The museum’s relationship with Oceania

Sea of Islands: Exploring Objects, Stories and Memories from Oceania
by Carol E. Mayer

Vancouver: Museum of Anthropology and Figure 1 Publishing, 2025
$55 / 9781773271552

Reviewed by Robin Fisher

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We tend to think of UBC’s spectacular Museum of Anthropology, with its Arthur Erickson design, concrete beams reminding us of a Northwest Coast long house, and Bill Reid’s Haida totem poles in front, as a display case of British Columbia’s First Nations culture and art. But, as Carol E. Mayer points out in the introduction to this book, the Museum’s huge windows face out to the wider Pacific: to the Sea of Islands. The Museum also has a long standing and large collection of art and artifacts from Oceania.

Carol Mayer is a senior curator and Research Fellow at the Museum of Anthropology who is known, and has won awards, for her work on ceramics from many parts of the world. She is also responsible for the Museum’s display and interpretation of material from the Pacific islands. She has been widely recognized for this work as well, including an Independence medal for her cultural contributions to Vanuatu. The Museum of Anthropology at UBC holds the largest collection of material from Oceania in Canada and it largely predates its holdings of North West Coast objects.

The basis of the Museum of Anthropology’s Pacific holding was the donation of  Frank Burnett’s personal collection to the university in 1927. Drawn by the romance of the south seas, Burnett visited many of the islands over twenty years gathering objects as he went until he had a substantial collection in his Vancouver home. By modern museum standards Burnett was an “amateur,” but not uninformed, collector. He donated his Pacific Island collection to UBC in 1927 in the hope “that the collection will prove as valuable in the way of object lessons to students of Ethnology as it has given me pleasure in acquiring it.” It was, at the time, the most valuable donation that UBC had received and it would, over time, become the basis on an ongoing connection between the Museum and the Pacific. For several years museum facilities at the University were rudimentary to say the least but the collection was augmented, particularly through the work of Audrey and Harry Hawthorn and his New Zealand connections, until it was finally put on full display with the opening of the Museum of Anthropology in 1976.  Since then, the collection has been enhanced, both in terms of adding more items and exploring their meaning, largely though the work of Carol Mayer.

This book presents that collection. It highlights items from widely scattered Islands: north to south from Hawaii to New Zealand/Aotearoa and east to west from New Guinea to the Marquesas. When it is known, the provenance of an object is provided along with a detailed physical description. A selection of the huge collection of more than 3,500 objects from Oceania is represented by high quality photographs. They are not, of course, a substitute for going to the Museum to view them on display, but they do provide a strong sense of the skill, creativity, and diversity of Pacific Island artists. Description and depiction are just the first steps. The significant contribution of this book is to explore the meaning of the objects.

The book’s subtitle is Exploring Objects, Stories and Memories from Oceania. Mayer has chosen “to concentrate on those areas of the collection that had stories to tell.” She has connected with the people and the communities that know the stories that the objects can tell. She has spent time with expatriate islanders who live in the Vancouver area and she has also, over the years, spent a great deal of time in the communities of the Pacific. This approach, of connecting Museum collections to Indigenous knowledge to understand their meaning, was pioneered by in British Columbia by Wilson Duff at the Provincial Museum in the 1950s. The eloquence and power of indigenous voices that retell and renew the stories that the objects tell can still be heard today. This book is a result of Carol Mayer’s connections and conversations with the people and communities of the Pacific: the cultures and the people who made the art. Taken even further, the art and the stories can lead to acts of reconciliation.

Included in the Museum of Anthropology collection are some objects collected by the London Missionary Society missionary, John Williams. In 1839 Williams, after a successful and well publicized career in Polynesia, was seeking to expand operations in Melanesia. Going ashore at Dillon Bay on Erromango, an Island in Vanuatu, Williams and a companion were clubbed to death. The killing horrified the evangelical world and cast a pall over Melanesia’s reputation among newcomers. More interestingly, there was also a sense of guilt on Erromango about the slaying long ago. Conversations about items at the Museum of Anthropology with the descendants of John Williams led to conversations in Vanuatu. In 2009, on the anniversary of Williams death, there was a ceremony of reconciliation and forgiveness at Dillon Bay between the people of Erromango and members of the Williams family. It was a powerful moment. The event was witnessed Carol Mayer and it is remembered in an exhibition on display at the Museum of Anthropology. One of her contacts in Vanuatu commented that “reconciliation ceremonies require something from each side. There is always that element of exchange.” It is a thought that we should bear in mind in British Columbia.

