The Peoples' Persistence: Impacts of WWI
Around the Globe

Our Story

Two University of Hawai‘i West O‘ahu anthropology courses entitled ANTH/CM 378 Visual Depictions of the Human Experience and Media Power and ANTH 383 Museum Studies collaborated to develop our exhibit: The Peoples’ Persistence: Impacts of WWI Around the Globe. Students were provided posters on WWI from the Smithsonian Museum and the opportunity to select artifacts from the Honolulu Museum of Art’s (HoMA) lending collections. We were assigned with developing a theme based on the topic of war and its impact on culture, highlighting the importance of cultural diversity and preservation of cultural identity through cultural sites and artifacts.

In February 2020, the theme and focus of our exhibit began to evolve after students visited the collections and began to determine which artifacts to select to correspond with the posters. The Smithsonian WWI posters feature the untold stories of WWI, particularly in the U.S., and represent one portion of our exhibit. With guided questions provided by Dr. Christy Mello, our professor, students collectively decided to select two artifacts representing First Nations peoples and citizens from India, China, Micronesia, Canada, Philippines, and East Africa. For building on the notion of untold stories, we selected regions not commonly represented in Western historical renditions of WWI, and we then created our own posters as another component of our exhibit. We selected artifacts representing daily life to illustrate how people from diverse backgrounds share the common experience of having their everyday lives disrupted by war.

Emphasizing our humanity and connectedness to others around the globe, the COVID-19 pandemic became a part of our story. We relate it to the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918 that essentially ended WWI, the topic of one of our posters. Due to our current public health crisis, our live interactive exhibit became an online interactive exhibit. Half way through the semester, all University of Hawai‘i classes were required to be fully offered online to help prevent further spread of the disease throughout our island home. To adjust to these changes, we have pulled from our experiences to better address life’s uncertainties and how we can relate to what people experienced during WWI and the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918. Collectively we created this exhibit and together we are practicing resiliency for asking how can we adapt to the current pandemic for making positive change in our near future.  

For more information you can contact Dr. Christy Mello at

melloc@hawaii.edu​.