Sea of Islands brings together knowledge holders, scholars, and artists from across the Pacific with Western scholars working with Pacific collections—as well as members of diasporic Oceanic communities—to share the stories and journeys of the objects that comprise Canada’s largest Oceanic collection, housed at The Museum of Anthropology at UBC.

In 1927 a stunning collection of 1,500 items—from canoes and barkcloths, to paintings and musical instruments, to tools and masks—was donated by adventurer and writer Dr. Frank Burnett to the University of British Columbia. This donation would be the founding collection of the University’s Museum of Anthropology, which has since grown to become Canada’s largest and most diverse Oceanic collection.


Today, museums acknowledge they live with a legacy of a different time that situates their collections in a difficult and contested past. Author Carol E. Mayer’s text draws on her decades of research and outreach centered around the complex intersections between museum collections, contemporary art practices and different knowledge systems. The result is an exploration of MOA’s Oceanic collection’s objects—old and new—alongside stories and journeys of those objects as shared by knowledge holders, scholars, and artists from across the Pacific. The text considers how these items continue to articulate systems of meaning and engender new relationships, and is illustrated with stunning photographs of the collection, and field photographs from Oceanic communities.

Foreword by: Ralph Regenvanu
Preface by: Susan Rowley