At the Bowers Museum in Orange County, a large collection of Oceanic art tells the story of Pacific Islanders through their own material culture.

The word "tiki" itself refers to a deity or ancestral figure from Maori mythology... Man: Among the Maori people, it usually means of the first man.

Masters: but, as the museum's Mark Bustamante showed me in a behind-the-scenes tour, tiki decor often pulls from many different traditions.

♪ OK, so what are these?

Bustamante: These are two masks which look like they represent tiki figure but really aren't.

They're from a different part of the Oceanic sphere.

These are both from Papua New Guinea, both from the Sepik area region, and they would kind of dress up men's houses.

They're gable masks, so the large gables that kind of sit above the entrances of these men's houses, they would be right there greeting all who are entering them.

Masters: But this would be considered, what, Melanesia?

Is that right?

Bustamante: Yeah.

This is Melanesia, so if you think about the way in which the Pacific Ocean was peopled, Melanesia was kind of a first stopping point, and then Polynesians kept going island-hopping outwards from there.

Masters: Quite a ways, too.

I mean, the Polynesian Triangle's massive.

It goes from, what, the subantarctic all the way up to almost the Tropic of Cancer.

Bustamante: Something like 12 million square miles of seawater.

It's a very big area.

Masters: So then this is where the migrations started, then.

Bustamante: Mm-hmm, yeah, and you can certainly see some references in Polynesian art to, you know, Melanesian art.

Masters: But there are also huge distinctions, and those distinctions were elided over when tiki bars opened, and basically, just any iconography that looked exotic, they'd make do with it.

Bustamante: Right, so in the grand scheme of things, things that are coming from Melanesia are pretty close, but a lot of tiki bars, yes, to your point, there really is an appropriation of cultural art and artifacts from all around the world.

♪ Let's head back here, take a look at some of these objects.

Masters: Oh, wow.

Bustamante: Yeah.

Masters: So what's this here?

Bustamante: So these are some pieces here that we pulled out because these are the kinds of things that you really could just take right off the wall of a tiki bar... Masters: Yeah, totally.

Bustamante: but when you look at this, this isn't Polynesian, right?

This isn't even Oceanic.

This is an African mask that we're looking at.

Masters: From Africa?

Bustamante: Yes.

Masters: Completely different part of the world.

Bustamante: Totally different part of the world, yeah.

It's from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

This is a Biyombo mask, and it'd worn at different ceremonies and ritual events, and you can actually see it's got some raffia here, as well, which I think, again, you see raffia appearing all the time in tiki bars, but-- Masters: And what is raffia, exactly?

Bustamante: Raffia is this fibrous material.

It's fiber taken, I think, usually from different types of palm and then turned into this kind of loose decoration.

You can see, actually, there's some body masks just behind me here which-- Masters: Oh, yeah, right here.

Bustamante: yeah, which have more of this raffia, which is used to kind of disguise the body of the person acting in this mask.

Masters: And, yeah, I've definitely seen this in tiki bars before, and--you're right--this could be right off the wall of, you know, the Tonga Hut, for instance or-- Bustamante: What's really interesting is that you kind of started with this focus in Polynesia.

You know, the idea is that tiki bars are very much just a Polynesian thing, but they're pulling from everywhere.

You know, they're pulling from South America, from Africa.

This is another example of a magic bag from Papua New Guinea, and if you look at the figure here, again, this is very much something that somebody might conflate as being a tiki figure... Masters: Yeah.

Bustamante: but it isn't.

Masters: It looks like almost, like, a miniature version of the Easter Island figures.

Bustamante: Yeah, like a moai, and the face is very similar, and, again, there are some connections here.

Masters: Now, we were talking about cultural appropriation, and I guess just another term for that would be, you know, cultural imperialism.

A lot of museum collections have been acquired by, you know, shady means.

How do you wrestle with that here?

Bustamante: You know, it's a great, tough question.

Museums all over the world have had to deal with this kind of historical baggage, right, which is that a lot of their collections were not collected ethically.

With early collections, you know, the big thing that we can do is just kind of revisit where they came from and do that research, that provenance research, to try and figure out whether the acquisition was ethical.

What we can do going forward is that we're doing things the right way now.

Anything that we move forward with collecting is thoroughly researched to ensure that it has all the proper exports and things like that.

When talking about our Oceanic collection, for the most part, it was collected within the past 30 or so years.

Masters: After standards had already been established.

Bustamante: Yes.

Masters: OK. Bustamante: Yeah, so a lot of work went into making sure that all this was was collected in an appropriate way.

We're always trying to do things better, you know, because what we're doing is so important.

We're sharing the cultural heritage of the whole of human history.