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Haptic & Hue
The Quilts That Hold the Heart of Hawaii
00:42:05
What happens when one of the most traditional museums in the world revolutionises the way it presents the story of the past? The answer is not only a riot of craft and colour, but a reminder of the crucial role of textiles in framing our...
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- [00:20]
Jo Andrews
On a dark winter's afternoon, the brown cases of the dimly lit music in Oxford are stuffed with object after object. The Pitt Rivers Museum organizes its objects by type rather than by time or region in the system it calls a democracy of things. But as everything takes on a sort of sepia tone in the crowded cases, it's hard to imagine anything further removed from the polluted light and the warm air of the Hawaiian Islands. But in a small, modern gallery off to the side of the main hall, you will find that Hawaii has come to Oxford to lend just a little of its light and joy, and also to show us that textiles don't just change the way we frame our histories. They also have the power to keep our stories from fresh, living things rather than the stuff of memory and the past.
- [01:51]
Marenka Thompson Odlum
And, you know, one of the things I always say about the Pur Rivers, it's great in many ways, but also gives people the idea that either a lot of these cultural groups are dead, dying, or stuck in like a dragon flying amber. And I wanted to show that that is not the case, that, you know, these are thriving communities. They are still working towards reclaiming a lot of their cultural heritage, but also changing it and growing.
- [02:19]
Jo Andrews
Marenka Thompson Odlum commissioned these new quilts for the Pitt Rivers Museum and curated the exhibition that they are now part of. Welcome to Haptic and Hughes Tales of Textiles. I'm Jo Andrews, a hand weaver and the host of this podcast. This episode is about how Hawaiians are using their unique style of quilting to keep alive and to cherish their traditions and their understanding of the ecology and environment of their islands. It's also about the place new work has in museums at a time when many of the objects that they hold are often understandably, deeply contested.
- [03:11]
Marenka Thompson Odlum
This is what this entire exhibition kind of represents. It's the family, the tradition of family in quilting, but also the idea of the Hawaiian environment being your family, your ohana as well, and not separating the two. And so the idea of you being stewards of the land as well. So if we go to the Kahlo Otaro quilt, I think that really brings together the other side of this exhibition that looks about Hawaiian ecology as kind of your family, really well.
- [03:41]
Jo Andrews
Hawaiian quilts are immediately recognizable and very different from other quilting traditions. These are not patchwork or pieced quilts, but instead they appliqued quilts. They're designed in a balanced, repeating pattern, just as you would a snowflake. Pat Gorlangton has been making Hawaiian quilts for nearly 20 years.
- [04:09]
Pat Gorlangton
Well, first of all, you have to imagine what it's going to be like being interpreted from an eighth of a pattern, which is how the pattern is designed and cut on both the paper that you design the pattern on, and then you place it on your fabric, which has been folded into eighths like you would make a paper snowflake that. We all learned how to do that in school, you know.
- [04:33]
Jo Andrews
But doing this on a large scale isn't easy.
- [04:37]
Pat Gorlangton
The cutting is hard because physically, you have to cut through eight layers, and depending on the complexity of the design, you're going to be cutting tiny little points or valleys or flowers or whatever, and then comes opening the pattern, and you need a large space for it. So I do it on my living room floor. And if you're making a king size, you're talking about 108 by 108 inches. And my husband, God bless him, has put sliders under all our furniture, so. So I can slide everything to the side, but then you're opening it. And it's a very important part of Hawaiian quilting is symmetry. So when you open the. Or unfold the eighths into a quarter, then a half, you have to make every effort to have each portion, each eighth, as symmetrical to the other in its placement, so that all eight look as pleasing to the eye, as balanced as possible.
- [05:48]
Jo Andrews
The motifs are sewn onto a background. And the quilt Pat made for the Pitt Rivers exhibition is called Tea Leaf and Lau Ia Fern, both plants native to Hawaii. It's an incredibly intricate pattern of leaves and fronds on an oxblood red background.