The Indigenous stories and histories presented here are told as the people and the objects speak for themselves. That is fine as far as it goes. The historian in me sometimes wishes for more evaluation. We now study the past at a time when the tendency is for Indigenous histories to be taken as read while the history of newcomer colonization is subject to all kinds of scrutiny. Thus, for example, New Zealand/Aotearoa is referred to in this book almost exclusively as Aotearoa which is the name that Māori, along with many Pakeha, now want to use for New Zealand. Aotearoa is probably not a traditional Māori word and it does not appear in the earliest dictionary of the Māori language published in 1844. Newcomer writers in the later nineteenth century had a strong hand in popularising Aotearoa as a better name for New Zealand and today many prefer a combination of New Zealand and Aotearoa.  History is always more nuanced than is allowed for by one version of it. Once they are treated equally, different versions of the past can then be brought together.

Carol Mayer is very aware of the debate in Museums about whether collecting should be confined to that which is old and traditional or whether there is room for modern art as well. She faces the issue and comes down clearly in favour of displaying both. So, the collection includes art that she has collected during her many visits to the Islands. Through her years at the Museum of Anthropology, Carol Mayer has added to the Pacific collection and continued to learn the meaning of the objects from the people of the communities that made them. Then the Museum itself can become a place of creativity. I was particularly taken by the story of Box of Promises. To artists, one Squamish/Haida and one Māori, were brought together at the Museum and created a work of art by drawing on two different Indigenous traditions. Their box included Haida and Māori forms but, unlike traditional closed boxes it had spaces through which the light could pass as it slowly rotates. It is a great metaphor for the promise intercultural understanding.

The artistic play between tradition and the modern world with all of its uncertainties, takes the author further to thinking about the role of the Museum around current issues. For Mayer is keenly aware of the wider challenges that face all the islands of the Pacific and the contribution that museums can make to understanding, and perhaps even addressing them. Having spent time talking to the artists of the Pacific she is aware of the issues faced by Islanders: resource extraction, pollution, environmental change, disease, and migration to cities, to name but a few. And so, she asks “Will politically shy museums and galleries displaying these works become actively critical… Are the contributors to this book suggesting that Museums have a more active role to play.” The question is left for museums, and us, to contemplate.

Sea of Islands is a wonderful, thought-provoking book. The UBC Museum of Anthropology is known for its Northwest Coast collection, but Carol Mayer invites us to raise our eyes to a more distant horizon. She asks us to look at and think about the cultural record of the wider Pacific, that vast ocean dotted with islands. The history of the Pacific was made on islands that separate, and beaches that invite crossings that may lead to understanding. That history, and its consequences, is also our history here on this coast.

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Robin Fisher taught and wrote history as a faculty member at Simon Fraser University before he moved into university administration and contributed to the establishment of two new universities: the University of Northern British Columbia in Prince George and Mount Royal University in Calgary. His books include Contact and Conflict: Indian-European Relations in British Columbia, 1774-1890 (UBC Press, 1977; second edition, 1992) and Duff Pattullo of British Columbia (University of Toronto Press, 1991). He was the recipient of the 2022 Lieutenant Governor’s Medal for Historical Writing for Wilson Duff: Coming Back, A Life. [Editor’s note: Robin Fisher has reviewed books by Ted Binnema, Jim Reynolds, Daniel Marshall, Margaret Horsfield & Ian Kennedy, Gordon Miller, and Art Downs for The British Columbia Review, and contributed two popular essays, The Way We Were: Two Friends, Two Historians and “The Noise of Time” and the Removal of History? ]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster