Te Maori exhibition boosts Maori mana

Press, 10 October 1984, Page 18

Te Maori exhibition boosts Maori mana

The largest international classical Maori art exhibition to leave New. Zealand, Te Maori consists of 174 objects made between 1000 AD and about 1880. The objects come from tribal areas throughout New Zealand, and were the subject of intense negotiations in each tribe before permission was given for these taonga or treasurers to leave New Zealand.

Negotiations with Maori tribes before the exhibition of Maori art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, have given impetus to the rise of Maori mana in the opinion of Professor Sidney Moko Mead, professor of Maori at Victoria University, Wellington.

Arranging the exhibition also highlights a dilemma facing the people of New Zealand today: how is Maori culture to be regarded?

“Negotiations for the Maori exhibition have highlighted the changing status of Maori-Pakeha relations. No longer are Maori leaders content to remain as silent partners in such matters,” he says in his essay “te Kaupapa o teh mana Maori” (“The changing context of Maori art”) in

By

LINDSAY MARTIN,

the exhibition catalogue. “Rather, they expect to participate directly in the negotiations, and they want to speak for themselves and not have Pakeha officials speak on behalf of ‘our Maoris’.

“This is new. It is also exciting because it is evidence of the return and rise of mana Maori, which is the theme of this exhibition.”

Professor Mead, who edited the lavish catalogue, on sale in New Zealand for just under $5O as a hardback book, says that not long ago the Pakeha settling on new land in Aotearoa meant fear, subjugation, poverty, and death for the Maori people. Hope was the preserve of the white majority; but Maoritanga did survive through Maori tenacity of purpose. “But as mana Maori rises out of the shadow of the bad experience in culture contact during the nineteenth century, the Pakeha section of the population becomes apprehensive. This is their dilemma, the reversal in expectations,” says Professor Mead.

Hammond Features

He also sounds an optimistic note.

“In spite of some awkwardness in Maori-Pakeha relations at the present, it remains possible to co-oper-ate and work together on such events as this exhibition. As people, we can walk together, argue our differences and negotiate a new future. There is hope in that fact.”

Professor Mead says that Maori art has been repudiated, rejected, vandalised, neglected, hidden and abused by Maori and Pakeha alike especially by some whose only interest is to exploit the tourist dollar, or any other dollar that can be made out of it. Others are interested in the serious side of the art, he says; and some Pakehas identify strongly with Maori art and view it as a symbol of their identity as New Zealanders. Professor Mead believes the art grid, or system of cultural references, for the Maori must act as the cultural grid for the Pakeha as well.

The bringing together of

the exhibition has made Maori people more conscious of their heritage, says David Simmons, ethnologist at the Auckland Museum, and co-selector of the exhibition with Douglas Newton, head of primitive art at the Metropolitan Museum. Some of the wahi ngaro or lost portion of Maori culture was revealed during the negotiations to stage the exhibition. It was exciting for tribes who knew historic and prized possessions existed, to discover where they were housed. Mr Simmons also says the exhibition made museums in New Zealand more conscious of the heritage they hold. Kara Puketapu, chairman of the Government interdepartmental committee which helped arrange the exhbition possible, says the maori people who have made the exhibition possible “have enabled Maori culture to thrust out into te ao marama, the world of light. “We mean to establish the mana of New Zealand in the United States. The Maori mana will increase. But so should the mana of us all.”