- [06:10]
Pat Gorlangton
Well, for the la Fern, it is all over the islands, and it's used whether. Whether it's in people's yards or as a shrubbery around a hotel or something. I've used it in many of the quilts I've made. I just think it's a beautiful shape. And then the tea leaf plant is so much a part of Hawaiian culture. Whether we make Hawaiian hula skirts out of it or we serve food in it, especially in the old days, to serve a portion of food wrapped up in it or served on top of a tea leaf. They use a tea leaf when they're blessing a building here or commemorating something. They'll have, like holy water, but they'll dip the tea leaf into it and then spread it that way to sprinkle around the grounds. And the people who are there, we even will take a tea leaf and shred it down the length of it and then weave it into a lei and wear it that Way, the tea leaf is very much involved in the past culture of Hawaiian islands as well as the present.
- [07:35]
Jo Andrews
As Pat says, the tea leaf is very much associated with the Hawaiian practice of hula, or dance. But as Marenka discovered, the old customs of Hawaii are having to give way to new environmental pressures.
- [07:54]
Marenka Thompson Odlum
You know, hula is not just dance. It's a form of communication. It's a form of storytelling. It's through that dance, you tell the story of how to care for your land. It's not only through the dance, but through the cultural practices associated with hula. So, for example, a hula practitioner will go up into the mountains to pick the tea leaf and that specific fern, but they won't pick any of it on their way up into the mountains. They'll only pick it on their way back down. The idea is, on your way up, you look, you see what is growing, how much is left, so then you know how much is okay to take, so you don't over pick. And so in that way, you're being mindful and you're leaving enough to kind of regrow and propagate the land, you know, so it's also about sustainability and land stewardship, right? Today, hula practitioners have to change these practices because, for example, ohialehua plant is being threatened the by a new fungal disease called rapid ohia death. And it is literally like decimating, like thousands of acres of lehua forest. And so one of the things you do is when you come out of the forest now, you actually have to clean your shoes off. So like all these forest trails, they have these little wash stations to clean your boots. The whole idea is you're not taking the fungus from one place to the other. So when Huda practitioners go in, now used to, you would take the ferns and the tea leaf, create what you wanted, and then you'd return, return those back to the forest to decay, right? You're giving it back, but because you don't want to now transmit for fungal disease, for example, you will not do that. You'll maybe leave it into your backyard to decay instead of bringing it back into a helio forest kind of idea. So it's. They're having to change their practices to fit the current situation. And that is what you're seeing in that quote as well.
- [09:42]
Jo Andrews
And it is what lies behind the quilts, the haunting stories and the deeply held beliefs that makes each Hawaiian quilt important. Here's Pat.
- [09:55]
Pat Gorlangton
The story behind the quilt is just as important as the quilt pattern itself. And there are so many different stories that are the reason for a quilt coming into being, whether it's just you have found a color of fabric that just grabs you or far more meaningful. I guess you would say you want to commemorate a certain event, like a wedding or a birth, or you just see a flower or a tree or anything that you want. You want to express it and you want to be able to show it. But there's. There's so much more. The Hawaiian word for it is mana m a n a, and it means the spirit, the energy. We feel that because Hawaiian quilting is all by hand, we feel that it's your mana, your spirit, your energy is passing through to the quilt, which will then get passed on to the recipient or the person who asked for it. And it's a very. I don't mean to sound like it's a religious thing, but it's a spiritual thing, and it certainly means a lot to me.
- [11:20]
Jo Andrews
And there is a tradition that to truly pass on your power, you add a little more of yourself to a finished piece.
- [11:30]
Pat Gorlangton
Once you complete a quilt, you sleep under it for a night so that. That even more of the mana is passed on. And nowadays I usually just take a nap or, you know, something maybe a little bit shorter, but because you're doing it by hand, you're thinking of the person you're making it for. You're contemplating how maybe you might want to embellish it just a bit to highlight the design in some way. But there's so much more meaning behind it.
- [12:03]
Jo Andrews
One of the most important quilt designs for Hawaiians is of the kalo. And yes, there is one in the Pitt Rivers commission. It is a glorious lime green on a mauve background. Marenka talked about its significance as we stood in front of it.
