A new exhibit at Bishop Museum on Oʻahu features eerie visuals of how phosphate mining stripped a massive amount of land and displaced residents from a tiny island in the central Pacific.
"Project Banaba" takes visitors on a journey from when phosphate mining began on Banaba Island in 1900 to its residents protesting for their sovereignty after relocating 40 years later to Fiji.
"It's a very unsettling story, but that's very typical of colonial extraction. Maybe one that people are not so familiar with, but it is the southeast corner of what is now known as Micronesia," said artist Katerina Teaiwa, who is a descendant of the island.
In the 20th century, the governments of Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom extracted 22 million tons of phosphate rock from the island. Phosphate, a key ingredient in fertilizer, was used for plantations across the Pacific and other parts of the world.
Banaba is Kiribati's solitary raised coral island, roughly 2,700 miles southwest of Hawaiʻi. The island is 2.5 square miles — small enough to fit 20 of them on Kahoʻolawe.
The new exhibit provides clues for museumgoers to examine Hawaiʻi's connection to Banaba. In addition, it has Teaiwa's archival research, interviews, film, and photographs of phosphate rocks, mining workers and the Banaban people.
The exhibit paid homage to Teaiwa's sister, Terisia, who has done extensive research on Banaba.
"It's very dense, it's very rich, and it's very multimedia," Teaiwa said.
Historical relevance
In the corner of the exhibit is a desk with a newspaper and a photograph of Banabans in 1903. The area is based on co-creator Joy Enomoto's research.
Enomoto said she found a contract of agriculture company Theo H. Davies & Co. — one of the Big Five that controlled Hawai‘i's sugar plantations — ordering phosphate from Banaba Island.
Additionally, according to Enomoto, the timeline of how strip mining devastated Banaba Island is comparable to the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom.
"The time it took for Banaba to be completely gutted and have its island carved out, that 80 years is the same time between King Kamehameha I and the overthrow," she said. "That is the amount of time you can devastate an island, a people, and their culture."
Sight and sounds
Enomoto said "Project Banaba" is intimate and interactive, adding that visitors can pick up the phone on the desk and hear an audio recording of the newspaper.
Elements of phosphate and its packaging are also woven throughout the exhibit.
Banners made of sacks that packaged phosphate dangled from the ceiling, imprinted with images of limestone — which is what happened when phosphate was removed from the island — and quotes from the archives.
"Quite a lot of quotes were disturbing," Teaiwa said. "There were threats to the Banabans saying, 'You can either sign this lease so we can take your land and live, or you can die if you don't sign this lease.'"
A mannequin stands prominently in the middle of the exhibit, wearing a dancing skirt made of sacks that packaged phosphate at Ravensdown in New Zealand.
Co-curator Yuki Kihara said Cook Islander Caren Rangi donated the skirt she made when she was 15 years old in 1985. She said it demonstrated how phosphate continues to be used. The sacks were used to replace fiber materials that weren't available at the time to make the skirt.
The exhibit debuted in 2017 in Australia and New Zealand. Kihara said the more it travels, the more it grows.
"What I hope the audience will experience from 'Project Banaba' is the relicency of the Banaban people. In a way, they were able to navigate complex environmental changes in their island through excessive mining," Kihara said.
Much of Banaba is now considered unlivable, and about 300 people care for the island, according to Teaiwa.
"There has to be a lot of cleanup, and there has to be a lot of regrowing of different parts of the island," Teaiwa said.
The exhibit is available for public viewing at Bishop Museum until February 2024.
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