Ecopoetic DISplace exhibit showcases Native Hawaiian kinship, rematriation, and design lineage at the Wing Luke Museum

The Wing Luke Museum exhibition DISplace emerged from conversations between curators Kanani Miyamoto and Lehuauakea. Their aim was to build a Pacific Islander-led exhibition in the Pacific Northwest that reflects diasporic life, cultural continuity, and material practice.

Kanani Miyamoto is a Portland-based printmaker, educator, and community arts organizer. Raised in Honolulu, her work explores cultural identity, institutional critique, and social responsibility. Her installations and murals hold space for multiple truths, particularly for those with roots across geographies. She is also the Arts Coordinator at p:ear, supporting creative youth navigating houselessness.

Lehuauakea is a Native Hawaiian interdisciplinary artist and full-time kapa practitioner from Pāpaʻikou, Hawaiʻi. Their work centers on traditional barkcloth,  ʻohe kāpala, and natural pigments sourced ancestrally. Lehuauakea studied traditional kapa-making for years, synthesizing innovative contemporary practices with the material. Having attended  Kamehameha Schools and trained under mentor Wesley Sen, their practice is grounded in ecological stewardship and Indigenous storytelling. They divide time between Hawaiʻi and the continent.

Together, Kanani and Lehuauakea co-curated DISplace with an invitational, community-centered, and process-based vision. They focused on building trust, deep listening, and collaborating with artists already grounded in traditional material practices.

Artists engaged included Malia Peoples, Mikiʻala Souza, and Haʻaheo Auwae-Dekker; each was actively practicing their work. Across film, kapa, and printmaking, these artists engage with inheritance, land, and lived responsibility, reflecting everyday cultural survival.

Lehuauakea discussed the regeneration of kapa-making during the Second Hawaiian Renaissance.

“Prior to the 1960s, there were not really any families making kapa,” they said. “It was dormant, sleeping after colonization. They transitioned to western fabrics like cotton and calico and linen.”

“There was a lot of pressure to assimilate, and a lot of Hawaiians just didn’t see the need to spend all this time growing the plants, beating the fibers, soaking it…” they continued. “You could just buy or trade for fabric and have something that could be easily washed thousands of times. Making barkcloth is time consuming and [the fabric] is so refined. We’re really bringing that back and I think just that act of cultural reclamation and revival is an act of resistance.”

Lehuauakea’s artistry involves a “deep relationship with the land, rooted in a radical slowness.” Curators and artists can thus share more meaningful experiences and understand their reverence for those that paved the way.

Kanani emphasized: “We end up in the company of so many ancestors and stories within the exhibit. We are learning ancestral stories from Native perspective, but so many of us are mixed [race] and now we have a heritage that’s tied to innovation. During the 1900s plantation era, Chinese railroad workers, contractors who came for construction building, and Native Alaskans working in the salmon canneries. These are all ancestral stories that are celebrated and featured in DISplace.”

The exhibit weaves together artworks, oral histories, heirlooms, and material practices. It reflects how stories are carried, adapted, and remade through land, family, community, and care.

When co-curators Kanani and Lehuauakea began building DISplace, they sought artists already living these practices who were open to sharing vulnerability and cultural knowledge.

During the exhibition’s development, the group found unexpected thematic and logistical overlaps. They shared stories about elder care, raising children, adapting cultural practices to apartment living, or making pigments in wet Oregon weather. The curators created space for these layered lives, not just their artwork.

“What we realized was that we were all doing this cultural work every day,” said Kanani. “It just rarely gets shown in a museum context where it doesn’t need to be polished or explained.”

The exhibition records these relationships as much as it is a collection of objects.

Mikiʻala Souza’s prints speak volumes without much need for words, quiet and textured with shifting weather and emotional memory.

“I want people to find their own way into the work,” she said, believing not everything needs explanation.

Based on the Oregon coast, Mikiʻala is an artist, educator, and mother whose practice blends abstraction with traditional themes. From a line of makers; her mother is a lauhala weaver—this legacy of handwork, repetition, and attention defines her creations. “I think of my prints as layering a metaphoric processing technique,” she said.

Within the layers, images representing choices are buried yet remain. This artistic process also symbolizes the urbanization and gentrification transforming her childhood home: “I grew up in Honolulu, and driving down King Street…then Main Street, you’ve known this old house from 100 years ago across from the old cemetery, which is now next to the new high rise.”

Her prints convey what’s felt when the body remembers wind, water, land. Her chine collé monotypes use natural materials, crescents, waves, winds, and triangular forms for her aesthetic. “Environmental memory” is her term. Mikiʻala’s approach aligns with the exhibit’s foundational questions, demonstrating a tactile intelligence. Her abstractions hold cultural specificity without being literal.

Mikiʻala brings these practices into classrooms and community spaces. “That’s part of my kuleana,” she said. “To make sure that this way of working doesn’t stop with me.” She views teaching her daughter, students, or young artists new to gallery spaces—as part of the continuum of making.

“Working together felt easy,” Mikiʻala said. “We didn’t have to explain where we were coming from. We were already aligned.”