- [12:22]
Marenka Thompson Odlum
So here we have a quilt called Kalo. Kalo is the Hawaiian name for taro, which is a root quote crop. It is arguably the most important staple crop in Hawaiian life. You pound it to make poi. I'm not a huge fan of poi, but don't tell anybody that. And what I really love about this quilt is that it depicts the whole plant, but also uses the chicken foot stitch at the end as an applique stitch to create a whole other dimension to the quilt as well. But the story of kahlo, or taro is also just really important because it's called the older brother, older sibling of the Hawaiian people, and because in kind of the creation myth in Hawaiian cosmology, it's that these two, the sky father and earth mother, gave birth to A son who was stillborn. And so they planted that fetus, and that fetus grew into the taro plant, and then the second child was a human being and was then fed from the taro. So the idea is that the taro nourishes the people, and you take care of the taro as you take care of your sibling. It's that kind of symbiotic relationship. And that is how, you know, for generations on Hawaiian islands, they kind of fostered the growth of taro as the idea of, you take care of me, and I will take care of you.
- [13:48]
Jo Andrews
And the more you look at these complex designs, the more you see in them.
- [13:54]
Marenka Thompson Odlum
I just realized that when you look at it, you think it's four different pieces, but then you realize they're all connected. They're not connected by the taro leaves or plants, but they're connected by the Hawaiian utensils to pound the taro. So we call them poi pounders, which are usually made of volcanic rock. So as you can see here, these two leaves are connected by a poi pounder, the same here, and all across. So, yeah, it's really intricate and detailed, and I don't think I could have done that. It's also worth mentioning that every single stitch here, you see is hand stitched, so there's no machine stitching in the Pookalani group.
- [14:34]
Jo Andrews
All 15 quilts created for the Pitt Rivers Museum were made by members of the Poa Kalani Quilting Group, which is based in Hawaii. Neither it nor the quilts in the museum would exist without a Honolulu policeman called John Sarao and his wife, Poa Kalani. When John retired from the police in the 1970s, he started to create the Hawaiian snowflake designs. He turned out to be a genius at it. But perhaps that wasn't all that surprising, as both John and Poa Kalani had quilting in their blood.
- [15:18]
Sissy Sarrau
My family came from quilters. My mom's family were quilters. My dad's family were quilters. When they got married, eventually it was like, okay, guess what? You know? And my mom, it was her passion. She loved quilting. She always talks about watching her grandma. You know, she was not raised by her mom. She was raised by her grandma. And she said, oh, I used to sit underneath the horse and watch the women quilt. And she just loved it.
- [15:42]
Jo Andrews
That's Sissy Sarrau, John and Poa Kalani's daughter, who, with her sister Ray, now run the Poa Kalani Quilting School, named after their mother and the reason their father John began designing was because his wife was born with just one hand. And although she had inherited more than 200 historic Hawaiian patterns from her family and she loved quilting, she wasn't able to execute them until John came up with the idea of making the patterns smaller and allowing her to create cushions.
- [16:23]
Sissy Sarrau
Yeah, she became the cushion lady. My dad, what he did was he made the pattern smaller for her. She had more control when she put it on the hoop. And what he did was he eventually made a special frame for her. It was squared. Everybody had round hoops back there, but he made a square frame, and they put the cushion top at the center, and then they stretched it through elastic, and she was able to quilt that way. She was amazing.
- [16:49]
Jo Andrews
John's designs for his wife were so good that word got out, and others wanted him to design for them. And this is the thing about Hawaiian quilting. It's not a static, regulated thing. Here's the true pattern. It's an ever changing, flowing art that tells different stories.
