Biography

Hattie Hāpai (Kanaka ʻŌiwi) was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, but her family also extends to the islands of Molokai, Maui, and Hawaiʻi. She received a BA in Anthropology with a minor in Japanese from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in 2021.

In her final semester, Hattie interned in the Ethnology Department at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum and rehoused samples of barkcloth. She continued volunteering during the summer with the Ethnology Department and their conservation technician, which reaffirmed her desire to pursue conservation. During the same summer, Hattie was a Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) Native American Summer Fellow and helped to identify the provenance of barkcloth and supplemented the database with cultural and learned knowledge from making barkcloth. A subsequent Long-Term Mellon Fellowship at PEM enabled Hattie to intern in the conservation lab, where she condition checked, treated, and rehoused barkcloth from all over the Pacific. She also researched PEM’s Hawaiian collection to find items that were potentially subject to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

A subsequent internship in the Conservation Department at the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) allowed Hattie the chance to see how institutions can serve as vehicles for collaborations that build and maintain relationships with affected communities. During her time at NMAI, Hattie worked on a variety of cultural belongings from various communities, including a contemporary buffalo hide robe, a Tlingit octopus bag, a Dakota flute. She ended the internship with the treatment and return of Kānepō, a large stone from Hawaiʻi that was loaned to NMAI in 2004.

While at UCLA, Hattie hopes to continue learning about how the field of conservation can be made more accessible and enable communities to build the skills and abilities necessary to care for their own collections.