CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Whiria te Whiri – Bringing the Strands Together
Donna Campbell
The Māori Fibre Arts as Spaces of Reclamation and Decolonisation
Since I was a child, I have always made things. I was taught how to sew, to knit, to crochet, keeping the hands busy and productive. I always enjoyed the transformation of thread to textile, and the practice of making and creating was as gratifying then as it is today. My experience was one of creativity and practicality and I am forever grateful to my mother passing on these skills to me as her mother did for her. However, the fact that I was taught these European arts and not our Māori arts is an example of the marginalisation of Māori knowledge and artistic practice. For me and other Māori children like me, the learning of European art forms established colonial arts and crafts as the norm, acceptable and superior to Māori arts. I did not realise this as a child, yet sewing, knitting and crochet was not an innocent pastime. Rather, it was another way in which Māori knowledge, language and culture was disrupted and devalued. Several decades later, I am a Māori visual artist, or kairaranga (weaving artist) with a recently completed doctorate in contemporary Māori design in the woven arts, entitled Ngā Kura a Hineteiwaiwa.1 In this chapter, I provide examples of Māori design in the fibre arts as holistic affirmation of cultural connectedness despite the effects of colonial settler dominance. These art forms are a political praxis in that they are assertions of embodied identity and pathways to decolonisation. Māori visual arts – raranga and whatu2 in particular – provide an access point to our unique expression of the Māori world. The spiritual, intellectual and physical connection of woven textile design and the Māori world is acknowledged in creative practice. Embodied knowledge within these
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