Creating Siapo: American Samoa 1967

Creating Siapo: American Samoa 1967

In summer of 1966, Joan Griffis was recruited by the National Association of Broadcasters to work as an on-air teacher in American Samoa. For the next two years, she worked in Pago Pago, American Samoa, teaching English as a second language, with her lessons being broadcast to high schools on all of the American Samoan islands. She then spent an additional two years at the Feleti Teacher Training school—later the American Samoan Community College—where she and a small staff worked closely with…

Hawaiian & Pacific images digitized from published works, circa 1770-1925

Hawaiian & Pacific images digitized from published works, circa 1770-1925

The Hawaiian and Pacific Collections have a substantial collection of large-format photographic negatives created as a result of requests for publication quality reproductions of book illustrations housed in our rare collection. These include plates from the 18th/19th century voyaging accounts, early 20th century ethnographic accounts and other texts. In addition to these photographic negatives, the Collections on occasion produce digital copies of similar material. This online collection…

Nuclear Diaspora: Bikini & Enewetak, 1946-1988

Nuclear Diaspora: Bikini & Enewetak, 1946-1988

The slides in this collection derive from the anthropological fieldwork of Dr. Leonard “Len” Mason and Dr. Robert Kiste, both of whom served as longtime faculty members at the University of Hawaii-Manoa prior to their retirement from fulltime teaching (Mason in 1969 and Kiste in 2002). The United States conducted more than eighty nuclear weapons tests on and around Bikini and Enewetak Atolls between 1946 and 1958. The early images in this collection document the lives of Bikinians after they…

The Douglas Oliver Collection, Bougainville, 1938-1939

The Douglas Oliver Collection, Bougainville, 1938-1939

Douglas Oliver (Feb. 10, 1913 - October 30, 2009) completed a B.A. at Harvard in 1934 and and a DPhil in Ethnology at the University of Vienna in 1935. Between 1936 and 1941, he was a research associate on the staff of Harvard's Peabody Museum of Ethnology and Archaeology. Between 1938 and 1939, Oliver conducted research on Bougainville, among the Siwai (a.k.a. Siuai) people. The majority of these images derive from that period, and were donated to the Pacific Collection following Dr. Oliver's…

The Edmunds/Bryan photograph collection, Rapanui circa 1900-1920

The Edmunds/Bryan photograph collection, Rapanui circa 1900-1920

Henry P. Edmunds and William A. Bryan were both photographers of the early 20th century. Although they lived very different lives, they shared the experience of Rapanui, or Easter Island, during the early 1900s. Each took remarkable photographs documenting Rapanui's archaeological wonders and everyday life, several of which are presented here.For more information about the photographers, the provenance of this collection click here.  A glossary is also available.In addition to the University of…

The George Grace linguistic research and slides of Melanesia collection, 1955-1956

The George Grace linguistic research and slides of Melanesia collection, 1955-1956

Dr. George Grace (b. September 8, 1921, d. January 17, 2015) was a professor emeritus at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, where he served on the faculty in the Department of Linguistics from 1964 until 1991. In 1955, while a doctoral candidate at Columbia University, Dr. Grace began work for the Tri-Institutional Pacific Project (TRIPP) — a project of Pacific anthropological research funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and administered by Yale University, the University of Hawaii, and…

The Jack Tobin Marshall Islands Anthropology Collection, 1950-1985

The Jack Tobin Marshall Islands Anthropology Collection, 1950-1985

Dr. Jack A. Tobin (1920-2010) first went to the Marshall Islands in 1950 as a student of Dr. Len Mason, to work on the Pacific Science Board's Coral Atoll Project (CAP) -- an initiative meant to study the needs of atoll dwellers with limited resources and growing populations. Arno Atoll was chosen as the first CAP research site, and the first 225 photos in this online collection derive from Dr. Tobin's time there. (Read Dr. Tobin's typescript description. Len Mason's final report,…

The Margo Duggan Collection: Slides of Micronesia & Hawaii, 1949-1954

The Margo Duggan Collection: Slides of Micronesia & Hawaii, 1949-1954

Margo Duggan served in the United States Marine Corps in World War II, from 1943 through 1945. In late 1949 she began work as a civilian employee of the United States Trust Territories Administration. Between 1949 and 1954, she worked on or visited a number of locations in the Marshall, Mariana, and Caroline Islands, including Guam, Saipan, Tinian, Ngeaur, Koror, Peleliu, Yap, Pohnpei, Chuuk, Kwajalein, Majuro and Ebeye. She also spent time at the Trust Territory headquarters in Hawai'i.Margo…

The Pacific in Wartime

The Pacific in Wartime

The images contained in this online collection are digital reproductions of materials in several distinct art and photograph collections, covering a range of geographic regions and time periods. Taken as a whole, these collections document many facets of life in the Pacific during World War II, from the brutal and the tragic to the mundane.A note about photo captioning: In cases where images had previously been captioned, either by their creators or by the various agencies that produced the…

The Steve Thomas Traditional Micronesian Navigation Collection, 1983-1989

The Steve Thomas Traditional Micronesian Navigation Collection, 1983-1989

The Steve Thomas Traditional Micronesian Navigation Collection is comprised of unpublished papers, audiovisual and photographic materials (including oral history transcripts and 35mm slides), publications and miscellaneous items related primarily to traditional navigation on the Western Carolinian island of Satawal, which is located within Yap State, Federated States of Micronesia.July 13, 2010: Master Navigator Mau Piailug Dies. Several news outlet are reporting today that Mau Piailug passed…

Trust Territory Archives Photograph Collection, circa 1958-1975

Trust Territory Archives Photograph Collection, circa 1958-1975

The Trust Territory Archives Photograph Collection is a unique resource of 50,000 photographs and 2,000 slides that documents the history of the American period in Micronesia (1947-1988), and includes invaluable visual representations of island cultures. Much of this material was salvaged from the former Trust Territory Headquarters on Saipan, and owes its very existence to the persistence of former Trust Territory Archivist Sam McPhetres and his team, who were engaged in microfilming the files…

Trust Territory Survey Maps

Trust Territory Survey Maps

Scans from a collection of about 1,700 survey maps on microfiche. Many of the fiche are also surveyors notes (longitude/latitude etc.) that don't have an attached map with them.Surveyor notes and other related documents are found in eVols Land Maps of Trust Territory Districts and Government Structural Drawings.