ABSTRACT
The collaborations discussed in this chapter are located largely within and colored by the cultural politics of the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum (BPBM) of Polynesian Anthropology and Natural History, an institution which in telling ways doubles the rise of Imperial Anglo-Americanism. Founded in 1889 by banker and businessman Charles Reed Bishop in honor of his wife, Bernice Pauahi Bishop, BPBM displaced an earlier conception of the museum as an expression of Hawaiian nationalism. Under Bishop's direction and funding, it appropriated the function of repository for the Royal collections, and nominally aligned its mission to that of the Kamehameha schools, of teaching Hawaiian students about Hawaiian and Polynesian cultures which were 'vanishing'. The constitution of the Board of Trustees made the Museum look like a metonym for imperialism: Sanford B. Dole, President of both the Territory of Hawai'i and the Board of Trustees, and William O. Smith, had been actively involved in the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy.
