The year 1969 is most remembered for Neil Armstrong's small steps, and for a gathering on a muddy field in upstate New York. But it also was the year that artist Jeff Donaldson penned "Ten in Search of a Nation," a now forgotten manifesto declaring COBRA (Coalition of Black Revolutionary Artists) as, instead, AFRI-COBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists) — "bad" slang for uber-good, of course.

Donaldson's essay documents the precise moment when the civil-rights movement tightened its belt. The previous year, Martin Luther King Jr.'s "dream" had famously imploded on his Memphis motel lanai. The movement's losses had trumped its advances. And so a group of its artists regrouped: not as factionalized revolutionaries, but as a collective; not as black Americans, defined by color and geography, but as the African family tree, defined by shared blood and cultural heritage.

It was, in Donaldson's words, "Nation Time."

That "us" behind AFRI-COBRA seems akin to the "us" in "indigen[us]: a native collective," organized by Bishop Museum and on view at The ARTS at Marks Garage during Honolulu's second annual Maoli Arts Month. "It is the us," the show's 16 Native Hawaiian artists contend, "that connects us to the 'aina and the kai."

The group offers its own manifesto, of sorts: verse composed by contributing artist and exhibition designer Kunane Wooton (who handles the venue's installation challenges well). Its parallels to Donaldson's essay are startling. The verse, for example, asks viewers to approach the art with their na'au, or guts, not with their eyes, ears or brains; similarly, Donaldson tasked artists to create visceral, not intellectual, images. Both outline a temporal triangle; indigen[us] articulates three conceptual, navel piko — representing po (past), present and ao (future) realms — that unify the exhibition's design and aesthetics. And both documents connect a people through historical bloodline, indigen[us] again invoking the umbilical cord image, which symbolically ties past to future.

What's most striking, and revealing, is the group's professed orientation toward time: "As Hawaiians, we stand with our back to the future, facing the past." The past, the statement claims, is the source of knowledge, the obscure darkness of ancestors and gods faced when walking into the gallery. That orientation is apparent throughout the exhibition, for better and for worse.

Some works integrate past and present into a compound dialogue, using traditional materials in contemporary modes. Jo-Anne Kahanamoku-Sterling's superbly wrought "Hulu Piko" weaves natural feathers into an abstract, meditative mandala form, its brilliant peacock center recalling the umbilical piko. Mahi La Pierre's altarlike sculpture, "Cloudland," incorporates coral, basalt, canine teeth and rope, reinterpreting the legend of demigod Kaulu, born as a rope, who created modern domestic dogs by rending a giant man-dog to pieces. And Wooton's thick basalt bowls, whose ivory anthropomorphic spirit-figurines straddle their pikos, are, despite their diminutive size, terrifyingly powerful.

Kunani and Ipo Nihipali collaborate on a more sarcastic offering, an unnatural copper "Kappa-kahi Kalo," which comments on the scientific "progress" of genetically scrambled taro — and how Hawaiian survival now depends on modified, synthetic foods. The sculpture's recirculating water pump is a far cry from the watershed.

Yet there's also a nagging sense throughout the gallery that many works are, above all, a coda to a long, storied cultural heritage. Consider "He'ulahiwanui," La Pierre's functional holua for riding grassy slopes, the native Hawaiian version of a bobsled. Its sleek contours are fashioned from natural materials, such as bamboo, sea grass, sennit, whale bone, pig tusk and red coral. Though the artist's craft is impeccable, down to miniature carvings that bless the sled, it seems most an homage to an inventive, resourceful past.

Joseph Dowson Sr.'s paintings, while lovely, also carry intense nostalgia for an environmentally unspoiled time. Solomon Apio's beautifully carved, wooden kapa-making kit reads somewhat like an artifact on display. Kahanamoku-Sterling's gorgeous, tiny "ti-leaf" skirt, made of peacock feathers and sennit, conceptually wraps land to sea to air, but is ultimately decorative. And Natalie Mahina Jensen-Oomittuk's goose-and-hackle-feathered, hand-held kahili are miniature representations of the cylindrical kahili traditionally used for ceremonial or funerary processions.

"Pupukahi i holomua," the Hawaiian proverb goes: Unite in order to progress. It's a fine sentiment; but the ideal is not always the real. Many objects on view here imply that the struggle for cultural survival remains central to those artists' aesthetic practice. That's understandable, given Hawaiian history and the culture's lengthy repression. Still, the past may be too present for this particular context. Where such work locates itself, as art, within a progressive aesthetic that represents not only a group's shared bloodline and cultural heritage, but also its messy, multifarious and ever-evolving post colonial identity — that is unclear.

And however seductive "nation" was to the AFRI-COBRA collective, that group's widespread cultural relevance (like that of many '60s communes) has long since lapsed. Its cause, unfortunately, has not; American blacks, as a demographic, still fare poorly compared to other ethnic groups on measures such as public health, education and incarceration. Who knows what that collapse means for Native Hawaiians; it does suggest that "nation time" hails a precarious, conceptually fraught juncture between po and ao. All eyes akimbo.

Marie Carvalho is a freelance writer who covers the arts.