On the island of Majuro, close to the National Library, there is an interesting Alele Museum, opened in 1907.

The museum building is small, one-storied, but very neat and attractive. It is a very friendly and cozy house which should be visited to find out something interesting and important.

The Alele Museum exposition is incredibly diverse. The main collection of the museum includes more than 3000 items that were found during expeditions and discovered during excavations on the territory of the islands.

There are also shown the unique exhibits telling the history of the Republic of the Marshall Islands. A variety of artifacts is impressive. You can see collections of seashells, from tiny to huge ones, household items, artisans works, and pieces of art. The Alele Museum even has a collection of canoes showing the development of this kind of transport. 

Also, the museum has a library and an archive with documents, where you can find a lot of interesting data on the history of the archipelago. Some of the notes are very old, and you can get them by special request.

But, probably, one of the museum’s most impressive collections is the Joachim Debrum’s, including more than 2,000 negatives, depicting the local natural beauties and moments of Aboriginal people’s everyday life. All these photos were taken from 1880 to 1930, so they clearly show how the life of people was changing from decade to decade.

Another private collection of Eugene Bogan is also impressive, it was offered to the museum in 1994. More than 3000 unique exhibits tell the history of local civilization: weapons, clothes, household items. But the most interesting thing is the navigation maps. Locals did not use paper or papyrus, so they write the information in nodal letters: it is very interesting to look at it and try to understand that system of information fixing.