-All are dead who knew how to make coverings and loincloths and skirts and adornments and all that made the wearers look dignified and proud and distinguished.- Samuel Kamakau, Hawaiian historian, 1870
Since the arrival of Capt. Cook and the missionaries, much has been written about the ancient and traditional histories of kapa in Hawaii as well as in all of Polynesia. Since there is not much point in rehashing all that information in this website, I would prefer to provide you with links to websites I think are the most helpful as well as a bibliography to books that are useful to anyone with a serious interest in bark cloth. Instead, I would like to give a brief history, as I know and researched it, about modern Hawaiian kapa making.
In other pacific islands such as Fiji, Tonga and Samoa, bark cloth culture remained intact over these last few hundred years since European contact. Although it has diminished to various degrees, a visitor to those islands can still find native women working on the tapa in the same ways as their mothers and grandmothers taught them.
In Hawaii, this was not the case. After two hundred years of upheaval of the native culture and history, and at the same time the abrupt introduction of at least ten completely different cultures all at the same time, many Hawaiian arts were lost. Even if practitioners existed, there was the loss of land and natural resources and even the craftspeople that made many of the necessary tools.
When Hawaii was a US possession and then a state, the push was for native Hawaiians to integrate with the general population, which was now a virtual united-nations-of-the-pacific mixture. Generations of Hawaiians grew without knowing their own language or traditional culture. By the 1900’s your bloodline could have included Hawaiian, Chinese, Filipino, Puerto Rican, Portuguese and Irish! However, into the 1960-70 has, native Hawaiians began to see that they could not move forward without understanding their past, and so resurgence in ancient Hawaiian culture and history came about. Google PR -
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