- [17:14]
Sissy Sarrau
So when my dad started designing, the women said, I, we don't want what's in the barrel. We don't want the old patterns. We want to do our own patterns. And they actually said, john, I know you can do it. You make cushion patterns. You can make the large ones that he started. If you came to him, he still kept in tradition of cutting it out in one piece. But he would always tell the quilter, what's your story? What do you want to pass on? The tradition is in the Hawaiian quilt, but let's pass on your story. And some of the designs that he made for these women that reflected their family life and their kids is quite amazing to hear. Some people made a breadfruit, and they would put the names of all their kids or their grandkids onto that quilt, and they would just say, my husband loves the ocean. In fact, he is known as the first to actually put sea life on a Hawaiian quilt. Nobody had sea life on a Hawaiian quilt before. And so he started putting dolphins. And I didn't realize that until I met another quilter. And then I said, oh, my dad's John Sarah. And she goes, oh, he's the sea life designer. I was like, okay, I've never heard of that before, but that's. That's okay. Yeah, he took the women's desires, and he says, let's put it on a quilt. And. And he did it. And he was interesting in being able to do that for the women. And so it was not just a culture of Hawaii, which is in the quilt itself and the echo quilting. But the design started reflecting that specific tradition of that quilter.
- [19:02]
Jo Andrews
Quilts may reflect the ecology and the natural world of Hawaii, but they may tell the story of its creation, or they might have a deeply personal meaning.
- [19:15]
Sissy Sarrau
And you have one called Kamakani Kaili Aloha, where a woman made a design over the loss of her husband. And it was called the Wind that Took My Loved One From Me. And so you had another quote called the Kaomi Malia, which means rub me gently, the love between a husband and a wife. And we have one called the Kahili o Inia, where one of the legends talk about how the God Kamapuaa, who basically has a place here on Oahu where they say he exists. But it was not just nature. It was legends, it was desires. It was, you know, stories that touched, and that's what they put into their quilts. That's why sometimes if we see a design, we don't like to name it, because even if it was a carnation design, it could have been made specifically for a loved one or someone. And so when we see a design, we can say, oh, it looks like a carnation. Oh, it looks like. But sometimes we don't want to see because we don't know what the original intent was of the quilter.
- [20:25]
Jo Andrews
And the designer, Sissy, says that even though Hawaiian quilt design evolves all the time, it's important that the basic principle remains the same.
- [20:39]
Sissy Sarrau
The tradition itself is that center medallion. And then my dad would always say that center is your center, you yourself, and it's also Hawaii, because he has always had that belief that that Hawaii was the center of Mother Earth. Everything started here. And it's an indigenous tale from all different indigenous cultures that also believe that their culture is the center, and everything went out from there. So you have your medallion at the very center of the quilt. And they said the echo quilting is the love going out from Hawaii, which is the center medallion, or from yourself going out to the rest of the world. If you have a border on that quilt, or what we call a lei, the love that is going out into that new world, and out it is returned back into the center. Because when you do a Hawaiian quilt with the medallion at the center, for every quilting line, echo quilting line, you quilt out from the center, you're quilting in from the border. So eventually you're going to have your quilting meeting up together. So every part of the quilt has a significant. It does tell the story of Hawaii, its Tradition and its culture. But it also has changed where it's not just about Hawaii culture. There is a huge significance in the quilt itself, but it tells the story of you, yourself and your family.
- [22:23]
Jo Andrews
All of the quilts that were commissioned by the Pitt Rivers Museum were designed by John Sorao for Marenka. This was an important point of principle.
- [22:35]
Marenka Thompson Odlum
So all the designs that are in this exhibition were designed by John Cerrao specifically. So most of them were created between, like, this 1970s to 1990s, although a lot of them also draw on older patterns as well. But the reason that we are very specific about using only drawings patterns is because Hawaiian quilt patterns, they are heirlooms. You know, they are specific to family, specific to place. And you don't want to kind of use design that wasn't meant for kind for commercial reproduction. It might have been for a specific person. They all tell their own stories. And so there have been times in the past when kind of large conglomerates kind of used patterns without the permission of those families and have run into trouble. So we used one specifically that we know John created and that were okay to be reproduced within this setting.
- [23:28]
Jo Andrews
Sissy and Ray Serao gave their permission for these designs to be used and wanted the story of Hawaii to be told properly in these new acquisitions to the museum. But these quilt designs are imitated and frequently ripped off by commercial companies for profit.
