Kuleana in Focus
Our Digital Kuleana: Practicing Malama for Hawai'i's Historic Fashion Collection through Digital Preservation
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Terri Lee Bixby
The Historic Fashion Collection housed at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa holds approximately 25,000 items from the following subcollections: Hawaiian, Asian, Global, and Western. The Hawai’i State Senate declared the Historic Fashion Collection a State Treasure in 2009. In Fall 2024, I was hired as a Curatorial Assistant to help with the digital preservation and collections management of the Hawai’i subcollection which contains approximately 1300 items. It is a crucial collection that illustrates the influences and impacts of different cultural groups on contemporary Hawaiian clothing resulting from colonialism, the plantation era, the statehood period, and beyond. The Hawai’i subcollection includes Aloha shirts c. 1920’s- present day, muumuu, holomu, and moloku c. late 19th century, kapa and tapa barkcloth pieces from various Pacific Islands, and Hawaiian quilts. The project’s main goal is to provide best practices for digital preservation and care of the collection with the use of database software to host not only object inventories but also digital public access to the subcollection. Community collaboration, dialogue, and use of the collection is heavily prioritized as we implement social media engagement while documenting the digital preservation of the collection. This paper seeks to understand how transparency in the digital preservation process can foster community engagement, further awareness of collection needs, and document the collection’s inherent value as a cultural heritage site requiring support from donors to maintain its status as a Hawai’i State Treasure.
Women Cultivating Food Sovereignty in Hawai'i and Aotearoa
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Monique Mironesco
Alternative food networks (AFNs) create spaces for women to engage in dialogue and resistance through storytelling. These narratives offer valuable input into projects and policies because they reflect lived experiences. The Hawai‘i and Aotaeroa New Zealand contexts in particular provide a critical opportunity to examine how decolonizing agriculture and food systems disrupts the industrialized agro-food system, allowing for meaningful participation by women in Indigenous and marginalized communities, sometimes one and the same in island ecosystems, and who are often at the forefront of climate crises. This book examines how food systems are shaped by political, economic, and gendered social experiences in Hawai‘i and Aotearoa New Zeleand, and how these are elements are co-constituted by ecological systems in both places. Through interviews with Kanaka Maoli, Māori, and other diverse women, it highlights Indigenous ecological values, whereby knowledge and being are not separate - but connected. Focusing on storytelling, the book examines how these principles influence women’s roles in AFNs and whether they have the potential to shape new models of agricultural communities as well as provide best practices models for other island ecosystems and beyond.
