Field Museum’s Pacific collection

If you wonder why the landlubbing Field Museum took a traveling show about whales, you’re not alone. That thought also crossed my mind. But “Whales,” an exhibit traveling from Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, is as much an engrossing look at the mysterious whale—its evolution and sub-orders, its fish-catching baleen and bizarre strap-tooth—as it is a portrait of the South Pacific people. And the Field Museum lays claim to one of the world’s largest and, arguably, best Pacific collections in the world.

So why is Chicago’s natural history museum so strongly connected to New Zealand and nearby islands? To find out, I met up with John Terrell, Regenstein curator of Pacific anthropology and a 40-year veteran staffer of the museum’s Pacific collection. The answer, it turns out, is the history of the museum itself.

According to Terrell, in order to display the progress of Western civilization during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, F.W. Putnam—the fair’s lead curator—needed a living example of a primitive civilization. In hindsight one of those particularly deplorable historic moments, Putnam brought in Maori people and put them on display. Maori objects, a part of the 60,000 anthropological items at the World’s Fair, became the origins of the Field Museum. The Pacific collection multiplied: In 1909, curator A.B. Lewis led an expedition through New Guinea and Melanesia gathering 14,385 items. In 1958, the museum purchased an eccentric English hoarder’s 6,500 artifacts, picked up in attics and yard sales.

To tell these tales and set the scene, Terrell walked me to a spacious hall on the west side of the Field Museum’s second floor. We sat down in front of a stunning, 19th-century Polynesian house clad with carved wood, dotted with paua shell eye shapes. Elaborating on collecting trends in museums with skepticism and occasionally derision, Terrell points to the house and says, “This is the equivalent of selling your grandmother.”

One of the only structures of its kind to be displaced from its native Tokomaru Bay, the community house represents deceased family members. Field Museum curator George Dorsey purchased it from a German dealer in 1905. (Terrell dubs these treks to European middlemen “shopping trips.”) Maori had built the public meeting house, named Ruatepupuke II, in 1881.

Early in Terrell’s tenure at the museum, the prized artifact was a sore subject. “I was told I should not inquire about the house [with the Maori people] because it was such an embarrassing, traumatic incident.” Terrell did the opposite: In 1986, he embarked on an ongoing conversation and reparation process (which included the 2007 return of human remains from the World’s Fair).

Some 25 years later, Terrell engages the Maori people in an exhibition partnership, something he calls “No presentation without representation.” In May, at the request of Maori, Terrell unboarded windows above Ruatepupuke II and created a more open floor space—imitating the open meeting grounds that traditionally sit in front of the house. He’s working on adding accurate, everyday lamps and removing “the silly dramatic track lighting.” Terrell introduced the Marae Encounters program, an effort to get people to heed the house’s original use as a marae or meeting place. He outlines the process on his website.

Terrell makes clear that while “Whales” is a modern whiz-bang exhibit, he hopes displays like Ruatepupuke II are the future of the Pacific collection, a future that includes honest cultural interchange—a huge leap from the Columbian Exposition’s freak-show-like displays. According to Terrell, the meeting house originally existed to “help nurture honest and meaningful conversations between communities.” In a twist of fate—by bringing together two communities more than 5,000 miles apart—it again achieves that purpose.

“Whales” runs through January 16. Ruatepupuke II is on permanent display.