- [23:52]
Marenka Thompson Odlum
Yeah. To me, there's, like, no excuse for us to kind of fall into that trap of appropriating someone else's, like, family heirloom or their intellectual property. That's what it actually is. And we often don't, like, talk about designs, especially indigenous designs, as intellectual property. And that is something that a lot of culture groups are fighting for today. But it is. It is something that they've created that has been passed down through generations, but has been appropriated many times by many big other big companies and fashion groups that have the money, for example.
- [24:25]
Jo Andrews
But the quilts in the museum are objects with immense beauty and power, mana in the Polynesian language. And as the commissioner of them, Marenka was required to add something of herself to each one of them.
- [24:45]
Marenka Thompson Odlum
So when I got all these quilts, I had to actually sleep under each one of them because that's kind of the tradition. It's the idea of the quilters have put a piece of themselves into it. So as the commissioner, I also have to put a bit of myself into it. And if you think of museums, museums are very much like, these are accessioned objects. You don't, like, handle them without gloves, you don't sleep under them, you know, and so it's kind of what I call cultural care or cultural conservation. It's not what we usually think about as a museum conservation, but it is what the quilters ask for. And it's. So it's kind of like a. Kind of a contract between me and them saying that I will care for these, and part of caring for them is me taking a nap under each one.
- [25:29]
Jo Andrews
Excuse me, but where did you take this nap?
- [25:32]
Marenka Thompson Odlum
Oh, I just, you know, did it in my office. Don't tell anybody I nap in my office, but I often do. But, yeah, it was just, you know, 20 minutes. I did one a day, so it was 15 days of a little bit of foot love. Yeah, so that is. I mean, I have to do a lot of things for some of the commissions, so this one's actually fairly easy because I love Napoleon.
- [26:02]
Jo Andrews
But there's something even more remarkable about these quilts, which have come to represent so much about Hawaiian life and the stories of the people who first settled here. Woven fabrics came relatively late to these islands. They were not part of the traditional culture of Hawaii. Hawaiians originally had a very rich but very different material culture, represented perhaps most famously by the intricate and beautiful feather capes, or ahu ula.
- [26:42]
Catherine Imai Kalani Ulap
Those feather capes were not only made for male chiefs, but also for warriors. Sometimes it would be worn in war and battles, and those are really symbolic, especially for our chiefs. You needed to have a lot of people go into the forest to catch the birds and then to get the birds off the nest and then pluck the feathers off of the birds. And that took a lot of time. And imagine, imagine they were mostly taking yellow for Hawaii Island. Those were the most rare, the yellow feathers, red feathers, and sometimes black and green feathers. And there were thousands and thousands of yellow feathers, or just bird feathers in general. To make one ahuhla, a feather cape, or a cloak, or a kahili, which are other objects that were waved to symbolize the presence of a chief. So can you can imagine the importance of an ahu ula and how much resources it took for the chiefs to get to make that, but also because birds would fly into the air, they also symbolize the gods that the Hawaiian chiefs descended from and were physical representations of. So we believe, as Kanakam Owiri, especially at that time, that our ali'I, our chiefs, were physical manifestations of our gods. So when they wore the ahuhla or the ahu'ula, or feather objects were waved. It symbolized A chief's presence, as well as it reminded people that they are descendants from the gods.
- [28:25]
Jo Andrews
Catherine Imai Kalani Ulap is a historian of Hawaiian material culture. She says that at the other end of the scale cloth for every day was kappa cloth, or bark cloth, made from the bark of the mulberry tree. It was adaptable and easily replaced when it came to the end of its life. But it didn't last long, and it was time consuming to make. Hawaii is one of the most isolated island groups in the world, but even here, woven cloth began to appear in the late 1700s, and that's largely when.
