Preserving the Past, Planning the Future

FAIN: PG-266660-19

Hula Preservation Society (Kaneohe, HI 96744-3814)
Keau George (Project Director: January 2019 to April 2025)

A preservation assessment and recommendations for disaster planning, staff education and training through webinars, and the purchase of environmental dataloggers and storage boxes. This small organization holds approximately 30,000 items dating from the 1930s to the present, including oral histories, photographs, scrapbooks, manuscripts, vinyl records, textiles, hula implements and musical instruments, books, and audiovisual materials. The request focuses on support for the Oral History Library, a repository of histories and artifacts from more than 100 elders born in the early twentieth century. Topics range from dance, music, and cultural traditions to history, poetry, art, literature, philosophy, religion, socioeconomic impacts, and changes in the teaching of the mother tongue. The periods covered, seen through Native Hawaiian eyes, begin with the late nineteenth century and proceed through the pivotal periods of the Territory of Hawaii, World War II, statehood, and the Hawaiian Renaissance of the 1970s.

Since 2000, Hula Preservation Society (HPS) has been building a one-of-a-kind repository preserving the voices of our esteemed native elders, through conducting oral histories that capture their lives, careers, wisdom, insights, and knowledge, and gathering associated tangible elements of those lives shared from their personal collections. The resulting HPS Archive was formally established in 2013. This preservation assistance grant will support three complementary activities – assessment, education and training, and supply purchase. Expected results are two-fold: 1-HPS will receive a final assessment report from project consultant which includes a survey of HPS's physical holdings and recommendations for preservation needs, storage and safe handling, adequate disaster planning, appropriate environmental conditions, and recommendations to enhance collections care policies and practices, and 2-the capacity of the team and its knowlege in collections care and management will be expanded.