About
The Kikuchi Center at the S.W. Wilcox II Learning Resource Center of Kauai Community College
The Kikuchi Center was born in the space where community vision and the vision of Dr. William Kikuchi meet and intersect. Dr. Kikuchi was a professor at Kauai Community College for 26 years and an archaeologist primarily focused on historic preservation on Kauai. He spent decades of his career aware of the ongoing curation crisis in Hawaiian archaeology. This crisis is largely triggered by the ongoing presence of salvage archaeology projects generating large quantities of excavated materials from cultural heritage sites and the reality that Hawaii offers no state legislated curation facilities to properly curate these materials. The result of this is that boxes full of materials remain un-curated and inaccessible to the public. Recognizing the need to preserve Kauai based cultural heritage materials to enrich the people of Kauai and the world, Dr. Kikuchi was a lifelong advocate for the development of an archaeology archival center on Kauai. He also had a larger vision for the archive, with plans to develop educational programs at Kauai Community College to teach cultural heritage management and curation to students, giving them the skills needed to succeed in a highly relevant Hawaiian cultural based career. After decades of community members continuing to advocate to fulfill Dr. Kikuchi's vision, the college received a Title III grant to develop the Kikuchi Center. The Kikuchi Center holds Dr. Kikuchi’s primary source materials on archaeology, historic sites, audio visual materials, a collection of artifacts, and more. It also embodies the memory of his original vision to develop an archival center for the curation of Kauai cultural heritage materials and the education of students.
Mission Statement
The Kikuchi Center strives to be in alignment with the mission of Kauai Community College, which is to “inspire, engage, and empower learners and educators to enrich our community and world.” This mission is expressed in Hawaiian language, as follows:
Ke ku nei ke Kulanui Kaiaulu ma Kauai ma ke ano he kahua e hooulu, hoa, a hooikaika ia ai ka ike a me ka naauao o na kanaka ao aku a ao mai no ka hoowaiwai ana i ke kaiaulu a me ka honua.
To align with and accomplish this mission, the Kikuchi Center serves as an archaeological, historical, and cultural heritage resource center for students, scholars, and community members in Hawaii, the Pacific Basin, and around the world. This is achieved by archiving, preserving, digitizing, and providing access to the collection, thus rendering a culturally significant Native Hawaiian heritage collection available for students and scholars locally and globally.
Furthermore, to support community engagement, the Kikuchi Center creates opportunities to provide presentations, education modules, and tours. Kauai Community College and the Kikuchi Center provides training for students, faculty, staff, historical and cultural organizations and practitioners, museum staff, planners, librarians, and educators to increase skills and knowledge essential for appraisal and acquisition, description and arrangement, preservation and access to historical collections in Hawaii. The center is also focused on the needs of the Native Hawaiian community to: 1) improve community skills by providing training in modern archives and care for cultural collections to preserve access to Hawaiian history; 2) train participants in the specific protocols for cultural collections in Hawaii and Polynesia, and how these relate to national and international collections; 3) expand community-based knowledge and excellence in care and preservation of historical collections and foster off-site partnerships.
Funded by the Title III Grant Kukulu Ae
The Kikuchi Center archival project is funded by the Title III grant Kukulu Ae, “building up and out.” The grant project seeks to sustain progress towards Kauai Community College goals to be a center for Native Hawaiian learning and success. The Kukulu Ae project is focused on increasing enrollment and success for Native Hawaiian students in high schools by supporting early college programs, developing a Native Hawaiian student gathering place on campus, the Kipuka Center, and by developing the Kikuchi Center which curates culturally significant materials from Kauai and other Hawaiian islands.