- [29:07]
Catherine Imai Kalani Ulap
We see a lot of European ships crisscrossing the Pacific to access markets in China. And the trade of cloth is one of the early material objects, along with other things. They were trading for guns, they were trading for ivory, ammo, ammunition. There were a lot of other things that were being traded. But cloth was really significant for several reasons. Number one, cloth became almost like currency. And even in America, right? Cloth was currency in early America as well. In the early 1800s. Well, it was the same in Hawaii. Cloth was currency and was really, really important. In ship logs, we would see that the sailors taking out a lot of cloth when they would come to Hawaii. My research shows that sailors were interacting with native Hawaiian women on a high level. So we can easily infer that a lot of times they were bartering with these women for cloth as well as. As native Hawaiians later on went to work on ships as seamen. When the ship logs show that when they were discharged, meaning when the Kanaka Maoli men were discharged, they were paid in clothes. When they. The Christian missionaries came in the 1820s, they were asking for a lot of clothing and cloth from Boston. They were writing letters saying, please, please send more cloth, because they would try to pay native Hawaiians who would work for them in cloth. So cloth was really, really important in early Hawaii.
- [30:42]
Jo Andrews
On March 30, 1820, the Thaddeus, an American ship, brought missionaries from Boston to settle in Hawaii. The story goes that the missionaries wives brought fabric, thread and needles with them, as well as a lot of assumptions about how Hawaiian women should behave. And they held the first sewing circles in Hawaii. Here's Cece Sorrel.
- [31:15]
Sissy Sarrau
So Hawaiian quilting itself was not the first thing they talked about. They talked about how to make clothing, how to dress the women. So the missionaries women, they, you know, they really worked hard with the Hawaiian women in trying to say, okay, cook for the husbands, clean the house, and that's what they did. Yeah, Basically, cover yourself up. What can you say? Right. Okay, so what happens is that they did eventually Hawaiian, not Hawaiian quilting, but quilting came into Hawaii, and they started doing more patchwork styles of quilting, taking fabrics from what we understand and sewing it back up together. A lot of the fabric were coming from the east coast, and the fabric would be scrap fabrics, and some of them would be good fabrics. You know, there's a saying that say, oh, they cut it up and they sewed it back up together again. That could be true because of the different styles of type of quilting that came in. But it was the tedious idea of having to take fabric and cutting it up, you know, to get that perfect square or that perfect star and sewing it back up. And the Hawaiian women, time is precious. Time has always been precious in Hawaiian culture, you know, because of the way we lived back then. And so they couldn't see cutting and then sewing things back up again. So eventually they say about in the 18, you know, maybe 40s, 50s, you know, they're not sure the exact time, but you started seeing quilting with that central design, that Hawaiian motif that reflected Hawaiian nature. And that's when they say, oh, look at this type of quilt. And it was cut out only in one piece.
- [33:06]
Jo Andrews
Catherine says her research shows that fabrics and sewing skills seem to have arrived gradually over time.
- [33:15]
Catherine Imai Kalani Ulap
Native Hawaiians had enough food and resources to support themselves. They wanted these items. But we really don't know if it came from missionary wives or even earlier sailors that were coming prior to the missionaries ships and vessels and seamen. They needed to learn how to sew. These sailors needed to learn how to repair their sails. And also, another big trade item is they were trading for cuppa, right? Cup of bark cloth to repair their sails in Hawaii. So if you think of it that way, a sailor could have, you know, brought and showed needle craft skills well before the missionaries.
- [33:55]
Jo Andrews
And Catherine has found evidence that a Spaniard called Francisco di Paolo Marin, known as Manini, who arrived in the islands in the 1790s and became a confidant of King Kamehameha. I was sewing for the Hawaiian elite.
- [34:16]
Catherine Imai Kalani Ulap
And Manini was a really important council for Kamehameha for many, many reasons. Manini spoke multiple languages. When you have foreign ships coming from different ports, he could speak Spanish, he could speak English, and he can speak Hawaiian, but Manini could sew as well. And in Manini's journals, he wrote down well before missionaries came, that he was sewing shirts for the chiefs. So we can see even well before the Missionaries arrived. We have Manini, who is making clothing for. For the chiefs, and maybe even other seamen who knew needlecraft could have been doing the same thing. So we really don't know where the quilting and needlecraft and where native Hawaiians wanted it, but we know they did well before the missionaries arrived.
