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296 A Tale of Three Time T ravelers Maintaining Relationships, ExploringVisual Technologies Karen L. Nero This chapter traces the stories of three late eighteenth-century Palauan treasures that are now held in the British Museum1 —a large shell-inlaid bird-shaped wooden bowl, a shell-inlaid canoe, and an oil painting of three Palauans. These pieces were given, transferred , or commissioned during Honourable East India Company ship visits—Captain Henry Wilson’s first extended visit to Palau in 1783 and Captain John McCluer’s return visits in 1791–1795. Occurring within decades of the Cook Pacific voyages and collections, the stories of these pieces both parallel and diverge from those of objects held in the Cook/Forster Collection at the Georg August University of Göttingen displayed in the Life in the Pacific of the 1700s exhibition—the occasion of the conference at which these chapters were presented. British Museum trustee Sir Joseph Banks was involved in both collections and was a friend and colleague of Professor Johann Friedrich Blumenbach of Göttingen, to whom he sent a second oil painting of the three Palauans in 1792. I have called these three “time travelers.” Not only were they transported across the world, but they are still materially present (in Britain) today for museum visitors and researchers to view. They are vital connections to the past, carrying knowledge through to the present, representing ancestral prestige and power (Tapsell 2006: 17). It is highly unlikely that they would have survived the rigors of Palau’s hot, humid environment and typhoons, or local and global wars. To my knowledge in Palau no other such treasures remain from that period. With the exception of the physical signs of history (the bead monies and stone pavements of the meeting houses and their associated oral histories , chants, and dance) (Parmentier 1987; Nero 1987, 1992), Palauans focus less upon objects than the relationships whose exchange they signify. These treasures too serve as “beads of history” that evoke and sediment historical knowledge. For this analysis we must move beyond mundane analyses of political and economic globalization. True, a defining characteristic of the Palau Islands is their strategic position on the borderline of the world divided between the Portuguese and Spanish by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 and between Asia and the Pacific today. In the 1780s Britain was looking for way stations as it attempted to wrest the Spice Islands trade from the Dutch (see Nero 2002), and in the late twentieth century the United States’ Nero | 297 interest in Palau was based on its strategic position bordering Asia. However if we are to understand the deeper meanings of the interchanges that occurred between the British and the Palauans, then and now, we must seek indigenous perspectives of the meanings of cultural treasures that were given beyond their homes. Tapsell’s (1997, 2006) groundbreaking work tracing the metaphoric pathways of Maori taonga serves as a foundation to understand the pathways of these time travelers through time and space and to consider their implications and extensions as applied to another Oceanic society. Both Maori and Palauans recognize the ancestral power that may be held by cultural treasures today. Analyzing the individual stories of three treasures from Palau using the “Changing Contexts—Shifting Meanings” theme of the conference helps identify the close relationships and partnerships established in the late eighteenth century between Koror/Palau and the British that are kept alive to this day. The pieces are embroiled in the complex continuum of the histories of acquisition and representation relevant in current international discussions surrounding the exhibition and repatriation of cultural treasures . There is a long theoretical development of the concepts of gifts and the obligations such transfers might entail (i.e., Mauss 1967 [1925]; Godelier 1999; Strathern 1988, 1992). While this concept of the gift is the correct context for discussing Koror chief Ibedul’s transfer of the bird-shaped bowl to Captain Wilson, there is deep dissonance between the meanings of the word “gift” in English and in Palauan, discussed below. The reason behind the transfer would be better translated by the Palauan term bltikerreng, which refers to deep affection or love, reminding us of the importance of the transfers of such key embodiments of cultural knowledge and power, and the continuing relationships for which they stand. This recognition opens possibilities of new partnerships for their management and exhibition. We are aided by new visual technologies that may bridge time and space to reconnect these time travelers...

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