Museums are living spectacles of colonial looting, land dispossession, and Indigenous genocide for communities in Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Drawing from the work of cultural theorist Tony Bennett, the birth of museum institutions in Europe and America legitimized Western governance and settler expansion into sovereign island nations. In the contemporary moment, museums remain colonial spaces where trauma is reanimated again and again for marginalized communities as they still hold cultural objects and ancestral remains captive within their walls. The need to confront these truths and build anticolonial coalitions seeded the early idea for the Asia Pacific Museum Exchange (APME).

In July 2025, 13 museum curators, educators, conservators, and cultural stewards based in Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands gathered in Honolulu for the inaugural APME Face2Face Workshop. APME is a new initiative that aims to build a network of undersupported museum workers to rethink “best practices” and ideate new methods of collections care, preservation, and exhibition-making that prioritize cultural and Indigenous practices of the region. Connected by our oceans, the APME cohort bore witness to each other's labor and together imagined liberatory possibilities of museum stewardship to heal colonial legacies and cultural disruptions.

This roundtable features 4 fellows from Saipan, American Samoa, Palau, and the Philippines, and 2 facilitators based in Hawaiʻi—all archipelagic lands that bear scars of American imperial violence. The discussants share reflections from the F2F Workshop and discuss how APME’s model can be replicated. With the 2026 AAAS Conference held in Hawai’i, a site of on-going U.S. occupation and Asian settler colonialism, this conservation especially considers how museum workers can insist on Kānaka Maoli cultural recovery and resurgence.