The Cook Islands National Museum was opened on October 14th 1992 as an institution to display, educate and preserve the cultural history of the Cook Islands. We are not specifically a Museum of Art, Anthropology, Ethnology, Marine Biology or Natural History, but it is a museum with general descriptions encompassing our visual and material culture.

As a new museum, the collection comprises of a number of replicas, of traditional Cook Islands ethnographic materials, housed in foreign institutions. As it is our role to preserve, collect and display the material and visual culture of the Cook Islands, it is one of our main initiatives to generate and develop an appreciation of one of our most finest resources, our Cook Islands cultural heritage.