Wikipedia
Tapa cloth (or simply tapa) is a barkcloth made in the islands of the Pacific Ocean, primarily in Tonga, Samoa and Fiji, but as far afield as Niue, Cook Islands, Futuna, Solomon Islands, Java, New Zealand, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea (particularly in Oro Province around Tufi) and Hawaii (where it is called kapa). In French Polynesia it has nearly disappeared, except for some villages in the Marquesas.
Usage examples of "tapa cloth".
In world myth and folklore, many images are seen: a woman weaving, stands of laurel trees, an elephant jumping off a cliff, a girl with a basket on her back, a rabbit, the lunar intestines spilled out on its surface after evisceration by an irritable flightless bird, a woman pounding tapa cloth, a four-eyed jaguar.
Christian gazed at them admiringly, thinking he had never seen a more beautiful sight than those two made in their kirtles of tapa cloth, with flecks of sunlight and shadows of leaves moving as the wind would have it across their faces and their slim brown bodies.
Noelani saw Captain Hoxworth on each of the next two days, and on the last day of his visit to Lahaina, while his men were dragging a complete set of furniture from the Carthaginian to the new mission house, she was alone in the grass palace wrapping in tapa cloth two heavy thigh bones.
I had not worn it from the day I left the Bounty, but had kept it carefully wrapped in a piece of tapa cloth hanging from a rafter in my house.
They spread out the presents - bolts of tapa cloth, dark red, orange and its natural fawn, made from bark.
The chief was a stern-looking old man, well over six feet, whose robe of tapa cloth, draped in graceful folds about his person, proclaimed his rank.
Hung on the walls in museum-style shadow boxes were a precious tapa cloth from Tonga, a nineteenth-century Hawaiian quilt, and an intricate featherwork cloak of modern vintage.
It wasn't the strange surroundings, nor the hard floor beneath the mat of woven tapa cloth that made Poplar's sleep uneasy.
They also bought some wood carvings and dyed tapa cloth to take home as souvenirs for Mrs.
The efforts of the paddlers and the friendly wind, caught in their tapa cloth sails, moved them ever eastward.