PACIFIC SUPERHEROES

Here’s an article found at tangatawhenua.com I thought y’all might find very interesting. Its fascinating to know how many, where, and the history of our wharenui around the world. So go hard PACIFIC SUPERHEROES and share the knowledge in our many journeys together. Maui ora whanau!!!

‘Hinemihi o te Ao Tawhito is the carved meeting house from Te Wairoa near Rotorua, which sheltered many Tuhourangi people during the deadly 1886 Tarawera eruption. Click here to watch TVNZ’s report on the anniversary of the eruption.

Soon after, Hinemihi was purchased by Lord Onslow, Governor of New Zealand, in 1892 for £50 and transported to Clandon Park in Surrey where she was left, forlorn and slowly falling into disrepair. Over the years she was used for various purposes (including a place to house goats…aue). In the early 20th century Hinemihi was cared for by recuperating Maori New Zealand WWI soldiers and over the last 15 years has begun attracting thousands of visitors.

Increasingly, Hinemihi has become a focal point for many Tangata Whenua who find themselves so very far from Aotearoa. She is considered a “beacon for whanau in Britain, including Ngati Ranana and Te Kohanga Reo o Ranana, who use Hinemihi as a base for cultural activities and whose presence must surely make her happy.

We were overjoyed to hear that Hinemihi is currently undergoing restoration. Marae restoration expert, Jim Schuster is heading the restoration project. Jim, whose great great grandfather carved Hinemihi 126 years ago, sees her as family, saying “It’s like seeing your great great grandmother… it’s almost like she smiles at me because she senses someone from home, one of her descendants has arrived”. Jim works part time for the Historic Places Trust as a Maori heritage advisor and runs his own business Toi Ora Assoicates whose objective is preserving Maori arts and knowledge. Click here to view TVNZ’s report on the Restoration of Hinemihi.

In an 2004/05 Art New Zealand article Echoes of Maoriland, Shona Kallestrup made the point that, “the transfer of Maori meeting houses to Europe, in particular, and the interpretative frameworks through which they were integrated into the culture of the ‘coloniser’.

Hooper-Greenhill points out “how ‘disjunctions and dislocations’ in perception of the houses ‘are rooted in different ways of knowing’. While, to the European, the house is an inanimate object, the Maori revere it as a living person, the ever-present ancestor figure, imbued with emotional and spiritual potency. This explains the tellingly different language that was used by British and Maori participants in the ceremony for the blessing of Hinemihi’s restored carvings in 1995: National Trust officers referred to the house as a ‘work of art’, while Maori elders spoke of it as ’she’.”

The journey of the whare-wananga Mataatua is also equally significant, especially in terms of repatriation and the pivotal role that the 1985 Te Maori exhibition played.

Mataatua was built in 1875 and described as ‘a grand carved house, said to be one of the finest in New Zealand’ and ‘because of its name Mataatua was given a special spiritual and political significance as a symbol of the recovery of Ngati Awa following the confiscation of 1866 and the invasion of Ngati Awa’s lands by Te Kooti in 1869 and as a symbol of reconciliation between Ngati Awa and other Iwi of the region, particularly Tuhoe, and also between those Iwi and the Crown. (WAI 46)

Three years later it was taken and shipped to England by the Colonial Government where it was displayed at the South Kensington Museum, where it was ultimately dismantled and stored. Finally in 1925 it was repatriated to the NZ Government for the New Zealand and South Seas exhibition in Dunedin at the Otago Museum where it stayed, finally when it was Otago Museum’s turn to host Te Maori homecoming tour (click the link to read a 1984 Time article on the exhibition), “the presence of Mataatua spurred Ngati Awa to include the whare-wananga in its Waitangi Tribunal claim“. Despite years of endless requests by Ngati Awa for the return of Mataatua it wasn’t until 1996, when the recommendation was made that Mataatua be returned to Ngati Awa that Mataatua was repatriated and is now currently located at the Whakatane Museum, “awaiting construction of a new marae where it will stand” ( Williams, 2003, p.255).

