United States · Bark Cloth / Textile
Kapa
Kapa is the traditional Native Hawaiian barkcloth, made almost entirely from the inner bark of the wauke (paper mulberry) tree through a labor-intensive process of stripping, soaking, fermenting, and repeated beating that transforms bast fiber into a non-woven fabric. This record, together with CRAFT-2023 ('Ahu'ula Hawaiian Featherwork), closes a striking and complete absence in the CRAFT archive: despite Hawaii being a US state with one of the most technically celebrated indigenous craft traditions in the Pacific, no Hawaiian craft of any kind was documented among the archive's existing 75 United States records prior to this pair. A University of Glasgow-led scholarly project on Pacific barkcloth traditions, Situating Tapa, concluded that 'the kapa of Hawai'i was — and still is — unquestionably the most technically sophisticated and aesthetically diverse tradition of Pacific tapa, and indeed, probably the world's most complex barkcloth art,' distinguishing it from related bark-cloth traditions found across Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia that share the same Austronesian ancestral origin. The wauke plant itself is documented as having been deliberately carried by canoe from the original Austronesian homeland through the Pacific migrations that populated Polynesia, making its cultivation and use in Hawaii a direct material link to that founding voyaging history.
Risk level: Extinct — Revival Exists · Not listed as UNESCO ICH; documented within major academic and museum sources (University of Glasgow's Situating Tapa project, Bishop Museum, Honolulu Museum of Art) as a nationally and internationally significant Native Hawaiian cultural practice
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