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The exhibition Trajectoires Kanak took place in 2017-2018 at the Anne de Beaujeu museum in Moulins. It was an opportunity to show a corpus of objects from the Pacific, among them around forty weapons from New Caledonia. The lack of archives makes difficult the establishment of a biography for such a collection. What does local history bring to this issue? This article investigates the roles of various local actors, especially the Société d’émulation du Bourbonnais, a learned society of Moulins. It aims at underlining its links to the museum, and its role in collections gathering. The society’s archives reveal the importance of Léon Moncelon, and the documentation he made of his ten years in New-Caledonia. This article explores his relationship with Kanak people, and especially with the two children he adopted and presented as specimens to learned societies. This could help bringing to light particular colonial perceptions of New Caledonia in the late 19th century.