The team visited the 1919 Hui Aroha in Gisborne, the 1920 welcome to the Prince of Wales in Rotorua, and communities along the Whanganui
This beautifully illustrated book tells the story of these expeditions, and the determination of early-twentieth-century Māori leaders, including Ngata, Te Rangihīroa, James Carroll, and those in the communities they visited, to pass on ancestral tikanga ‘hei taonga mā ngā uri whakatipu’ as treasures for the rising generation.
The Dominion Museum Ethnological Expeditions 1919–1923
The Dominion Museum Ethnological Expeditions 1919–1923
These ethnographic expeditions, the first in the world to be inspired and guided by indigenous leaders, used cutting-edge technologies that included cinematic film and wax cylinders to record fishing techniques, art forms (weaving, kōwhaiwhai, kapa haka and mōteatea), ancestral rituals and everyday life in the communities they visited.
River (1921) and in Tairāwhiti (1923). Medical doctor-soldier-ethnographer Te Rangihīroa (Sir Peter Buck), the expedition’s photographer and film-maker James McDonald, the ethnologist Elsdon Best and Turnbull Librarian Johannes Andersen recorded a wealth of material.
HEI TAONGA MĀ NGĀ TREASURES FOR THE URI WHAKATIPU RISING GENERATION
From 1919 to 1923, at Sir Apirana Ngata’s initiative, a team from the Dominion Museum travelled to tribal areas across Te Ika-a-Māui The North Island to record tikanga Māori (ancestral practices) that Ngata feared might be disappearing.
HEI TAONGA MĀ NGĀ URI WHAKATIPU TREASURES FOR THE RISING GENERATION
WAYNE NGATA / ARAPATA HAKIWAI / ANNE SALMOND / CONAL McCARTHY / AMIRIA SALMOND / MONTY SOUTAR / JAMES SCHUSTER / BILLIE LYTHBERG / JOHN NIKO MAIHI / SANDRA KAHU NEPIA / TE WHETURERE POOPE GRAY / TE AROHA McDONNELL / NATALIE ROBERTSON / ‘THE TERMINOLOGY OF WHAKAPAPA’ BY APIRANA NGATA
E tipu, e rea Mo nga ra o tou ao Ko to ringa ki nga rakau a te Pakeha Hei ara mo te tinana Ko to ngakau ki nga taonga a o tipuna Maori Hei tikitiki mo to mahunga Ko to wairua ki to Atua Nana nei nga mea katoa. Grow, and thrive In the days of your world Your hand to the tools of the Pākehā For your material wellbeing Your heart to the treasures of your ancestors As a topknot for your head Your spirit to your God Who created all things.
— A whakataukī written by Apirana Ngata in a young girl’s autograph book in 1949 (trans. with advice from Wayne Ngata)
Tā Apirana Ngata watching a poi dance with his granddaughter, Wiki White, at the opening of Tamatekapua meeting house at Ōhinemutu in 1943. Photograph by John Pascoe.
CONTENTS HEI WĀHI AKE
8
WAYNE NGATA
MIHI
10
ARAPATA HAKIWAI
INTRODUCTION
12
ANNE SALMOND / CONAL MCCARTHY / AMIRIA SALMOND
1 ‘DAYS OF PEACE AND HARMONY’
76
The First Dominion Museum Ethnological Expedition, 2–16 April 1919, Gisborne MONTY SOUTAR
2 ‘E TAMA! E TE ARIKI! HAERE MAI!’
116
The Second Dominion Museum Ethnological Expedition, 12 April–8 May 1920, Rotorua ANNE SALMOND / JAMES SCHUSTER / BILLIE LYTHBERG A Pouhaki for the Prince JAMES SCHUSTER
3 ‘TŌIA MAI! TE TAONGA!’
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154
The Third Dominion Museum Ethnological Expedition, 17 March–18 April 1921, Whanganui River ANNE SALMOND Like He’s Sitting Here and Talking JOHN NIKO MAIHI
188
My Tūpuna are Revealing Themselves SANDRA KAHU NEPIA
192
Where There Was an Astronomer There’s a Pōhutukawa TE WHETURERE POOPE GRAY
194
The Knowledge Inside the Words TE AROHA MCDONNELL
196
4 ‘OH MACHINE, SPEAK ON, SPEAK ON’
200
The Fourth Dominion Museum Ethnological Expedition, 18 March–12 April 1923, Te Tairāwhiti ANNE SALMOND / BILLIE LYTHBERG
5 ‘THE EYE OF THE FILM’
218
The Tairāwhiti film and photographs of 1923 through a Ngāti Porou lens NATALIE ROBERTSON
6 ‘ALIVE WITH RHYTHMIC FORCE’
278
ANNE SALMOND / BILLIE LYTHBERG / CONAL MCCARTHY
APPENDICES
304
Reconnecting Taonga BILLIE LYTHBERG
306
The Terminology of Whakapapa BY APIRANA NGATA INTRODUCTION BY WAYNE NGATA
316
Relationship Terms APIRANA NGATA
331
NOTES GLOSSARY BIBLIOGRAPHY ABOUT THE AUTHORS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS INDEX
335 348 350 357 359 360
36
TREASURES FOR THE RISING GENERATION
Te Rangihīroa and his university colleagues Wī Repa and Nuku, in the Dunedin Botanical Gardens in 1899, staging a stunt in which they stalk a stuffed moa.