In Haʻaheo Auwae-Dekker’s film The Tongue is an Island, viewers encounter quiet movements, hands redirecting foliage, wooded trails, rocky bedrock, and a closed caption monologue at a slow pace. Lacking verbal communication, it’s an immersive, pensive, and meditative visual language.

It reflects their experience of learning ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi from diaspora. Haʻaheo stated the film “ultimately seeks to visualize the connections between ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi and ʻĀina, how being on ʻĀina strengthens our connections to language.”

For Haʻaheo, filmmaking is about returning to practice, place, and listening. The Tongue is an Island included their mother, siblings, and family reunion home in Hawai’i; their mother hadn’t returned in 9 years. They crossed the ocean during the Pandemic, and Ha’aheo learned about their grandfather’s life toiling coffee fields. The film compiles footage of the family reconnecting intimately with each other, the ‘āina (land), kahawai (rivers), lāʻau (trees), and moana (ocean).

Haʻaheo has lived most of their life in the Pacific Northwest, home to the second largest population of kanaka ōiwi diaspora outside of nā moku (the islands). While Ha’aheo’s family built a strong community through church, Haʻaheo later reconnected with the energies of the natural world and skies.

Filmmaking is their north star. “ʻĀina is my church,” they said. “That’s where I go when I need to feel something again. When I need to get out of my head and back into my body.” This rhythm—of water, labor, attention—guides their editing, sound design, and storytelling, reflecting kilo, the Hawaiian practice of observation.

Their process shows care. They film kanaka communications, maintain traditional knowledge, and acquire learning, documenting lived experience with humility and familial collective care. Their films possess a raw honesty, translating identity kindly.

Haʻaheo, from community media, has worked on projects centering queer and diasporic Pacific Islander stories. They name Laura Jean Cronin, Remove the Gap Productions at Northwest Film Forum as part of their creative lineage. Their work in DISplace is personal and political—not didactic, but opening space for others navigating similar disconnection and return.

They spoke of caregiving, land work, and the quiet pressures of being seen as cultural bearers, especially when that role is inherently chosen for them. “I’m not trying to represent everyone,” Haʻaheo said. “I’m just trying to be honest about what I’m still figuring out.”

Malia Peoples learns kapa traditions to connect and continue her people’s history. A ceramicist and fashion designer by training, she began investigating barkcloth as a way to deepen her relationship to cultural practice, ecology, and ancestry. Living in the Pacific Northwest, she started using wauke (mulberry barkcloth) from Hawaiian strains and local varieties.

Malia participated in the mulberry’s growth and cutting. “I know exactly where each branch wanted to sprout off, but it was knocked down during the process, and I see that come up when I’m working with this material, you see the imperfections.”

“It wasn’t about trying to replicate something exactly,” she said. “It was about figuring out how to do it where I live and making it accessible to others who want to learn too.”

In DISplace, she merges design sensibility with kapa protocols: bark beaten and fermented; cloth imprinted with intention. Some pieces are wearable, like wrist and hair scrunchies, all rooted in care for process and place.

Malia sees kapa making as a way to reconnect with personal and environmental wellness.

“My background is in fashion. There’s been a lot of conversation in the fashion world about fast fashion, and how to make more, produce more, and more seasons. You have to come up with all these collections, do and make more, otherwise you’ll be forgotten,” she said. “Kapa encouraged me to slow down, making it come to me at the right time in my life. I’ve been doing this for a few years. I’m a recent practitioner, not an expert.”

Malia’s relationship to kapa-making is part of a broader continuum of Indigenous and diasporic artists adapting materials and methods to meet their communities. Her design background adds attention to pattern, form, and how garments or objects move.

Her work brings contemporary design language into ancestral forms. Instead of separating the duality of her wearable artmaking, she lets them inform each other.

Her kapa reminds us that culture isn’t based on fair market production value; it can be static. It reflects her resilience, a continuation of her, her ancestors, of kanaka.

What holds DISplace together is the sense of responsibility carried through fiber, pigment, film, and family by everyone involved.

For Lehuauakea, the exhibit binds ecological attention to generational care. For Kanani, curating invites difficult questions about authenticity, diaspora, and self-perception in institutions that haven’t always made room. Her printmaking and community work are part of the same inheritance: making space where none existed.

The artists share and reimagine that weight. Mikiʻala Souza prints from a textural memory, layers carrying her mother’s weaving and her own teachings forward. Haʻaheo Auwae-Dekker brings visual language, using film to name the untranslatable. Malia Peoples tends her wauke, modernizing kapa without losing its integrity.

Throughout the show’s creation, new relationships surfaced.

“I cried a lot hearing other people’s stories and seeing the exhibit live,” said Kanani. “The first iteration was full of educational material…Seeing and sharing our histories, stories, and art from our perspectives has been so meaningful.”

DISplace is Hawaiian pidgin for “this place,” a community of Kānaka ʻŌiwi who embrace friction with kindness, reverence, sadness, remembrance of erasure and loss, traditional and punk-rock aesthetics, and the elements. DISplace questions staying and leaving ‘aina, remembering, teaching, and adapting. In doing so, it becomes less about where home is, and more about how we carry it. Mālama ʻāina. Aloha ‘āina.

Dawn Dailey