Integral to Mataatua’s restoration is Ngati Awa carver, Te Hou o Te Rangi who has been assisting with the refurbishment of the wharenui. The reconstruction of this house on Mataatua land in the coming years will be a major landmark for all of the Ngati Awa whanui. A very well-researched report by Dr Hirini Mead and Te Roopu Kohikohi Korero O Ngati Awa was written in 1990 which chronicled the journey of Mataatua - here are the details, it is available at Wellington City Library.

• Mead, H.M. and Te Roopu Kohikohi Korero o Ngati Awa 1990 Nga Karoretanga o Mataatua Whare: The Wanderings of the Carved House, Mataatua. Research report No.2. Whakatane, Te Runanga o Ngati Awa.

Another important wharenui is located in Chicago, the wharenui (meeting house), Ruatepupuke II, which we discussed in Issue 5 2007 was built at Tokomaru Bay and opened in 1881. The house was in disrepair by the late 1880s or early 1890s, and eventually was dismantled and sold to a dealer in Maori curios sometime in the 1890s. It was purchased by The Field Museum in Chicago in 1905. Beginning in 1992, the house was reconstructed with the endorsement and assistance (we are told) of the Tangata Whenua of Tokomaru Bay, and in 1993 was formally reconsecrated and opened again to the public. The marae is one of only three known to be outside New Zealand, and is the best preserved (however, if you know of any others, please make contact).

There are two other wharenui both in Germany. The first is Te Wharepuni-a-MauiT. E. Donne in 1905 for the New Zealand International Exhibition in 1906. Donne leased this building to the organisers for the duration of the exhibition at a charge of £25. The meeting house measured only 6 metres by 3.7 metres, and was “really only a large model and never intended for actual use”. It is currently located at the Linden Museum in Stuttgart. Recently Emily Schuster of Ngati Hinemihi replaced the flaxen tukutuku panels (special thanks to Julie Lawlor at the National Trust in Clandon Park for this information). which was commissioned by

The second wharenui is called Rauru and is at Volkerkunde Museum in Hamburg. It was carved by Ngati Tarawhai carver Tene, for a self-styled ‘white tohunga’ called Nelson. Rauru is a fully carved meeting house featuring legendary and mythical personalities chosen to illustrate the Rotorua legends that guides would tell to tourists. Rauru was sold in 1903.

Jeff Sissons has written about it in an article called The Traditionalisation of the Maori Meeting House which may be of interest, he also refers to Mataatua. Sissons’ article seeks to illustrate how the “diverse projects of national identity, tourist marketing, ethnology and state-directed rural development converged to displace meeting houses of this period” (special thanks also to Kane Te Manakura for this valuable information).

Nuhaka, a wharenui located in Laie, Hawai’i, is interesting because it was built as part of the Polynesian Cultural Center in the early 1960s, Maori tribal elders and members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which established the Center in 1963, agreed to pattern the meeting house in Laie after its namesake in Nuhaka, New Zealand. Click here and to view old photos of the construction of the whare.

Master carvers, artisans and their apprentices fabricated all the significant elements in New Zealand, then shipped them to Hawaii where the Polynesian Cultural Center’s meeting house was constructed piece by piece.

This site is still used by Maori at the Polynesian Cultural Center to greet dignitaries and travelling parties from Aotearoa.

In looking for others we found something quite interesting in Romania (located in Eastern Europe). The ‘Maori’ Huts of Queen Marie of Romania are Maori-inspired and European-built and designed. They date back to the 19th century.

What was equally interesting is Kallestrup’s analysis, “The craftsmen’s lack of understanding of the formal and cosmological significance of Maori art is unsurprising: as Neich has pointed out, even ‘enlightened’ Europeans in New Zealand still viewed it through the Romantic filter of the ‘noble savage’ who produced aesthetically pleasing ornament but had not yet evolved to an understanding of proportion and perspective. They failed to recognise Maori work as a conceptual art based on a wholly different notion of time, space and spiritual reality” (Kallestrup, 2004/05).

To read the article in full click here. A valuable insight and one that should not be overlooked or undervalued. The folly of mimicry, the arrogance of imitation continually ignores, denigrates, overlooks, misinforms and generally undermines the significance, aesthetic, meaning and mauri of our taonga. Sometimes the greatest compliment is NOT imitation, sometimes the greatest compliment is respect… So what are Your thoughts whanau?’