INTRODUCTION
Te Rangihīroa was fond of practical ‘stunts’, as he called them. When Dr Thomas Hocken, founder of the Hocken Library, asked him to perform an ancient Māori christening ceremony at a local bazaar, and gave him an English text of a karakia to recite, Te Rangihīroa and Wī Repa decided to use a chant that was well known to Māori children instead. Dressed in a cloak provided by Hocken, Te Rangihīroa took a karamū twig and dipped it in water, then sprinkled the stage ‘baby’ and chanted ‘E rere te kotare’ ‘Fly, kingfisher’, to tremendous applause. After repeating the ditty, he improvised in Māori, ‘Who are these people in the audience. They are Pakeha. They are the people who have stolen your land.’ Dr Hocken mercifully did not understand, but an officer in the Native Affairs Department who was in the audience called out, ‘No, not at all!’61 After graduating from Otago, Te Rangihīroa was appointed as a junior house surgeon at Dunedin Hospital, and then worked briefly at Sunnyside Mental Hospital in Christchurch. He met and married Margaret Wilson, an Irishwoman who had arrived in New Zealand as a young girl. This was an unusual marriage at the time, when prejudice against Pākehā women marrying Māori men was strong. Margaret was a determined woman, however, and intensely loyal and ambitious for her new husband. At the end of 1905, Te Rangihīroa took up an appointment as a native health officer, working under Māui Pōmare, another Te Aute old boy who was also from Taranaki and a trained doctor, at the Department of Health.62 At this time, while Te Rangihīroa was studying medicine at Otago, Ngata was fighting for his people.
37
In 1899 he became the travelling secretary for TACSA, campaigning on health issues, including ventilation in meeting houses, strengthening tribal committees, arguing for papatipu rūnanga to deal with ancestral lands instead of the Native Land Court, and fostering Māori arts including haka, poi and whakairo. During his travels around the country, Ngata built close relationships with leading rangatira, and in 1901 he was elected chairman of the Horouta Maori Council. The following year, he was appointed the organising inspector of Māori councils, campaigning for the preservation of Māori lands.63 In 1905, at the age of thirty-one, Apirana Ngata was elected to Parliament, defeating Wī Pere to win the Eastern Maori seat.64 He remained closely associated with TACSA, and at its tenth conference at Ōhinemutu in December that year, moved a motion to ask the Minister of Native Affairs to have waiata and whaikōrero collected ‘in the recording machines of the Pakeha’.65 In June 1906, a Royal Commission into Te Aute College issued its report. Despite (and perhaps because of) Te Aute’s academic success and TACSA’s best efforts, Thornton was pressured to abandon his academic programme for Māori boys, and to shift to a technical curriculum based on agricultural studies. When he refused, the provision of scholarships to Te Aute was curtailed. According to the Inspector of Native Schools, ‘the purpose of Maori education was ‘to prepare Maori for life among Maori, not to encourage them to mingle with Europeans in trade and commerce’.66
‘ TŌIA MAI! TE TAONGA!’ The Third Dominion Museum Ethnological Expedition 17 March–18 April 1921 Whanganui River
3
ANNE SALMOND JOHN NIKO MAIHI SANDRA KAHU NEPIA TE WHETURERE POOPE GRAY TE AROHA MCDONNELL BILLIE LYTHBERG
Pā tuna on the Whanganui River at Hiruhārama, photographed by James McDonald during the third Dominion Museum Expedition in 1921.
198
HEI TAONGA MĀ NGĀ URI WHAKATIPU
‘TŌIA MAI! TE TAONGA!’
199
I remember my grandmother always saying to me that Koro Taaia was an orator. He was always on the marae doing all the whaikōrero and he must have had to sing his own song too. He carried a lot of knowledge. My grandmother went to school at the convent so Koro Taaia and Nanny Te Ara were heavily involved with the Catholic Church. I believe that’s the reason why Koro Taaia was involved with this visit of Elsdon Best and James McDonald: because of his ability to converse in English as well as te reo. He would have accompanied Best and McDonald when they went on to the marae and engaged with the whānau down at Patiarero. There’s a photo outside Whiritaunoka with Father Venning greeting Best. Koro Taaia is standing in the background holding a suitcase or a satchel. One of the karakia recited by Koro Taaia in the recordings is about the Aotea waka and some of the names, the kōrero, the essence, the richness of it all, makes me want to be able to repeat it and learn it and share it so that it’s given life again. Because it does have a place. It had a place back in 1921, and for whatever reason my grandmother didn’t retain it or impart that knowledge on to her children and then to her own grandchildren. I’ve shared these waiata and the kupu with my Aunties and Uncles and my cousins and we’re all just in awe of this treasure of listening to Koro Taaia sing, and the knowledge inside the words.
