FIG. 2 (below): Installation view. De Young Museum, San Francisco. Photo: Randy Dodson. Royal Hawaiian Featherwork When the exhibition opens at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum on March 19, 2016,2 loans of featherwork from other institutions including the Honolulu Museum of Art; British Museum; Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University; Hastings Museum and Art Gallery in East Sussex, England; National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution; Museum of Ethnology, Vienna; and Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, New Zealand, will be displayed in Hawai‘i, returning some pieces to the islands for the first time in more than two hundred years. Hulu o na manu, or bird feathers, from select endemic birds of the islands were highly valued. They were collected by chiefs as taxes (in the form of feather bundles) or used to acquire special trade goods.3 Feathers red in color were the most sacred and yellow feathers were the scarcest. The term ‘ahu ‘ula literally means red (‘ula) garments for covering the upper part of the body and shoulders (‘ahu).4 Red, yellow, black, and green feathers were mainly acquired from a few forest species of Hawaiian honeycreeper and one genus of honeyeater. Feathers from the Hawaiian domestic fowl (moa) and seabirds were also used in featherwork. Kia manu, skilled bird catchers, understood the behaviors and habitats of the birds, and they used a variety of techniques to attract and capture them to procure their feathers.5 Hundreds of thousands of feathers were needed for a single large cloak,6 which would be worn only by high chiefs who could procure the resources necessary to create them. To fashion cloaks and capes, bundles of feathers were tied together and attached to a twined fiber netting (nae) made of olona (Touchardia latifolia). These garments endure today because of their fine knotted construction and their foundation of olona cordage—one of the strongest and most durable natural fibers in the world.7 Adrienne Kaeppler has theorized that the netting might have been fabricated by priests while chanting
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