Now several pieces of tapa, including an ornate, wall-sized textile made by Tuita and 11 other Tongan women from the Bay Area, are on display this month in the Elihu M. Harris State Building. Tuita's traditional tapa is the first made in the United States.

Thick tapa cloth has tremendous cultural significance. It is given as a gift and used for ceremonies, weddings and other events.

Tuita, 56, a composer, musician and dancer, moved from Tonga to Oakland in 1979. In 1999, she founded the Otufelenite Tongan Community Organization to help the thousands of Tongans who have migrated to the Bay Area reconnect with their rich culture and heritage. Otufelenite means "Friendly Islands."

Tapa is part of the heritage, but it took a chance meeting between Tuita and social anthropologist Ping-Ann Addo at the Academy of Sciences in San Francisco to bring tapa to the East Bay.

The result is a year-long collaboration between the academy, the Center for Art and Public Life at California College of the Arts, Tuita as lead artist and Addo, who curated the exhibit and created an exhibition catalog.

The exhibit features several pieces of tapa cloth, clothing and tools for making the textiles collected from six South Pacific cultures -- Tonga, Samoa, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Futuna and Hawaii, most on loan from the Academy of Sciences. One walks away knowing that besides cloth, tapa is an art form and its creation a significant ritual in the community.

Tapa is made by stripping the moist inner bark of the paper mulberry tree, cutting it into thin strips and soaking the pieces overnight, laying the pieces on flat logs and pounding the strips with wooden mallets until the bark is flattened into wide, flexible sheets.

The sheets are double-layered for extra strength, dried and then glued together with a paste made from sticky vegetable roots to make a larger textile. The cloth is adorned with geometric patterns, traditional pictures or symbols by rubbing natural plant dyes over hand-crafted stencils.

In many cultures, tapa adds to a person's status. Men adorn themselves with the ceremonial dress created from the cloth, but women create it, sitting together pounding the bark in an alternating cadence that reverberates throughout the village.

That's what happened when Tuita and women from the Tongan community gathered under the trees at Dimond Park in September to pound the mulberry bark Addo brought back from Tonga.

They worked twice a week for a month, laying the bark on a long wooden anvil, called a tutua, using wooden mallets, called ike, to pound the bark. It sounds like exhausting work, and it is, Tuita said. But the work also brings happiness, and the women would often sing, she said.

"When we started, the kids from the College of Arts and Crafts came over and we let them try it and they lasted for two or three minutes," Tuita said with a laugh. Her group included two technical advisers -- Falelala Tupou, 87, and Siatua Toa, 90, who despite their age would take turns pounding the ike.

The cloth is often folded into large bundles. It is sometimes used for wall hangings, draperies or layered for a bed. In Tongan culture, the cloth would be laid out as a red carpet for important chiefs or used to wrap ancestral remains.

The craft has been handed down for centuries, although it became less common as families migrated from the islands and the old ways were either forgotten or replaced with modern technology. A resurgence in Hawaii's political and cultural movements helped resurrect and preserve the ancient tapa methods after they had all but died out, Addo said.

For Tuita, the project is a blessing.

"It's very, very important, an honor," she said. "For myself, I'm so glad to take part in this tapa because I'm across the ocean from my country. This is very good for my people, an honor from this country to my country."

"Pieces of Cloth, Pieces of Culture" is on display through Sept. 7 at the Craft and Cultural Arts Gallery, 1515 Clay St., Oakland, Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. A documentary of the project will be screened at 6:30 p.m. Thursday with a gallery tour at 5 p.m. Admission is free.