Project Banaba, Bishop Museum’s latest exhibit, displays contemporary art that tells the history of Banaba Island through the eyes of artist Katerina Teaiwa.
The exhibit, which opened this month, portrays the devastating impacts made by phosphate mining to the nearly 2.5-square-mile South Pacific island, which forced the relocation of Banaban communities and ravaged the island’s landscape.
“I wanted to tell this story about how our island was feeding all of these other places,” said Teaiwa. “Now we’re more than 75 years in displacement from the original homeland … and we keep falling into the blind spot of all these different governments.”
Teaiwa, whose grandfather and great-grandfather were among the first Banaban to be relocated off-island after World War II, realized the trauma embedded in her culture’s history while pursuing a master’s degree at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
When she later went on to pursue her doctoral degree in Australia, she then began uncovering a plethora of old photographs, films and documents about Banaba Island, which was also known as Ocean Island and is part of the Republic of Kiribati.
“It was a very visual story,” Teaiwa said. “This story was quite interesting and important from a wider perspective, because the phosphate was turned into fertilizer and was being spread across plantations including in Hawaii, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and in many parts of the world.”
Teaiwa said watching film of the mining was traumatizing. The land would be moved into wheelbarrows and put on a boat, leaving “pinnacles” of land left between the land that was mined.
“The pinnacles look like the bones of the land,” said Healoha Johnston, one of the exhibit’s co-curators and Bishop museum’s director of cultural resources. “They bleach and turn white in the sun. And then the longer that is the case, the less rain is attracted.”
But the mining of the island was only one piece of the trauma that would be inflicted on the Banaban people, Teaiwa said. When World War II began, the Europeans who oversaw the mines left the island, then Japanese forces arrived and occupied the island.
By the end of the war, the Banaban population had decreased from about 2,000 people to 700, Teaiwa said. Those who remained were told by the mining company that the island was no longer habitable, and were sent off on boats to live in Fiji.
The change in environment was significant and the elders, who were accustomed to the dry, still climate of Banaba, struggled to acclimate to Fiji’s cold and rainy weather.
“A lot of elderly people could not survive in that kind of environment,” Teaiwa said. “So that’s where the trauma grows, because when your elders pass away, that’s a loss of knowledge about culture and protocols.”
Since then, the majority of Banaban people have remained disconnected from their island, with only a small group of about 300 who have chosen to return. Anyone who travels there not only risks asbestos inhalation, but they also would find an old, broken mining town that is a far cry from the vibrant tropical island it used to be, Teaiwa said.
Still, a mining company recently received permission to begin exploring the island to potentially restart mining on Banaba, to which many Banabans have opposed.
“You shouldn’t use Banaba again as a quick source of money, because it’s not worth it,” Teaiwa said. “It’s not worth it to keep ruining the environment. It would be very healing from a cultural and social perspective if we put our efforts into repairing and restoring the island.”
For Johnston, co-curating the exhibit was a way to stand in solidarity with Banabans and support them in their efforts to restore their island. With Hawaii also being one of the places that received Banaba-mined phosphate, the exhibit is also a way to acknowledge Hawaii’s implication in the island’s history.
“There’s global relevance as people face human-induced climate impacts to look at Banaba and understand in very real terms, the consequence of living out of sync with the earth,” Johnston said. “It’s such a relatable story for a lot of people in Hawaii and the Pacific.”
Along with Johnston, the exhibit was co-curated by Yuki Kihara, Joy Enomoto and Bishop Museum’s curator of archaeology, Pulama Lima.
The Project Banaba exhibit at Bishop Museum’s J.M. Long Gallery in Hawaiian Hall is open until Feb. 18. For more information, visit tinyurl.com/2yrhsxzz.
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Linsey Dower covers ethnic and cultural affairs and is a corps member of Report for America, a national service organization that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues and communities.
