#GJWculture#Antiques#AncientArtifacts When Dennis Kanaʻe Keawe started learning pahu (Hawaiian drum) making in the mid-1960s, he was guided by his teachers Ollie Roberts, Clayton McKinzie and Herman Gomes, and inspired by the works of his ancestors. Over the years, Kanaʻe Keawe has meticulously researched and studied pahu collections in Hawaiʻi and overseas with this ultimate goal: re-carving to-scale contemporary drums that feel, look and sound like ancestral pahu, now often too fragile to be played.
Recently, Kanaʻe Keawe shifted his focus towards recreating several Hawaiian drums under the care of the British Museum, aiming to bring back the voices of these ancestors. After supporting his work remotely during the pandemic, we were finally able to host him in London to connect with the collections, including one lapaiki (small drum), possibly collected during Captain Cook's third and fatal voyage to the Pacific in 1778-79.
Here, Kanaʻe Keawe shares with us a moment that had been decades in the making, reuniting his newly carved drum with this lapaiki, the oldest documented Hawaiian drum at the Museum. As he brings them side by side, explaining his process and noticing slight differences, he reminds us of the importance of ""having a voice"".
Dennis Kanaʻe Keawe is a Native Hawaiian cultural practitioner specializing in pahu making, and based in Hilo, Hawaiʻi. He was hosted in London through the Benioff Oceania Programme at the British Museum, a programme that aims to transform the research, stewardship and curation of collections from Hawaiʻi and Rapa Nui.
Our thanks go to Kanaʻe Keawe for allowing us to witness this moment, and to kumu hula (dance teacher) Laʻakea Perry for giving voice to Kanaʻe's drums, and for providing the chant for this video.
Aloha, my name is Kanae Keawe. I come from Hilo, Hawaii.
I am an artisan specializing in making drums.
It's my passion. I find great delight in it. It keeps me busy and out of trouble.
This one here right in front of me today is a drum of a miniature caliber from our history.
The original was collected in 1779 by Captain Cook on his third and final voyage into the Pacific.
We have this marvelous book that was printed in 1978,
a Bishop Museum Press. Bishop Museum being in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Dr. Adrienne Kepler did a compilation of all of the known Hawaiian drums in the world.
She had measurements and also where these were located.
So I flipped through them and decided on replicating a number of them.
We had great cooperation in my request for images, measurements.
Beyond that, we've had ultraviolet UV photography that is showing up little
hints and unknown stories in these pieces that you have in your collection here at the British Museum.
And for that, those are all little secret stories that these items don't reveal to anybody while
you're looking through a picture book, a marvelous picture book at that.
And so these are the things that I just cherish. I just relish. I feed off of them.
First of all, the burning question I had was, what does it sound like?
This size of a drum, we've gotten to look at some records and historical references.
It is called properly Lapa Ike. The term pahu refers to the whole genre of timpano,
drums that have a skin to them. They could come from a height of this much and its proper use
would have been in a temple, a Hawaiian temple. Then when we dropped down to the mid-range,
they were about so. Then those are used in context with the dance.
And these are for that high staccato pitch.
When I went into doing this one, I said, well, okay, I've got a chunk of milo wood.
Cut it to the proper sizes, did level it properly, top and bottom.
And then I had to use a series of drilling activity to get the chamber hollowed out.
Same for all of the space between the guys at the bottom. And from there, that volume of wood
is removed. As it's a replica of the original, I could not give it a fine sanding. I needed to keep
the crude cuts, which are apparent at the bottom. I could have taken some fine activity and file
and then the various grades of sandpaper to make it look really great and sparkling. But
no, that's not the feeling. It was a snapshot in time of 1770s.
All of our finer wood items have a black finish to them. And that word is called paele. It's a
combination of various liquids, carbon black, either from burnt and ground charcoal, or it
could be carbon soot captured. Every artisan has his own recipe for making his paint. I had to
beat out my own kapa, bark cloth, and it's under this skin, the topical coating of shark skin here.
It was very complicated. And thank goodness, again, for the photography, I was able to see
and figure it out. But the lashing is pretty much same, almost the same from one to the next. We've
got some basic principles on tensioning and pulling and pulling tight and hoping for the best.
You do not get the sound as soon as you finish. This is done while the shark skin is wet.
In my city, because it's semi-humid, your baby does not get a proper voice until the third day.
And you know, it's like, and I hear you cry. Speak to me. And so this is what I go
through with every drum that I do. It's every day is an anticipation moment. I wake up in the
morning, say, here's my coffee, and how are you, dear heart? A little bit about the man at the bottom.
I did have to study and ask for interpretation, I believe here. How many guys are there on the
bottom? Because when you present it with a black and white frontal shot, you don't know how many
guys there are in the round. So I think the answer came back to me that there are five.
Thank goodness for communication. Email makes life easier. With that, I had to capture the
feeling of every one of these guys. They've got a different posture. Some of them have this
forward lean, slightly, not too much. And they all have broad, sweeping chest, which emanates power
and strength. You know, the bicep, the pectoral muscles. There is a difference in opinion about
what are these guys mean. In my understanding, and I haven't seen everything, anytime we put in
these little images around the bottom, it portrays someone that has been defeated in battle.
And they're going to be serving forever the victor of that skirmish. He's always going to
be in a servile position, assisting the victor of that battle. We have schools of thought,
no, no, they're everything else. When I do ask my counterparts in the Northern Tahitian Islands,
French Polynesian Islands, what are your interpretations of your little tiki men?
Oh, they're good luck omens. Everybody's supposed to have them. Or it could be interpretation of a
god, the god of ava drinking, or the god of war, the god of canoe making. Everybody's got a
different spin on what those images mean. I did want to leave the last trailing ends of my lashing
available. I've done a little tradition of my own. And in a way, these represent the umbilical cord
that I will cut to release myself from the image, the item. And to the receiving
holder, the British Museum, they will have the opportunity to cut the second strand. And with that,
I'm psychologically fine with that gift. I've done my part. It's going to have a lovely home.
It's basically to remove myself from it.
I hope I've created a marvelous twin to the original, which is going to be coming out
shortly. And for that, I'll be quite interested to see how true and fidel I've been to the original.
Mine is bigger. I've got the same feel. It's just that the proportions are bigger on this one.
At least I think I can say I've walked in the same steps, the same pair of shoes
this guy does as I've done with mine. This is a first. This is a golden moment right here.
Never be replicated. So I'm really happy for today to see the original and how close my effort is.
But mine can be played. I won't touch the original out of its state of fragility
and the sense of conservation. I've got greatest respect. I won't touch it.
I'll have enough photos of the two of them together to pacify everybody back home who's
thirsting about, take a picture of the two together. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If it's possible. We'll see how it works out.
