A New Name For a Stolen Collection

In June I spent two months in Hawai'i as part of a fellowship I received this year, and while I have missed home and missed my family so much, what an amazing and productive time it was. Gof gaibåli. 

 

Part of the Te Raingi Hirao Curators and Caretakers Fellowship that I was honored to receive from the Mellon Foundation and the Bishop Museum, supports the continued repatriation/rematriation of the 10,000+ Chamoru artifacts that have been in Bishop Museum's collection for more than a century. For the past week and a half, myself, Nicole Delisle Duenas from the Guam Cultural Repository and other fellows from the program have been working with those very artifacts, preparing them so that they can make the journey home later this year. 

 

This massive collection of artifacts from across the Marianas, known as the Hornbostel Collection, was deaccessioned by the Bishop Museum last year. Due to its size though, it was decided to return it in phases or to use an appropriate islander metaphor, waves. The first wave took place last year with the most unique and rarest artifacts come back in June and August 2025, and the latte stones being returned to Guam and the CNMI in October 2025. 

 

The åcho' atupat or slingstones in this post are all to be part of the second wave of returns, which will include more than 4,000 slingstones, some decorated pottery, some small lusong and some fish hooks. The Ethnology Team at the Bishop Museum has been amazing, guiding us so that we can assist them in finalizing the inventory for the artifacts, going over the field notebooks for Hornbostel so that to the best of our ability, every single slingstone can have a location from which it was taken identified. 

 

Sometime in August or September this second wave of artifacts will be crated and sent back home. We are working on an exhibit at the Guam Museum to showcase them. 

 

Each day that we were working with the slingstones was one of excitement and joy, mixed with some sadness. To see the collection room, and tables covered with trays, each filled with slingstones, and then going through hundreds and then thousands, number by number. It takes a toll. 

 

Then looking through Hornbostel's field notes and checking for each slingstone, the area of village where he took them from, 20 from Asan, 15 from Inarajan, 3 from Ritidian, 1 from Yigo, another 12 from Asan, 10 from Agaña, 18 from Saipan. 7 from Yoña, 1 from a place whose name we can't read. Then we turn the page, and there are 40 more entries just like this. 

 

It is hard to not feel the violence in which so many artifacts were taken in just a few years. Hornbostel's collection practice was so troubling that years after he finished, the US Navy was reaching out to the Bishop Museum to ask for artifacts back, because historic, cultural sites which had once been plentiful with the tools of the Chamorus of before, now appeared empty. 

 

I am driven in this work though by the fact that, through our collaborations with i mañe'lu-ta at the Bishop Museum and by bringing these artifacts home, we have a chance to give new meaning and new life to these artifacts. To not let the violence of Hornbostel's collecting define them or our relationship to them, or to who held them for a century before returning them. 

 

It is with this in mind that I look forward to the exhibit we are planning at the Guam Museum later this year. At the top of my list is coming up with a new name for this massive collection. When the exhibit is up and people have a chance to see the artifacts and learn the history, I am hoping we can also invite people to help us rename the Hornbostel Collection.