Powerful Things
Fighting for the sacred in a material world
Wading in a sea of verdant, feathery ferns, I follow Timona Tereino through the forest above the Marquesan village of Hakahetau, Ua Pou, in October 2013. Wet mango leaves stick to our flip-flops as we pass plantations of banana and coconut, densely-packed mango trunks, crumbling walls and stone platforms covered with weeds. When we pause to rest, Timona talks about how people used to live here.
“What I’ve heard is that all this land from here down to below, they used to use it for their tapu [or sacred] things,” he says. “Before there were two tikis here,” large-eyed stone statues of gods or ancestors. “If this place was clean [or cleared of brush], you’d be able to see what the ancestors did.” For Timona, the land is not simply a place to grow crops or graze cows. It is a living, breathing thing that links him to his ancestors and the colonial history that nearly obliterated them. Like a length of woven coconut fiber, this relationship to ancestral spirits and the trauma of the past winds its way through all of Marquesan heritage.
The Marquesas are an overseas territory (collectivité d’outre mer) of France, an archipelago of twelve islands tucked into the northeast corner of French Polynesia. For nearly two centuries they have grappled with the ebb and flow of French influence, embracing some things while resisting others. Staking a claim for their islands, their culture and themselves is a daily struggle that plays out everywhere, from open-air kitchens to bingo games to government offices. And particularly when it comes to the material world, they find themselves pushing back.
We capitalists like to pretend we are emotionally detached from the world of things. On the surface, at least, our lives are powered by money. Each of our possessions has a price tag.
But our relationship with things is not that simple. Why else would we fill our basements and attics with boxes and bins of old artwork, clothes, spare tools, holiday decorations, unused kitchen appliances, jigsaw puzzles and empty mason jars? Most of these things have little objective value. But we hold onto them for sentimental reasons, or because we might use them some day, or because we’re hoping to hand them off to someone who needs them. Even with Marie Kondo’s help, the cycle of capitalist consumption feels relentless and unstoppable. And in some ways, it is. This unquenchable thirst for acquiring things is a hallmark of Western cultures and capitalism.
By contrast, the cultural heritage and relative isolation of the Marquesas make minimalism a necessity. Located thousands of miles away from the nearest continent (South America), these islands are among the most remote in the world, and importing anything takes precious money and time. Each frozen American chicken breast that hits a Marquesan pan has to land first in Tahiti, French Polynesia’s capital, and then travel almost a thousand additional miles to reach the Marquesas.
Capitalist consumption has clashed with Marquesan values, too. The people of these islands have a rich tradition of subsistence, communal living and family-based networks of exchange that makes acquiring a lot of things problematic. It suggests a distasteful focus on personal wealth and a moi, je (me, me) attitude; a grave fault in a place where everyone knows each other (the largest Marquesan towns number less than 3,000 people). Compared to Americans, Marquesans not only have less stuff; they feel less attached to what they have. They live in a whirlpool of reciprocal exchange in which tools and other possessions circulate among extended family. They constantly give and take everything, from headphones and cars to clothing, fruit-picking poles and food without any money changing hands.
In 2023 I was working on Hiva Oa, the island neighboring my “home” island of Tahuata (where I was first adopted by a Marquesan family in 2002) for a month. Throughout my stay I lived with a sister of my adoptive father, Manuhi, during the week and commuted to Tahuata on the weekends, and each time I passed between their homes I became a courier. My aunt would send me to Manuhi’s house with frozen steaks and chicken, fruit, fresh baguettes, sausage and other store-bought goodies, and when I returned from Tahuata I always carried a cooler or a box full of limes, fresh fruit and fish caught by my adoptive brothers.
When I began coming to the islands in the early 2000s, I found the constant circulation of things confusing. Each time I visited I would bring gifts for specific family members and carefully distribute them one by one, only to find everything shuffled around a few hours later. The hat I’d given to my little brother would turn up on the head of a cousin, or the school supplies I’d brought would be seemingly scattered at random among the village children. For my Marquesan family, giving these gifts away didn’t feel like a loss since most of it went to family members. It took some adjustment, but eventually I learned that even when someone “takes” something from a sibling it doesn’t count as stealing because the item remains in the family. Giving things away or allowing them to be taken feeds a deep bond of trust and affinity. Sure, you may love a particular jacket or a pair of sandals. But this emotion is superficial and temporary since the things, themselves, are temporary. Or are they?
The first time I visited the storage space of a museum, it reminded me of someone’s attic. The dry, faintly dusty smell. The crowded shelves. The darkness chased away by the flick of a switch. But the stuff in there wasn’t junk. It was rare and precious artwork. At the time I was a college student working at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the scene from The Goonies when a gang of kids finds a treasure map in Mikey’s attic (Mikey’s dad happens to work at — wait for it — the local museum). The map leads them, after many misadventures, to a pirate ship loaded with booty. The Peabody Museum storage units feel a bit like the cramped hold of a treasure-laden ship, too. Tucked into every spare corner of the museum’s hulking, historic red brick home, they are hidden behind half-sized doors, around corners and under steeply sloping eaves. Each object has its designated place, meticulously organized row-upon-row in numbered drawers and shelves.
