1889, the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum has the world’s largest collection of Polynesian cultural artifacts, books and natural history specimens.

Charles Reed Bishop (1822–1915), a businessman and philanthropist, co-founder of the First Hawaiian Bank and Kamehameha Schools, built the museum in memory of his late wife, Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop (1831–1884).

Born into the royal family, she was the last legal heir of the Kamehameha Dynasty, which had ruled the Kingdom of Hawai‘i between 1810 and 1872.

Bishop had originally intended the museum to house family heirlooms passed down to him through the royal lineage of his wife.

- PNC sources