Agreement between the Ibero-American Institute of Berlin and the Ma’u Henua Indigenous Community for the Preservation of Archival Registries of Rapa Nui
In March, the Ma’u Henua Indigenous Community signed an agreement with the Ibero-American Institute (IAI) in Berlin (Germany), which will allow the German institution to digitalize documents which contain registries of Rapanui heritage that are found in several different museums throughout Europe and the world for the purpose of publishing a book on Rapa Nui in olden days.
The archive belongs to Dr. Walter Lehmann, a German ethnologist, linguist and archaeologist, well known for his work documenting many native cultures and languages of Central America. The Rapanui collection was set up between 1890 and 1920 and contains a variety of visual material: drawings, photographs and clippings on people, tattoos, ruins and petroglyphs, stone sculptures, maps, scenery and objects from the early XXth Century, deposited in museums in Germany, France, England, the United States and Chile. There are also data, manuscripts and correspondence about the scientific publication on these topics in that period.
These materials offer a narrative on the culture of Rapa Nui and, above all, a panorama of the European view of this Polynesian island administered by Chile, a Latin American country, at the beginnings of the 20th Century. During the coming year, the archive is to be digitalized with the intention of publishing a book, together with the IAI, identifying the heritage of Rapa Nui found in the various collections and initiating the process of restitution of this historical archive to the Island.
