Review: Hei Taonga Ma Nga Uri Whakatipu | Treasures for the Rising Generation: The Dominion Museum Ethnological Expeditions 1919-1923
Reviewed by: Kennedy Warne
Authors:
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 and Natalie Robertson
Publisher:
Te Papa Press
ISBN:
9780995103108
Date Published:
11 November 2021
Pages:
368
Format:
Hardback
RRP:
$75.00
The 1918 flu epidemic struck Māori with devastating force. During a two-month period from October to December, 2500 Māori died. Most were people in their prime. Flu stripped Māori communities of its wage earners, caregivers and future leaders. It blasted a demographic crater in Māori society. The Māori death rate was eight times higher than that of non-Māori. The epidemic was “the severest setback the race has received since the fighting days of Hongi Hika,” said Māori health administrator Te Rangihīroa/Peter Buck.
The epidemic’s indirect impacts were equally dire. There were grave concerns that loss of cultural knowledge through the death of experts in ancestral arts and knowledge would cause irreparable damage to the very foundations of Māoridom. Māori leaders, in particular Apirana Ngata, the MP for Eastern Māori, were adamant that this could not be allowed to happen.
A plan emerged to record and preserve the patterns of Māori life while they could still be witnessed. Using the relatively new technologies of phonographic recording, cinematography and photography, staff from the Dominion Museum would visit Māori communities to make an inventory of cultural arts and document daily life.
Time was of the essence. As James McDonald, the photographer and cinematographer for the expeditions noted in December 1918, “The elders are fast passing away, and the chances of securing [records of Māori culture] are steadily diminishing.”
As it happened, a hui to welcome returning Māori troops to Gisborne was already planned for April 1919. It would be the largest Māori gathering of its time and afforded a perfect opportunity for the gathering of cultural knowledge. The Dominion (now National) Museum acted swiftly, sending a team comprising McDonald, ethnologist Elsdon Best and librarian Johannes Andersen to join Ngata on the first of four ethnological expeditions.
From left: James McDonald, Hēnare Te Raumoa Balneavis, Elsdon Best and an unnamed man making a recording during the Hui Aroha in Gisborne, 1919. (Te Papa)
These expeditions—their content, their historical importance and their ongoing relevance—are the subject of Hei Taonga mā ngā Uri Whakatipu, Treasures for the Rising Generation: The Dominion Museum Ethnological Expeditions 1919–1923. Thirteen authors have collaborated to produce the work—a volume that is as much a treasure as the taonga it records.
The key figure in the expeditions—a man whose presence looms over the entire book—was Ngata. The expeditions would not have occurred without his urging. His commitment to his people was the driving force of his life. The book’s introduction records that when Ngata’s fellow Canterbury College student Ernest Rutherford urged him to follow him to Cambridge University to further his studies and establish his career, Ngata replied, “I bid you well that you go, while I remain here to help the people.” By recording his people’s cultural knowledge, he saw an opportunity to rebuild Māori society.
And so it began: four expeditions during four years, capturing a breadth of cultural knowledge and expertise in a way that has probably never been repeated. Reading Hei Taonga feels like being a part of the expeditions themselves. The range of what was recorded is astonishing. As well as more obvious cultural expressions such as various types of song, haka, chant and poi dance, along with examples of weaving, carving and cooking, there were less well known practices such as string games, divination rites, the making and setting of eel traps, the use of cord drills, the manufacture of stone implements and the making of fire.
But even a broad category such as “song” conceals a wealth of diversity that is brought to light in the book. Musical expression in Māori society was used for a multiplicity of purposes. There is a genre known as pātere, songs of derision in response to slander. Another genre is whakaaraara, watch songs, sung to keep people alert and awake if a threat of invasion is imminent. Also collected during the expeditions were love songs, laments, lullabies, curses, canoe launching chants, chants sung to a humming top, even a lament for a plundered kumara pit.
Some chants were very long. One, accompanied by a string game, or whai, took two hours for it to be fully recollected and recorded: “Some ten or a dozen men, old and young, discussing and reciting until the song was secured, and taken down,” as librarian Andersen noted in his field journal.
The second expedition was also built around an event: a welcome to the Prince of Wales at Rotorua. It was a huge event; 6000 Māori attended. Iwi from around the country sent representatives. What is now Arawa Park was transformed into a miniature town, with streets and suburbs named after each participating iwi.
