Encountering the ancestors

Kennedy Warne reviews Toi Te Mana, a monumental new work that explores the history of Māori art.

 

“One has to look back to look forward,” expert weaver Diggeress Te Kanawa once remarked. The massive new book Toi Te Mana (600-plus pages, four kilograms in weight!) does exactly this, exploring the deep history of Māori art, from its ancestral origins through to its contemporary expression, to provide context and inspiration for today’s Indigenous artists.

One of the compelling themes that emerges in Toi Te Mana, crafted by Deidre Brown and Ngarino Ellis, with the input (and presiding presence) of the late Jonathan Mane-Wheoki, is that art objects are not just physical but spiritual entities, embedded as they are in whakapapa, possessing a life force and spirit that endures through time and through the handing down of taonga across families and across time.

Taonga are tūpuna, the authors write. The objects themselves are ancestors. Whether a waka or a carved house or a woven cloak, they carry stories and meanings that connect people to their history and identity. Indeed, such taonga are often addressed as “grandmother” or “grandfather”, since they have become living embodiments of their creators. This is the reason that bridal couples still wear taonga cloaks to bring the lives of ancestors into the ceremony and increase the mana of the occasion.

Another indication of the personhood of taonga is the practice of “warming” them through the presence of tribal members when they are far from home. This happened with the legendary Te Māori exhibition of 1984–7, and continues to be practised in museums today. Treasures that do not receive such attention are referred to as taonga mokemoke, lonely treasures.

The wovenness of art and life is deeply embedded in Toi Te Mana. It often comes as mildly startling to read about a carved whare referred to as “he” or a cloak as “she”. Or to learn that certain varieties of harakeke (there are 47 known types) have personal names. Taonga are not objects but beings — a reality asserted in all Indigenous traditions.

Artists themselves embody the interconnection between material and spiritual. Weavers in the Hetet and Te Kanawa families are referred to as māreikura, “female supernatural beings,” walking in two worlds. The materials they work with are “inherently embedded in whakapapa, which brings spiritual meaning to the resources and to what is produced with them,” write the authors.

And what is produced has been outstanding. Glimpses of an unrepeatable history are to be found throughout the early part of Toi Te Mana, where the book explores ancestral traditions. A single cloak woven for Marewaiterangi, granddaughter of Tūhoe chief Tūtakengahau, who died as a child from influenza, is estimated to have required 4,800 kereru feathers, 5,300 tūi feathers and 2,200 kākā feathers — a trove of treasured plumes that would be impossible to replicate today.

Not surprisingly, taonga imbued with such mana, inherited both from the materials from which they were made and the people who possessed them, often served important social purposes, especially in rituals of exchange. They were essential to balancing mana and tapu, resolving disputes, forging alliances, among other roles.

One remarkable story of a taonga’s authority and agency concerns a cloak named Paepaeroa, which belonged to Te Ātiawa rangatira Ruhia Pōrutu. In 1840, a young Pākehā boy, Thomas McKenzie, entered a wharenui the local Māori were carving at what is now Thorndon Quay in Wellington, not realising he was trespassing and had broken tapu. He was on the point of being clubbed by an offended chief when Ruhia, the chief’s daughter-in-law, threw her cloak over the boy and pleaded for his life.

McKenzie was spared, and became a prominent Wellington citizen. He also became a friend of Ruhia Porutu, and when he died, the cloak that saved his life was placed over his coffin. Paepaeroa now resides in Te Papa, but seeing her displayed in the book, elegant and beautiful, with an intricate taniko border, allows the reader to sense her mana.

Taonga that were exchanged in conflict resolution accumulated a whakapapa of guardianship as they were passed through a sequence of utu transactions, notes Deidre Brown in a chapter on art and utu. “A taonga’s mana and tapu were enhanced through effective use in utu events,” she writes. “Their original utility — as weapons, buildings, clothing or watercraft — was superseded by their accumulated transaction value, so they could effectively settle major disputes such as inter-iwi wars. They did not symbolise an agreement; they were the agreement.”

Set against the potency of these taonga in the pages of Toi Te Mana is a narrative of cultural loss, the legacy of colonisation.

Consider, for instance, the tradition of building elaborately carved pātaka for food storage. These taonga were closely associated with traditional lifeways, the authors write, and few survived the disruptions of colonisation to those traditions. Culture and tradition died together.

