LANAI CITY - A strand of "trade beads" used by Russian sailors around 1815, a silk Korean dance dress last worn in the 1930s and photographs of Dole Park when its now-famous pine trees were just a few inches tall are among the artifacts on display at the new Lana'i Culture and Heritage Center.
Many of the objects and more than half of the photographs in the center's collection were donated by Lanai families that, for generations, saved pieces of the island's history in trunks, garages and under their beds. Other items are on long-term loan from the Bishop Museum, or were repatriated to Lanai after the center opened to provide a safe repository for them. The center also launched an oral history program and has completed more than 80 interviews with Lanai residents about the island's past.
Executive Director Kepa Maly said the artifacts and interviews tell the story of how Lanai became the tightly knit, multicultural community it is today.
"The vision is that the center is going to be the repository where you can find anything about Lanai's history all in one place," he said. "These things have been sitting in people's homes for years, and now they're being brought in and they have a home here."
The Heritage Center, which has been building its collection since it organized as a nonprofit in 2007, will hold a grand opening Saturday in Lanai City.
Maly and two part-time Heritage Center employees were still working hard last week to complete exhibits and get the museum ready for its official debut.
The facility is housed in a 1,300-square-foot space in the former plantation manager's office in the old Dole Administration Building on Lanai Avenue.
Maly installed movable panels over the room's traditional, large double-hung windows, both to protect fragile artifacts from damaging sunlight and to expand the tiny museum's available wall space for exhibits. The outside faces of the panels hold exhibits with display copies of photographs and documents that can be viewed through the windows when the museum is closed.
The center also has added climate control and a security system to its facilities.
"It's a safe repository for our heritage collection," Maly said.
The Lana'i Culture and Heritage Center grew out of a 1987 agreement between community members and the island's major landowner, Castle & Cooke Resorts, as it was developing the Manele project district. Under the agreement, Castle & Cooke pledged to develop, fund and provide a space for a history and culture program on the island.
Cultural programs developed under the agreement began in 1990, and a small museum opened in 2000 in the old Rabbon Store building fronting Dole Park, but the facility closed its doors after just 18 months.
Maly, who spent his boyhood living with a Hawaiian family on Lanai and had moved on to a career in cultural resource and historic preservation, was approached by the Lanai Archaeological Committee in 2006 about restarting the program.
The new Lana'i Culture and Heritage Center formed as a nonprofit, so it would be able to accept donations and apply for grants - sources of revenue that weren't available when it was still part of Castle & Cooke's operation.
"We didn't want the company to feel they were being hit up for funds every time something was needed," Maly said.
Since then, the organization has raised $1.1 million - $100,000 of which came as donations from Lanai residents.
It also received a $750,000 grant from the Office of Hawaiian Affairs for capital improvements and to hire staff to be trained in managing the exhibits, cultural knowledge and interpretive, educational and archival skills. That staff development will help the nonprofit plan for a long-term future, Maly said.
The museum has received 11,600 visitors since it formed in October 2007, he added. On a recent day, 28 visitors came to view its exhibits.
"That's not a bad day for us on little Lanai," Maly said.
Maly's excitement was contagious as he showed off some of his favorite artifacts from the museum's growing collection.
A tiny stone carving, small enough to fit in the palm of a hand, was found on one of the island's heiau in the 1950s and is believed to be a personal deity image belonging to one of Lanai's ancient chiefly families.
"It's unusual to have small, portable images like this," he said. "It's a treasure - no other image like this is known in any other collection."
The trade beads - otherwise worthless objects used by sailors to buy food and supplies from Native Hawaiians during a time when Russian exploration of the islands was at its peak - bring to life a period when Hawaii was opening to visitors who would alter it forever, he said.
"It's a relic of something from this period of change and transition," he said.
A 1929 payroll ledger from Hawaiian Pineapple Co.'s Lanai Division - a massive book weighing in at 60 pounds - records the names of every Lanai resident who worked for the company. It also lists their "bango," or employee identification number; hours worked; deductions for purchases at company stores or for fees to use the communal furo, or bathhouse; and rates of pay - men earning between 18 and 33 cents an hour, women paid less than 11 cents.
"All of the individuals named on these sheets have passed away, although some of the children, grandchildren and later descendants still reside on Lanai," Maly said.
Lanai residents even rescued the large sign that stood outside the airport welcoming visitors to the Pineapple Island. The sign was torn down when Dole closed in the 1990s, but someone pulled it off the scrap heap and hung on to it for more than 15 years before donating it to the museum.
Maly said Lanai's isolation is the reason the island's community grew so close. Different ethnic groups came from all over the world to work in the pineapple fields but quickly learned they had to work, live and play with one another, and with the Native Hawaiians, in order to survive. That closeness and sense of welcome are a big part of what people love about the island today, he noted, and he hoped the Culture and Heritage Center's growing collection would help residents and visitors understand how that came to be.
"The stories of this place and its people are what make Lanai unique," he said. "They're what draw people to us."
* Ilima Loomis can be reached at iloomis@mauinews.com.