Women perform at the welcome ceremony for the Prince of Wales at Arawa Park in 1920. (Photograph by James McDonald, Te Papa)
The authors of this chapter step beyond the work of the ethnologists to report on the way the event was perceived. In stark contrast to the enthusiasm of Māori in welcoming a member of the royal family (and future king) are the petulant and derogatory remarks about Māori by Prince Edward in letters to his mistress of the time, Freda Dudley Ward. After one soirée, he wrote “the women could not dance . . . and the band was impossible.” Commenting on a visit to the Ōhinemutu thermal areas, he noted that “today’s stunts” were “terribly boring and irritating.” After the formal welcome ceremony, he had nothing good to say except that he had received some fine presents. He dismissed the haka and poi as “comic stunts.” In one letter, the prince foreshadows his eventual abdication as Edward VIII 16 years later. “Each day I long more & more to chuck this job & be out of it all.”
So much for the “gracious thoughtfulness” of the British Crown towards Māori of Te Tiriti o Waitangi.
A year later, the ethnological team, now including Te Rangihīroa, travelled to Whanganui to make a “phonographic and photographic” record of cultural life along the river. Then, after a gap of a year, the final expedition was to Ngata’s home territory, Tairāwhiti. The museum team followed a now-established pattern of recording fishing and netting techniques, including the weaving of crayfish pots and scoop netting in the surf. Remarkably, the team recorded a catch of grayling, upokororo, a once widespread freshwater fish that is now extinct.
All of this cultural diversity comes to life in the pages of Hei Taonga through McDonald’s photography. An excellent portraitist as well as a fine capturer of action, McDonald’s images invite detailed observation and have an emotional impact. To learn that many of his images, along with many of the sound and film recordings, from these expeditions have been lost is sad indeed.
The book also benefits from contemporary photography by one of the contributors, Natalie Robertson, a senior lecturer in design and arts at the Auckland University of Technology. Commemoration of the centenary of the Hui Aroha in 2019 provided arresting colour images to complement McDonald’s black-and-whites. Equally compelling are Robertson’s landscape images of Tairāwhiti that give geographical context for the fourth and final expedition.
Te Rangihīroa takes field notes at Waikākā Beach in 1923 while Panikena Kaa advises him, watched by young men, possibly Kaa’s sons. (Photograph by James McDonald, Te Papa)
Other contributions complement the historical narrative. Carver James Schuster tells the story of a large pou carved for the Prince of Wales that had languished in the weather of Portsmouth for a century before being restored by Schuster and others and housed in the Museum of Anthropology at Cambridge University. Other contributors speak of the personal impact of listening to the expedition recordings and being able to hear their tupuna speak.
In a lengthy essay, Robertson discusses the importance of the historic films and photographs to present-day people. She speaks of the relational cords that bind the ancestors to their communities. “Like plucking the radial strands on a spider’s web, these aho quiver when we reconnect with historic ancestral images. Photographs are a medium that link us to land and people… These photographs offer a portal into an alternate spiral time–space realm.”
Ngata and Te Rangihīroa understood this, Robertson writes. They believed that documentation could revitalise Māori arts and culture and not just serve as a static record of old ways that were disappearing. Yes, they were “grabbing at fragments of Māori culture as they were scattered by the winds of change,” but they were doing so in the service of restoration and revival. They were sharing their matauranga to create a legacy.
Some of those who participated with the ethnologists recognised this kaupapa. One dedicated the recording of songs sung by him and his wife with the words that they were giving the songs as “treasures for the rising generation.” So significant was this insight that the authors chose it as the title of the book.
That vision is becoming reality. Already, some of the sketches, writings and photographs of weaving gathered during the expeditions have been used by raranga (weaving) practitioners seeking to learn the old techniques. That process continues and needs to be at the forefront of museum thinking and practice, the authors assert. The book makes a forceful case for repatriating not just objects, but knowledge itself, to those from whom it came. The photographs, films, audio recordings and notes from these expeditions have not been widely circulated in the areas where the collection happened. Keeping knowledge within museum walls, the book argues, is a form of colonisation, tantamount to treating the knowledge keepers as objects. That has to end.
Knowledge is a taonga that remains “embedded and forever alive in the Māori psyche,” write the authors. “The time has come for Māori to reclaim the space and speak for and about their taonga, histories and worldviews… These enduring taonga must not be left on shelves and in cupboards as collections and passive artefacts for museums, libraries and cultural institutions. Their trajectories have a greater cause, helping to uplift the foundations of language, culture and identity.” It’s time to set the taonga free.
Reviewed by Kennedy Warne
