The National Museum of Vanuatu () is located in the Vanuatu Cultural Centre (VCC) in Port Vila, Vanuatu. It specializes in exhibits relating to the culture and history of this group of islands in the South Pacific. It is unique amongst Pacific national cultural institutions for rejecting many aspects of European museology, and creating new ways of working which value kastom practices.
Background
The Vanuatu Cultural Centre was founded in 1959. From its inception, it was designed to encompass a National Museum of Vanuatu. By 1960 a Board of Management was established with British, French and ni-Vanuatu members. In the early years the museum focussed on exhibitions, mostly of collections formed by colonisers. Its first site was on the waterfront of Port Vila.
In 1989 leadership of the museum passed from the expatriate anthropologist Kirk Huffman, to ni-Vanuatu Jack Keitadi.
Official opening
In 1995 the VCC and the museum moved to a new purpose-built structure in Port Vila. The new building was 45 metres long and 20 metres wide, and its architectural design was inspired by buildings from the northern islands. Its official opening was held at 9.30am on 17 November 1995, and was preceded by four days of ritual and cultural activity. This festival brought people from a range of communities to the capital and emphasised the museum also belonged to them. The opening ceremony involved gift-giving and a "Kastom dedication" of the building. The "Kastom dedication" included covering the building with a spiritual net and the sacrifice of a specially selected pig. The date of the museum opening, 17 November, was also dedicated as National Cultural Day.
Building
The museum is within the shared structure, which contains an exhibition hall, where displays regularly change. The museum also has an archival space, known in 2003 as the Tabu Room, where kastom objects can be deposited by their owners for safekeeping, but where access to them is also kept along kastom traditions. The museum also has storage space, where objects that cannot be displayed are kept, either because they are fragile, or because they are the subject of dispute.
Public engagement
The museum runs a Kastom School where traditional arts and stories are passed on to young people from Vanuatu. In 2020 the museum hosted an exhibition on the history of archaeological research in Vanuatu. In 2021 the museum was the location of the launch of Vanuatu's first anthology of women's writing Sista, Stanap Strong! Exhibitions in the 1990s included: money, contemporary art, domestic spaces.
Collections
The National Museum of Vanuatu has a collection that includes archaeological and ethnographic objects, as well as biological and geological specimens, from the country. The collection includes: masks, slit gongs, model canoes, pottery, animal and birds specimens from each island, as well as archaeological archives relating to the material culture of the first inhabitants. The geology collection includes bones belonging to the meiolaniid family of megafaunal horned turtles. The remains were excavated from the Teouma site, which was inhabited by Lapita people; the site provides the earliest evidence for human-meiolaniid interaction. Ceramic material from the archaeology collection includes Lapita pottery and Wusi pottery from Espiritu Santo. The archaeology collection also includes a photographic archive, which includes images of the excavation of Chief Roi Mata's burial site. Another photographic archive records the tradition of sand drawing from the islands, which appears on UNESCO's List of Intangible Cultural Heritage.
Digital collecting
Digital collecting has been an important aspect of the museum's work since 1976 when an Oral Traditions Project was founded. The project trained ni-Vanuatu men to record oral traditions. In 1990 this programme involved to include the collection of women's oral traditions, as well as men's, and was led by Jean Tarissei. By 1994 this programme had developed into the Vanuatu Culture Centre Women Fieldworker Network.
Connections to the Independence movement
During the 1970s, at the same time as the museum was starting its oral collecting programme, the independence movement in Vanuatu was developing, following the establishment of the Vanua'aku Pati in 1971. The party stressed the importance of kastom, in particular as a way to unite ni-Vanuatu against both the colonial rule of the Anglo-French Condominium. This meant that the importance of kastom became part of a national discourse. In 1980, post-independence, the Oral Traditions Project developed into the Vanuatu Cultural Centre Fieldworker Network.