Mum fastens her hand securely around mine as she firmly guides me through a dense cluster of people in a European Museum. My ears are engulfed by a cacophony of foreign languages. I feel small and out of place as we glide past cold white walls, the stone floor absorbing our footsteps as if they don't belong here. We come to an abrupt stop, ahead is a doorway of portals into distant pasts, “The Pacific Collections”.
The space is isolated, soulless, a storeroom of imperial conquest collecting dust. Muted lights barely uncover its contents. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust from the brightness outside. When I recover my vision Mum releases her grip and whispers into my ear, “this is where they keep the Fijian things”.
Our reflections melt into a glass cabinet labelled “Fijian Weaponry”. Suspended between two totokia weapons is an iTuki club. My face flushes with a familiar warmth, Mum comes up to my side - we both knew these forms and carvings intimately from our Fiji island home yet, in a strange way, we felt like we were home but without the keys to get in. I took note of yet another display of “Fijian weaponry”—an invasive narrative that portrays us as savage, warrior-like, cannibalistic. The label underneath didn't have any information about a village of origin or the maker. It simply read “Fiji, acquired in the 1800s”. As an 8-year-old, I did not have the language to explain the sinking feeling I felt when I saw our culture depicted in this way. But I knew then, as I do now, that it was deceptive.
It’s 2021, and my family and I are standing in the underground vault of Te Papa Tongarewa, New Zealand’s national museum, being greeted by some of the country’s most respected and knowledgeable Pasifika curators and researchers. We are here to view rare pieces of masi from the 1800s that originate from my mother’s island.
The vault seems enormous yet I feel like I’m suffocating. Every square metre is filled to the brim with thousands, maybe millions, of objects from across the Pacific ocean. I imagine countless ancestral stories drowning under delicate white wrapping, suspended in time, forced into slumber. My thoughts are suddenly broken by the voice of one of the curators, “the masi is this way”.
With pristine white gloves, two of the curators carefully unroll the giant pieces of masi. The deep blackness of the vanua anchors itself before us in immaculate patterns and spectacular compositions. Red natural dyes soak the fibers with precision. Rows and rows of repeated patterns speaking to us, finding us again like an old relative. I refrain from grabbing a corner and uplifting the masi into our arms, reuniting her with her people. Instead, I quietly lean over and whisper to Mum, “this is where they keep the Fijian things”.
Just last year instead of standing in cold underground vaults I fell into the abyss of online museum collections. Endlessly scrolling through Fiji search results, encountering precious ceremonial items like tabua and masi reduced to a number in an extensive system of “preservation”. Their origins unknown, maker unknown, use unknown, their stories unknown. However, then I was introduced to Digital Pasifik, a website that has consolidated Pacific items and records from museum collections across the world. Their hope is to connect Pacific peoples to their own culture and vice versa. There are spaces below each item that allow users to write what they know about the item and weave their stories back into their life cycles. I thought this was deeply meaningful, a form of resistance and a doorway to reconnection.
I had the opportunity to choose something from these collections and respond to them with a creative piece. Without hesitation I chose three pieces of masi. From what felt like a world away, I lovingly held them in poetry whilst also painting onto fresh white masi. I enclosed them in their mother tongue, reminded them of the warm Fijian sun they once knew and re-painted their markings so that they lived on outside of their confines. I felt sadness, I wish they didn't have to be so far from home, “this is where they keep the Fijian things”, I said to myself after closing my tab on Google Chrome.
My vision of an indigenous future does not fear the end of the museum and its temporalities. It is a future of liberation and story sovereignty. This vision denounces the ways museums participate in acts of indigenous extinction. Determining our place in time as if we solely belong to the “past”. Our temporality is systematically validated through obscure forms of collecting and “preservation” as if we are to be saved. In reality, we exist within an expansive network of living breathing ecosystems that connect simultaneously to the past, present and future. We cannot be categorised or archived into separate parts.
Fiji is not just weaponry, we Taukei are an entire cosmos of complex, rich stories and kinship ties. Yet, here I am in the digital ether using these same oppressive systems of preservation to find perceived versions of myself so that I might find one that I recognise as true. Connecting to my cultural heritage through online collections is a bizarre paradox of reclamation and encountering coloniality. In one tab I am rejoicing in the images of incredible rare masi that demonstrates the innovation and creativity of our women. I feel inspired and empowered to reimagine our visual languages in new ways. However, in the neighboring tab I am filled with frustration at the lack of provenance, the lack of respect and cultural care given to our most prized ceremonial items like whale’s teeth. My hope is for a future where our heritage is safely in our hands, where we determine our stories. A future where my daughter is among her people, on her ancestral land knowing that this is where they keep the Fijian things.