At age 31, Sarah Tamashiro Kuaiwa stay da youngest curator at da Bishop Museum, da largest museum in Hawai‘i. Dis 2011 St. Andrew’s Priory grad wen get her BA in art history from Occidental College in Los Angeles, den she we go get her master’s degree at da University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa before finally getting her PhD in art history from da University of East Anglia Sainsbury Research Unit in Norwich, England. In 2022 she got her current position as da Bishop Museum’s Curator for Hawai‘i and Pacific Cultural Resources.
Initially she thought her interest in curating came when she wuz in high school and she went to one museum, but aftah talking story, she realized her love for history and storytelling actually came about several years earlier, all because she wuz brave enough for ask her grandma. . . one question.
* * * * *
Lee Tonouchi (LT): What your ethnic backgrounds?
Sarah Tamashiro Kuaiwa (STK): I’m Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiian, English. I was raised in an Okinawan Japanese household.
LT: How you identify as? Hawaiian? Local? Asian? Nikkei?
STK: I don’t know. Yeah, that’s a good question. I definitely identify as being Hawaiian. I think that’s very important to me. But I also recognize that I’m very Asian passing and I can’t ignore the fact that I was raised in an Asian household. And so I like to describe my identity as like a soundboard where you can kind of move things up at some times and then dull things down, but they’re all on. It’s just a matter of at what point you decide to kind of make something louder than the others. But you know, most days I definitely identify as being Asian Hawaiian.
LT: What area you grew up?
STK: I grew up in Waimalu in ‘Aiea, but my family is from Pearl City and Waipahu. So I definitely see like this part of Pu‘uloa as my home. I think I just feel so lucky to have grown up really close to my family. So in the area that I grew up in ‘Aiea, I have multiple family members living on different streets in the same community. I could run to my grandma’s house and I would spend a lot of time there too. And so everybody felt very close within a couple of blocks from each other, a couple of streets from each other. To have that kind of proximity to family, I think, was really lucky.
LT: Since you one curator, dis wen randomly just occur to me. You nevah know when something might be one treasure later on, yeah, so are you one packrat? Do you live in one hoarder house, Sarah!!!?
STK: Ummmm. . . (super long pause) I would say. . . I am. . . I am definitely not a minimalist (Laughing)! I’m more of a maximalist. I think I’d like to consider myself. . . a collector of certain things. . . that I like.
LT: (Laughing) “Things that you like?” Why you being so mysterious, li’dat? Is it something embarrassing? You no collect Beanie Babies, ah?
STK: Oh gosh, definitely not Beanie Babies. I definitely have a lot of books and so I have to admit that books are covering almost every surface of my house. I also collect like these little pamphlets I guess we would call them zines today, but they’re like these little newsletter things that would come up from certain communities. I really like those.
LT: Try tell what your curating job stay about?
STK: So I’m the Curator for Hawai‘i and Pacific Cultural Resources at Bishop Museum. I like to say that my title is really long, but it really just means that I get to work with people around the collection that I help to oversee and take care of. So the Ethnology Collection, which is the department that I’m based in, is 80,000 pieces strong.
And it is the smallest collection at Bishop Museum. However, many people consider it a very significant collection because it’s all the three-dimensional materials. Things that aren’t like paper, photography, that’s not the collection I work in. I work in the collection of stuff. Things like everything ranging from the size of coins all the way to canoes and carriages, big-sized material. So the department I work in takes up the most amount of space on Bishop Museum’s campus.
And the collection represents not only Hawaiian culture, the many cultures of the Pacific, but also what Local culture is too. It represents a lot of immigrant history, the establishment of all these different peoples in Hawai‘i and so forth. So it’s a really diverse collection which allows people like myself to then go in to talk, to find threads that connect all these pieces and educate people through these pieces and how they can tell stories. And then it’s through the production of exhibitions and through curatorial research that allows storytelling to happen around these pieces.
LT: Is da role of museums changing?
STK: I think the role of museums is changing quite a bit. And especially Bishop Museum currently. Coming out of the pandemic, there was just a huge need for people to be part of the process of public history and social history. And this has been a trend that has been escalating over decades at this point. But that means that a lot of the job that I do is including community in those discussions around the pieces that we care for.
We recognize that we are not necessarily the only stewards or the most important stewards of these pieces. They just happen to be with us at this time and were entrusted with us and it just means that we can find better ways to include people in the discussion of their presentation, interpretation, and display. A lot of times too, these discussions lead to the conversation of repatriation, but we like to call this process rematriation because it establishes a relationship first before we undergo a process of determining the future of a said piece.
