Exhibition on Māori manuscripts to look at where local taonga belong
A rich trove of manuscripts charting important periods of Ngāti Kahungunu history goes on display next week in an exhibition called Mārama: Manuscripts with Memory, An intimate audience with Ngāti Kahungunu tīpuna.
The exhibition will be held at Te Ara o Tāwhaki, Te Ūranga Waka, EIT’s Marae in the School Māori Studies from Tuesday to Thursday (22 - 24 June 2021). The exhibition is the result of a significant research project undertaken by EIT’s Professor of Māori and Indigenous Research David Tipene-Leach and Te Reo Māori researcher and EIT’s Twist Library archivist, Waitangi Teepa.
Professor Tipene-Leach says: “This is the age of the ‘Repatriation of Taonga Māori’ and we ask: ‘Where do Ngāti Kahungunu manuscripts, documents, records, taonga-a-tuhi and other taonga archived and curated in museums and libraries around the country rightfully belong?’”
The manuscripts consist of letters and papers from two significant collections that have been passed down through the generations of two Māori whānau. The project is personal for Professor Tipene-Leach as one of the collections is of his own family’s papers. It includes more than one thousand letters written between 1860 and 1890 to Henare Matua. Matua was the leader of the Hawke’s Bay ‘Komiti’, which was based around several mid to late-19th century rangatira in the area who banded together to both prevent land sales and overturn land sales that were clandestine, fraudulent and damaging to local hapū.
The group went to court to “repudiate” some of those land sales and as a result, local landowners called them the Repudiation Movement. Henare Matua was Professor Tipene-Leach’s great, great grandfather’s oldest brother.
The other collection, part of which is in the caretakership of local historian Pat Parsons, concerns John Thomas Blake, a Māori Land Court translator, who kept two records of the cases he translated – one for the judge and the other for his personal collection.
The Hawke’s Bay collection was split in three bits – some in the Hastings Library, some deposited with Pat by the Blake family – and many pieces are still in the wider Blake family.
The Tipene Matua and Blake whānau will attend the exhibition next week.
Professor Tipene-Leach says: “The words ‘our own memory’ have become the common truth of post-Settlement Iwi around the motu - particularly where there is no Tribunal Record to rely on. We in Ngāti Kahungunu have our own separate oral histories and Crown historical record. But we have scores of whānau who are caring for caches of valued manuscripts.”
“This exhibition is about what is possible with your manuscripts – how to care for them so that they survive until one of your whānau is able to retrieve the mātauranga contained therein.”
He says the exhibition will also give students of Māori language and culture some small insight into a new workplace – curating, exhibiting and disseminating taonga of the distant past with modern technology.
To attend the exhibition, please register here https://forms.gle/UXS84oEKXqf1WBnq8
PHOTO: An exhibition called Mārama: Manuscripts with Memory, An intimate audience with Ngāti Kahungunu tīpuna will be held at EIT It is the result of a research project undertaken by EIT’s Professor of Māori and Indigenous Research David Tipene-Leach (left) and Te Reo Māori researcher and EIT’s Twist Library archivist, Waitangi Teepa (centre). Assisting them with the exhibition is Ricky Winitana (right).
