FEATURED MOʻOLELO
The Hawaiʻi State Archives Story By Wanda A. Adams - Photos By James Kimo Garrett
T
he Hawaiʻi State Archive occupies an obscure Territorial-era building at the edge of the ‘Iolani Palace grounds, reached by an equally easy- to-miss alley just ‘ewa of the State Library on King Street. You’ve likely driven by it a thousand times without noticing it.
“Ninety percent of the population has no idea that we exist, what we do, or the incredible depth of material we have,” said Jansen. “And no idea that they need it. Ar- chives tend not to be valued until they’re needed.” The archives might contain, for example, some long-forgot- ten piece of public record that a plaintiff needs to prove a lawsuit. It might also provide a peek at the original, hand-annotated sheet music for a mele that a Kumu Hula is researching, or attest to the truth or falsehood of a family story. “An archive is not a museum, and it’s not a library,” Jansen explains. “An archive is a repository for any record made in the course of an activity. It is vital evidence of that activity.” In other words, materials suitable for an archive were produced in “real time,” recording, in whatever way, from quill to computer, those events. It is not a memoir or something written or summarized later, he said.
But within are treasures, among them 26,000 pages of Queen Liliʻuokalani’s letters and journals, the manuscript of her best-selling biography, hand-inked sheet music, dozens of photographs, and even a sprinkling of personal possessions — feather lei and tortoiseshell hair combs — left to the archive by Hawai’i’s last monarch. During the Queen Liliʻuokalani Keiki Hula Competition, a few of those treasures have traveled a short way from their dim, climate-controlled home to the Blaisdell Ex- hibition Hall, part of an ongoing Mobile Archive project curated by State Archivist Adam Jansen.
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49 YEARS OF CELEBRATING KEIKI AND THE ART OF HULA
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