Taaia Toheriri Kingi (centre at back holding a little bag), and Te Aratu Parewhakairo (seated in the foreground, front row at left), at Koroniti in 1921. Photograph by James McDonald.
←Fold
238
Lashing together a waka taurua A fitting model for understanding the harnessing of two distinctive knowledge systems can be found in seine fishing canoes — waka taurua.41 In customary fishing, waka were temporarily lashed together for the purpose of carrying large seine nets. Similarly, the Tairāwhiti expedition was a temporary vessel in which Ngāti Porou leaders joined with the expedition team to net and catch their knowledge. McDonald had been instrumental in getting government funding for the camera equipment and film, and Andersen brought with him a lightweight Edison
phonograph for the wax cylinder sound recordings. Through Ngata, Ngāti Porou found in McDonald and Andersen willing collaborators, ‘enthusiastic mavericks operating on the margins of government’.42 While the expedition’s waka taurua was lashed together for just three weeks, the knowledge caught in its nets is only now resurfacing. In a show of support from a Māori filmmaker, Merata Mita wrote about McDonald’s role in recording these taonga: ‘By now there was an awareness by some Maori elders and scholars of the need to record and preserve, and McDonald’s work was regarded as a matter of considerable importance.’43 She adds that,
HEI TAONGA MĀ NGĀ URI WHAKATIPU
‘During this period, he had strong support from Te Rangihīroa (Dr Peter Buck) and Apirana Ngata, and through the patronage of these two men in particular, McDonald received the assistance of many influential Maori in the areas to which they travelled and recorded.’44 According to Mita, the remaining record ‘stands as a monument to their labour and foresight. It is among the most remarkable and rare material of its kind found anywhere in the world.’45 After viewing ‘the McDonald films’ at a screening in Hawai‘i in 1989, Barry Barclay suggested that McDonald’s camera was ‘a bit like an outsider peering into rural life as it was then’.46 As an
indigenous filmmaker and an important critical voice in indigenous film, Barclay’s viewpoint requires careful consideration. Given that the films were referred to at the time as ‘the McDonald films’, with little further context, his response is unsurprising. Barclay acknowledged the ‘special treat it was’ to see the films presented by Jonathan Dennis and Witarina Harris, an influential Ngāti Whakaue kuia who accompanied the archival screenings. As a darling of the silver screen from the silent movie era, Harris lent these occasions her considerable mana.47 Nonetheless, the films have many hallmarks of the Western ethnographic genre of their time.
‘THE EYE OF THE FILM’
In his analysis of images of Māori in New Zealand film and television, Martin Blythe described the films as occupying ‘a peculiar existence at the bicultural edge between a Pakeha-controlled technology and the Maori subjects of the film’.48 He, too, likened the films to peering, as if through a window: ‘In that sense, the films in the Eighties and beyond are a window into the past and the future, particularly for those Maori whose tipuna (ancestors) and tribal areas appear in them.’49 Barclay has said: ‘the images have great beauty; they are priceless for ethnographers and very moving for the Maori community who can feel the presence of their immediate ancestors in
239
much the way they sense their presence in carvings in the meeting house — which to many outsiders are nothing more than sculptures’.50 The Tairāwhiti film is the only documentary record of life on the East Coast for the first half of the twentieth century. But who are the immediate ancestors in the film? Is the camera an outsider peering through a window into rural life? Or was it a welcomed manuhiri — a guest? Is it the contemporary commentators who are the strangers?
Waikākā beach, near the mouth of the Waiapu River, looking towards Hikurangi maunga. Photograph by Natalie Robertson, 2020.
HEI TAONGA MĀ NGĀ URI WHAKATIPU | TREASURES FOR THE RISING GENERATION: THE DOMINION MUSEUM ETHNOLOGICAL EXPEDITIONS 1919–1923 Wayne Ngata, Anne Salmond, Natalie Robertson, Amiria Salmond, Monty Soutar, Billie Lythberg, James Schuster and Conal McCarthy RRP: $75.00 ISBN: 978-0-9951031-0-8 PUBLISHED: November 2021 PAGE EXTENT: 328 pages FORMAT: Hardback SIZE: 270 x 220 mm
FOR MORE INFORMATION OR TO ORDER https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/about/te-papa-press/taonga-maori-books/forthcoming-bookhei-taonga-ma-nga-uri-whakatipu-treasures