LT: How you came interested in curating?
STK: Curating. . . curating was something that I learned about in the last few years of high school. I was really interested in alternative ways to tell history. I didn’t grow up necessarily going to museums or so forth. And so when I was introduced to the idea of a museum, it was a really exciting concept because I was like, wow, you can tell history through all these little things. And for me, it really appealed.
LT: Who you grateful to in your journey in coming one museum curator?
STK: I think I’m most grateful to my teachers, my professors, especially during my PhD process. My two advisors, Stephen Hooper and Karen Jacobs, were incredible mentors. I think that there were a lot of moments where I really wanted to give up and I had a lot of self-doubt, because I think there was definitely elements of me trying to do new things that I thought were risky. And they ultimately supported that process and understood why I chose to take those risks and so I’m really grateful for them in walking me to the finish line.
LT: You can give one example of your risk-taking?
STK: So the work that I do for my PhD research really utilizes Hawaiian language resources. And for a lot of Hawaiian art histories that have been written and are kind of the canon in the field, the texts that everybody goes to, to write Hawaiian art history, a lot of times they’re kind of one-sided. They really prioritize English language sources written by English explorers or collectors or people who didn’t understand Hawaiians. They couldn’t ask a Hawaiian person like, “Oh, what is this object?” So it’s not to say that those texts are wrong. It’s just that it’s one-sided.
And so the work that I did for my PhD really utilized Hawaiian language resources to create a better interpretation of pieces that are in museum collections. And so that Hawaiian language element became really, really important because it provided more insight into the work that I was doing on Hawaiian bark cloth and helped to better interpret some pieces that are in museum collections, including Bishop Museum’s.
And the risk that I took was, how do I explain to people the value of Hawaiian language in an institution that doesn’t have a Hawaiian language program? I was getting my PhD at a school in England halfway around the world. And so that risk was something that my advisors really supported.
LT: If you eva had to work overNIGHT at the MUSEUM, did you eva see anything magically spring to life before?
STK: (Totally serious, whispering) I don’t have any personal stories, but I do deeply believe that all of the objects that are in a museum have energy and they have spirit and personalities. And so if you believe that, then you ultimately develop a sense of respect and responsibility for the things that you take care of.
LT: Um, that was supposed to be my funny, Ben Stiller Night at the Museum jokey question. So you saying that movie might actually be based on true story den?
STK: Yeah. I wouldn’t be surprised.
LT: What makes someting historically important and worth having for one museum collection?
STK: So museum collections are formed based off of the scope of the museum. So for example, Bishop Museum, its scope is Hawai‘i, Pacific, and the local communities that have formed in Hawai‘i. If it doesn’t have a direct connection to Local culture, Hawai‘i culture, Pacific culture, it might not be relevant.
LT: With that being said, I curious if you guys get da bestest POG collection in da world.
STK: Honestly, probably not. Yeah, I think there are so many collectors of things that exist outside of Bishop Museum who have amazing collections. And I think that’s great because it means that people are super passionate about certain things and that objects can live outside of a museum and have relevance to people.
LT: You know, seems like you wuz always interested in history and storytelling and how those realms merged, but you must’ve had one singular moment from small kid time that made you realize da importance of history, no?
STK: No. (Thinking for long time) Oh, oh, I know! Yeah, I see what you mean. So my grandma Masako Tamashiro on my dad’s side was always very, um, tight-lipped about the war, World War II. She hated talking about it, but she was born and raised in Waipahu and so had literally experienced the wartime. And also even before that, she grew up in Okinawa for part of her childhood.
And so one day when I was in my early teens, I just asked her, “What was it like?" And she talked! She said a lot of things about her experience that I thought were really interesting or surprising and it helped me make sense about who she is as a person. And I talked to my dad about it after. I was like, “Did you know these stories that grandma just told me?” And he said, “No, I didn’t know that.”
And from that experience I learned two things. Basically, it taught me that if you ask the question, sometimes you’d be surprised that you get an answer. But it’s worth asking the question. And it’s worth being bold enough to try to understand and not pass judgment over it because there are other people who can benefit from hearing the answer to help them process that gap in their knowledge. And then I also learned, too, that the person to ask the question and find out the answers can be me!
© 2024 Lee A. Tonouchi