Or consider the wanton destruction of hundreds of carved waka by colonial forces in the New Zealand Wars for both logistical reasons — their role in maintaining Māori mobility — and more vindictive motivations: they were cultural treasures.

One wonders how many waka still lie buried or hidden, Moses-like in the rushes, removed from circulation to preserve these vessels of mana and tapu.

The flipside of that tragedy has been the renaissance in building oceangoing waka and in traditional wayfinding that has, since the 1980s, “created exciting opportunities for tohunga tārai waka (expert canoe builders),” write the authors. “It has also brought a reconnection with the Pacific, as one example of the ongoing cycles of Māori art through time and space.”

Another thread to the story of cultural loss is the long history of appropriation of taonga by collectors and museums. “By 1900, thousands of taonga had been removed from Māori communities into public institutions, both in Aotearoa New Zealand and overseas,” writes Ngarino Ellis.

This loss had a direct correlation with Māori statistics, Ellis continues. “Māori had become a minority demographic in their own lands.” Their political status was minimal. Forced relocation away from ancestral lands meant no access to spiritual sites of significance, including urupa, and no access to earlier models/templates for artists to draw inspiration from. “Despite this,” writes Ellis, “Māori endured.”

Museums, however, were both villain and saviour. They were perpetrators of cultural loss but also preservers of irreplaceable artistry. So rapid was the decline of artistic knowledge in the early 20th century that carvers in Apirana Ngata’s pioneering School of Māori Arts and Crafts had to visit museums in order to study tribal carving styles.

Now, with an emphasis on repatriation, museums play a crucial role in restoring the mana of iwi and hapū by returning taonga to their rightful owners. Taonga which might be just a registration number in a museum’s accession register “represent histories of land confiscation, murder and long-term dispossession and alienation of land and culture” for communities. For this reason, writes Ellis, “Repatriation means more than just a shifting of locations — it is an acceptance of the history and a determination to make amends.”

One heartening story of repatriation has to do with a carved house named Te Whare o Heretaunga, commissioned in the 1870s by a Ngāti Kahungungu rangatira. The chief died before the house was completed, and work ceased. Most of the carvings were shipped to Dunedin to be displayed in the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition. When the exhibition closed, the carved panels were gifted to Otago Museum, whose curator began swapping them for items from overseas that he wanted. The carvings ended up in more than 10 museums.

“At no time did the curator contact the original owners; nor did he consider the ways in which separating out individual carvings from a meeting house might offend Māori, who conceptualised a wharenui as a living ancestor,” writes Ellis.

A descendant of the rangatira who commissioned the whare, Rose Mohi, has been visiting many of the carvings and calling for their return. A deed of settlement by the people of Heretaunga Tamatea in 2015 stipulates that the Crown must protect and restore the house. Thus do the wheels of justice turn, albeit slowly.

But the whare’s return is just the tip of a very large iceberg. A recent assessment of the extent of Māori collections overseas revealed a staggering 18,000 taonga in 160 museums. These collections are especially rich in pre-1900 taonga, many of which are no longer made, and the knowledge of them has not been transmitted through the generations, writes Ellis.

In the latter chapters of Toi Te Mana, the emphasis shifts from treasures of the past to opportunities of the future, and the changing face of Māori art. Artists have always had a central role within their community “in articulating important social, political and economic issues for the people,” writes Ellis, and that continues, both within Aotearoa and on the global stage

“The world in which contemporary Māori artists work recognises that Māori are part of a wider Indigenous network of peoples who are joined under shared histories and experiences — a ‘global collective consciousness among First Peoples’,” writes Ellis. That consciousness was never more important than it is today, as a resurgence of discriminatory attitudes and policies threatens gains made by Indigenous people here and overseas.

At the beginning of the book, the authors quote the whakataukī, He iti, ahakoa he pounamu: though it is small, it is significant. This book is by no means small, but it is certainly significant. A joy to read, and a valuable resource. Documenting taonga, it is itself a treasure.

 

Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art, edited by Deidre Brown and Ngarino Ellis, with Jonathan Mane-Wheoki, was published by Auckland University Press, 2024. ($99.99).

Kennedy Warne is the co-founder and former editor of New Zealand Geographic magazine and the author of Tūhoe: Portrait of a Nation, published in 2013. Kennedy has written extensively about the connections between people and place, past and present, both in Aotearoa, the Pacific and elsewhere.

E-Tangata, 2025