[3] The alele means bag or basket in Marshallese, and represents a particular receptacle in which a family's valuables would have traditionally been kept.

Displays focus on Marshallese culture, including traditional navigation, warfare, tools, crafts and jewellery.

[5] Due to a lack of space, the museum is unable to display the large items from its textile collection, in particular its nieded which are traditional women's cloths.

[2][3] The museum's collection includes traditional tools, objects relating to housing, jewellery, drums, fishing apparatus, tattooing, weaving, canoes (and model canoes), and navigation, including stick charts, a Marshallese nautical tool used to memorise wave patterns.

[8] The museum has collaborated to understand and create listings for Marshallese intangible heritage, in particular work on indigenous navigation.

[9] The museum is part of an international collaboration building a digital archive of nuclear history relating to the country.