It feels like a privilege to enter those climate-controlled storage rooms, and it is. Like most museums, the Peabody supervises and records details about every person who visits its stored collections. Gloves and even masks are often required, and curators regulate all interactions with the objects. Immersed in regulations, these things have been transformed into artifacts by the passage of centuries and their own unlikely survival. They are meaningful because they were collected, but also because they have been so painstakingly preserved. They alone were selected and acquired, transported across the world, made priceless by their stories. Like patients in a hospital ward, each artifact requires special care. But unlike patients they don’t require constant attention. So they spend most of their time in silent obscurity, waiting for someone to take notice. It’s a far cry from their former lives as everyday objects, things held sacred or utilitarian by distant peoples. Collectors (largely white men) who viewed these communities as “exotic,” “pre-modern,” or “endangered” launched a chain of events that led to the growth of ethnographic museums. Relics of other times and diverse places, the resulting collections are stamped with not just accession numbers but the imprint of lasting racial, cultural and economic inequities. For the museums that house them, this stain of colonialism has become a heavy mark on such artifacts. So why bother keeping them? Because letting go is hard.
The inhabitants of Europe and their cultural descendants have been trained to hold onto things. The very foundations of Western civilization rely on a system of material inheritance; of objects, estates, buildings, and trust funds. So by necessity and force of habit, we are collectors. Most of the millions of objects in museum storage are rarely viewed. Rather, they are kept, and the lack of human contact tends to prolong their lives. Some day, perhaps, someone will come and learn from them. Or not. The museums don’t really care, since their goal is to preserve things for future generations. Their collections are a cultural inheritance for humanity, echoing the genes, property, and other miscellaneous baggage we inherit from our forebears. Baked as it is into our very understanding of who we are, none of this strikes us as strange. But what if it did?
In the Marquesas, honoring the meaning of objects takes a different form. Things are valuable because they are used and shared, and respecting a thing can mean leaving it alone and letting it fall quietly to pieces, unseen. The things we have and use are auxiliary, mere enhancements to our relationships to the land, the sea, and other people. For much of their history, Marquesans buried caches of sacred or valuable objects with chiefs and priests in remote, largely inaccessible caves. For the Marquesans of today haina kakiu, or old things, have gained a place apart from most material objects, valued for their age and association with the ancestors rather than their current utility. Haina kakiu are vehicles of cultural transmission, a direct link to a time when pre-European beliefs and knowledge still thrived. They are an opportunity to heal and rebuild after centuries of colonial oppression, trauma and depopulation.
Hoping to seize this opportunity, the planned cultural center on Hiva Oa intends to house a collection of Marquesan objects returned from two museums in Europe. The Museum der Kulturen of Basel, Switzerland and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology of Cambridge, England have both preserved haina kakiu for perpetuity, and for Marquesans this makes them the keepers of something truly precious. Hiva Oa’s leaders hope to renovate an existing museum known as the Gauguin Cultural Center to house the returned items.
In the Marquesas the “life” of objects used in everyday activities comes from their contact with human skin, breath, dirt and sweat. This was the spirit in which they were made, and it is what allows Marquesans to build relationships with their haina kakiu. The mana, or sacred ancestral power, that lingers in some of these objects can only be felt in their physical presence, and the human response to that power creates a dialogue between ancestral spirits and living descendants. When an object becomes an artifact to be housed behind glass and handled only with gloves, it takes on a whole different value. The physical connection to the ancestors is severed.
The question of how the new cultural center can best respect and honor these objects is therefore critical. In many ways, this space is poised to blend pre-colonial understandings of objects as powerful, active agents with mana and post-colonial views of objects as precious material things that must be preserved. But as museum pieces imported with care from abroad, the loaned haina kakiu will likely become treasured sources of knowledge about the past, closely studied but rarely touched. Might the haina kakiu in museums be more meaningful if their Marquesan source communities were to use them, instead of preserving them?
As one Marquesan artisan noted, the planned space should above all be “for the future of young people.” Another artist, the dancer and tourist guide Humu Kaimuko, supports the return of haina kakiu and the creation of a cultural center. But he also worries about how Marquesans might interpret the exhibition of their own culture. “We are not a people who belongs in a museum yet. We aren’t ready,” he said. “We want to be in our culture,” not peering at it through a pane of glass. And putting it on exhibit might suggest to young Marquesans that they have to “go look in a museum” to see their culture, rather than living it. He mentioned how Marquesans still wear the kinds of headdresses, whale tooth pendants and rooster feathers you see on display in museums. So while foreigners might be happy to exhibit the remnants of their cultural history, haina kakiu are not museum material. “Because we’re not yet in that spirit.”
While many Europeans, Americans and Marquesans hold the preservation of haina kakiu as sacred, retaining the deep cultural and spiritual meanings of these objects is vital to how Marquesans understand who they are. By working to get haina kakiu out of European storage rooms and returned to the Marquesas, Hiva Oa’s leaders have shown a tenacious resolve to reclaim this heritage and create a space where Marquesans can gather, learn and breathe new life into these powerful things. In the process, they will assert themselves against the imperialist legacy of museums and its materialist roots.
Thank you to Humu Kaimuko, Joëlle Frébault, Moerani Frébault, Maria and Felix Teikiotiu, the population of Hiva Oa, and the Museums of Cambridge and Basel for their input and support.