Treasures of the Pacific Island nations – objects, photographs, documents – are held not only at home but in institutions around the world. Digital Pasifik is a gateway to finding them, a website that provides a centralized link to the collections. (Link to Digital Pasifik: https://digitalpasifik.org/)
But it’s more than a portal to the past. The access it gives to Pacific Islanders allows them to both rediscover and recast their heritage; to bring their perspectives to what has been largely a colonial European view of their cultures.
Tim Kong, director of digital experience at the National Library of New Zealand who has been deeply involved in Digital Pasifik, thinks a lot about how the past formed the present, especially in the Pacific region, and what influence it will have in the future.
“It came with a capitalist model that took a whole bunch of stuff from a whole bunch of people and made a lot of money. And it came with a version of religion and faith that redefined how people saw and valued themselves.”
He considers the biggest, though often invisible, influence of the past to be represented by three Cs: colonialism, capitalism and Christianity. These three belief systems became the default worldview in the Pacific, he says. It’s a worldview that defines progress as always moving forward, always getting bigger, always consuming more. It views culture as a possession rather than a lived process. It deals with people in transactions rather than in relationships.
“It came with English, Spanish, French ships when they sailed into the Pacific,” he says. “It came with a capitalist model that took a whole bunch of stuff from a whole bunch of people and made a lot of money. And it came with a version of religion and faith that redefined how people saw and valued themselves.”
It’s a worldview that is reflected in many of the collections that Digital Pasifik links to, in the kind of information that museums and other institutions have on each of the objects in their possession — information known as metadata.
“We tend to see the metadata of these mostly Western institutions as a point of truth, and we see the institutions themselves as holders of the truth,”
Most cultural metadata capture a moment in time, Tim notes. With many objects, it’s the moment a collector took them out of the Pacific, often with minimal information about their meaning and use, very often calling them only by a European word. It might name the collector but not the creator.
“We tend to see the metadata of these mostly Western institutions as a point of truth, and we see the institutions themselves as holders of the truth,” he says, “when in fact from my perspective this metadata is a version of a truth, created at a certain point in reality.”
Now that institutional collections are being digitized, Pacific peoples can see these objects and documents from their history even if they’re on display or in storage in other parts of the world. And now they can question the metadata, add to it, change it, introduce a different worldview.
If information is power, this ability has the potential to alter the future.
“I think the average person has no concept of how much these cultural heritage institutions hold,” nor that the vast majority of the holdings are in storage rather than on display, Tim says. “I’m constantly just amazed. There’s an incredible value to people getting access to the scale of content, and particularly access to their own story.”
He uses the example of Solomon Islands. Like many Pacific nations, when Solomon Islands won independence it lost access to records that were kept during colonial rule; the colonial powers often took their paperwork with them when they left.
“A colleague in the Solomon Islands said to us, ‘Your site was amazing to us because we found things we didn’t know existed. All of our records begin from independence onwards.’
“So their own ability to tell their own story is bounded by when the colonial power left. Arguably, if your version of your recorded story only begins in 1978, and you aren’t able to access the records of the British administration of your islands, then you are limited in your ability to make sense of that history.”
Similarly, he says, New Zealand’s national archives hold Samoan land records dating back to 1918.
“They were only digitized in 2021 in part because of this (Digital Pasifik) project. So up until 2021 the only way Samoan people could access these land records from 1918 was if they firstly knew the record was in the New Zealand archives; and then they had to book access to them in the archives in Wellington, and fly from Apia to Wellington, all to see the records of their own country.
The museum’s information is academic in nature, but culture is lived.
“So having the ability to learn the vastness of the records, to be able to access the digitized versions if they exist or know how to access them physically, is incredible.”
When it comes to cultural heritage, he says, access to collections allows Pacific artists to examine and re-imagine them, and perhaps add a different perspective to the institutions’ information. A Samoan colleague said it was lovely that the national museum in New Zealand had so many tapa beaters beautifully photographed and preserved, and with good metadata, “but in Samoa they just sit on the kitchen shelf until you need them. And then you take them off the shelf, the young ones are learning from the elders, you sit around and make the tapa and put it back on the shelf.”
The museum’s information is academic in nature, but culture is lived, Tim says. “So how do we get people involved?”
As pleased as he is with digital access, he believes institutions also must find ways to invite Pacific Islanders of all kinds – not just academic researchers – into their physical space. He mentions the work by three artists presented in the Weaving a Narrative workshop which was held by the Übersee-Museum Bremen in Germany to explore how to add storytelling to metadata.
“No museum would have come up with what those artists did. No curator in a museum is coming up with those things. And so I think the opportunity is to lower the barriers, lower the hoops we ask people to navigate through. I’m fascinated by the opportunity for physical access but in a way that’s ongoing.
Our minds often go to the idea of repatriating collections to the nations they came from, he says, “but for a number of Pacific institutions I speak to, repatriation wouldn’t help them, because they’re already struggling with what they have and the ability to look after what they have. If you’re in Tuvalu, they know those islands will be under water in a hundred years, so why send stuff back from the British Museum.
To hire people who are okay with being in relationships with human beings, and with human beings who maybe don’t speak the language or who don’t look like them or might burst into song when they see an object, or weep, that’s what I’m thinking of.
“I think the opportunity is to allow Tuvalu people to get access to records and items held around the world, and be supported to do so, in ways that matter to them. That’s about being in a relationship with people. In institutions, we mostly hire people who look after inanimate objects. To hire people who are okay with being in relationships with human beings, and with human beings who maybe don’t speak the language or who don’t look like them or might burst into song when they see an object, or weep, that’s what I’m thinking of.”
One of the tensions, he says, is the risk that it becomes a transaction, in the capitalist model, rather than a relationship: We’ll let you in if you give us the information we think we’re missing. “You’ve got to invite them all in as their groups, respecting their organizational units, rather than just ‘we’ll get Pacific people in.’”
The Übersee-Museum is taking an amazing approach, he says. “They’re just gone to Samoa and engaged with the National University of Samoa and are doing incredible stuff. And I appreciate that costs more money than just building a website – but it is so much more valuable to those in Samoa, and so much more enduring.”