- [35:07]
Jo Andrews
The missionaries primary objective was to bring Christianity. But the Hawaiians had other priorities. They were interested in learning to read and write. And as Catherine says, the elite, the alihi, were just as interested in the textiles and sewing skills the missionaries brought.
- [35:29]
Catherine Imai Kalani Ulap
With them too, because that was very important. Right. The alii wanted to make sure the people who they're allowing to stay are going to listen to them, but as well as to say, are you going to make clothing and fabric, which is clothing and attire, which is highly, highly desirable? And that's what the chiefs want. Right. So we know, because there's a lot of scholarship, that the chiefs want reading and writing, they want to understand reading and writing, they want to learn it. But I also argue that they want textiles, clothing and fabric. In my own work and during the first initial years, I would say maybe the first two to five years, the missionary wives, their major task is to gain favor. Well, not only missionary wives, the missionaries in general, their task is to gain favor. We see a lot of the men teaching reading and writing. The missionary wives, on the other hand, are sewing. They're doing a lot of sewing. And they write, they're doing a lot of sewing to gain favor from the alii.
- [36:34]
Jo Andrews
And suddenly in Hawaii, it became fashionable to be dressed in full Victorian clothing, complete. Yes, with bonnets.
- [36:46]
Catherine Imai Kalani Ulap
For me, I'm like, bonnets? Why would you. Bonnets? But that was a very fashionable. Native Hawaiian women wanted bonnets because missionary wives were wearing bonnets. So we have Kahumanu, she is a very, very powerful chief, is from Maui, Ali Wahine, and she even wanted a bonnet. We have later on, native Hawaiian commoner women who wanted bonnets. So, and also there are images as early as 1823 with Keopua Lani's death. She was a high ranking Ali Iwahine as well. And those images from her death in 1893 show women wearing bonnets. And we can assume especially from that image, some of the women were missionary wives. And maybe some of them may have also been Hawaiian women as well. But, you know, even as early as then, we see in images bonnets.
- [37:39]
Jo Andrews
These strange and exotic imports were fashions that came and went in Hawaiian society. But the quilts have endured because they tell a much deeper truth about Hawaii and its people. Here's Sisi.
- [37:58]
Sissy Sarrau
They symbolize a very cultural tradition. All our stories, our legends, our nature is in the design. And so they said, if you want to learn some history of Hawaiian, of history of Kauai itself, sometimes you just have to look into the quilts.
- [38:19]
Jo Andrews
And it probably wouldn't please the missionaries to know that the sewing skills they spread amongst the islands have been used in the corporate quilts to reach back past the import of Christianity to a much older well of understanding.
- [38:38]
Sissy Sarrau
Christianity came in and the Hawaiians had lost all their gods. Their whole culture is based on their religion and their God. So when that was taken away, a lot of their culture of who they are was also taken away. A lot of the quilt designs reflect the old culture of what the Hawaiian people missed in The Old Hawaii vs. The Christianity Hawaii that we know today. But like all quilting, it developed, it evolves, and it's still evolving today.
- [39:24]
Jo Andrews
Thank you to everyone who gave their time and wisdom to contribute to this podcast, particularly to all those quilt makers from the Poa Kalani Quilt School in Honolulu whose creations now light up the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Do go and see the quilts if you can. And if you can't, with the next episode of Friends of Haptic and Hue, we will be giving away several copies of the wonderful book Marenka edited about the quilts. It's published by Common Threads Press and it's called Mauka Tumakai. It has pictures of all the quilts and interviews with the quilting. To join, go to www.hapticandhue.com join. You can find out more about this episode and see a full script and pictures@www.hapticandhue.com. listen. Series 7 HAP Dickenhue is hosted by me, Joe Andrews and edited and produced by Bill Taylor. It's an independent production, generously supported by our listeners who fund us via Buy me a Coffee or by Becoming a friend of Haptic and Hu. If you do become a friend, there's an extra podcast every month called Travels with Textiles, hosted by Bill Taylor and me, where we cover a whole range of different textile stories and news. But until then, it's goodbye from me and enjoy whatever you are making. Sa.