David Eggleton
Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous history of Māori art by Deidre Brown and Ngarino Ellis with Jonathan Mane-Wheoki (Auckland University Press, 2024), 600pp, $99.99
As bulky as a foundation stone, Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous history of Māori art is a one-volume blockbuster, profusely illustrated with prime examples of Māori art, whose narrative provides a revelatory immersion in te ao Māori. This tome fit to weigh down any coffee table at more than 600 pages, shines as a work of careful scholarship, building steadily on the mahi of previous ethnographic researchers. It is replete with twenty-nine pages of endnotes, a vast bibliography and a substantial glossary, as well as a thorough kuputohu or index. Lucid, accessible, diplomatic, if sometimes jargon-laden, it tells a story that balances the purist alongside the hybridist aspects of Māori culture, from Polynesian beginnings more than a thousand years ago until now.
The authors state that when they first pitched the concept of their book to the publisher in 2014, they wanted the narrative to be fully Māori-centric, that is, to tell a comprehensive story that spirals outwards from Aotearoa as an expression of the ‘global domination of Māori art history’. And so they have. With this panoptic telling they have synthesised a kōrero that brings together Māoritanga’s primary art and craft forms—incorporating waka-making, carving, weaving, body adornment, various ways of mark-making and architecture (though not performing arts)—into a holistic entity to emphasis Māori art as something of a shapeshifting taniwha, one with multiple heads that has constantly adapted in order to survive and ultimately triumph as a world-eater.
Although unified by tone and kaupapa, or purpose, the book is something of a composite in that it is co-authored by art historians Ngarino Ellis (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Porou) and Deidre Brown (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Kahu), who write alternate chapters or sections, while space is also made for a third contributor, the late Jonathan Mane-Wheoki (Ngāpuhi), an art historian who provides a chapter on the Māori Modernist artists of the twentieth century. Mane-Wheoki, we learn, provided the original inspiration, years ago, with his ambition to situate Māori art within the great art traditions of the world and to position Māori art history as transformative within the tradition of art history. The epic arrival of this book, then, with its elegant, clean lines, is a watershed moment in Māori art studies.
To keep their holism dynamic and focused, and even provocative, the trio write as polemicists or with the fervour of evangelists, asserting that in this ‘manifesto’ some words, such as moko, tapu, mana, should not be translated into English ‘as the nuances of the practice or concept get lost in translation’. They argue that ‘customary art is contemporary art’, and they argue for ‘Māori art forms and ideas that have survived through colonisation. There are not many, but … precious … we need to ensure they are made only by Māori.’ Art-historical terms, they contend, must be understood ‘through a Māori lens in which concepts such as whakapapa, whenua and tikanga are central’.
Asserting essentialism as a guiding principle, they place whakapapa or genealogy front and centre: ‘ancestry binds our people together’. In the book’s penultimate chapter, ‘Māori and Indigenous Art on the Global Stage’, Ngarino Ellis states that incorporating ‘Indigenous’ in the book’s title is an acknowledgement that ‘a sense of collective identity’ with other First Peoples around the world is being declared in the cause of ‘self-determination … survival, recovery and development’. Yet the book’s editorial strategies are also able to respond to and represent the complexities of collective identity and whakapapa Māori: ‘there are artists of Māori descent who have little or no connection to their cultural heritage, and in this book we embrace their contribution.’
In Toi Te Mana, ‘tikanga in the form of values, functions and interpretations remains a constant presence’, which means in practice the flow of text is patterned with apt quotations (translated into English) taken from whakataukī, mōteatea and karakia, while the three-part structure of the book’s telling borrows from Māori creation legends, and in particular the pūrākau of Tāne, the atua of knowledge, and his transportation to the secular world from the Māori spiritual realm of the Three Baskets of Knowledge, Ngā Kete e Toru. According to legend, the first kete contained knowledge of astronomy and crafts; the second, knowledge of the natural world, sense perception and prayer; and the third, knowledge of maramataka (lunar cycles), ritual and philosophy. But because the book’s epic narrative also unfolds chronologically—a classic age (craft, reciprocity, travel between islands) followed by an age of struggle (first encounters with Pākehā, colonial repression and adaptation), then a modern age (innovation and subsequent puāwaitanga, or flourishing)—the three kete categories the authors invoke—(1) customary Māori art practices, (2) cross-cultural exchange, (3) the recent and the contemporary—tend to blur and blend together, as taonga remain taonga whatever the setting.
So the book establishes a continuum around customary art and its making and inventive remaking, and its preservation and display, but this serves to minimise traumatic or psychologically negative facets of history in favour of ultimately a buoyant story of resilience and overcoming disaster. Nevertheless, certain significant tragic or damaging episodes are highlighted, in particular the forcible occupation of the thriving Māori settlement of Parihaka on 5 November 1881 by colonial troops, along with large-scale land dispossession overseen by the colonial administration, and the wid-spread trafficking, looting and dispersal of taonga—which is chronicled as a kind of detective story.
At all times the book, through its displays and text, honours Jonathan Mane-Wheoki’s statement quoted within: that the art of Indigenous peoples is ‘informed by distinctive cosmological constructs, their sense of occult in the natural environment, and their shamanistic engagement with it’. Mauri is not just a life-force moving through things but a vital presence animating the book’s pages as choices are made around the design, the layout, the imagery and the commentaries.
In the Māori universe—te ao katoa—everything is connected. Whare design and waka design share communalities. The waka taua—the ceremonial canoe of the people, built to hold a travelling group of up to 100—functions as a form of community, its carved forms ‘imbued with the genealogies of heaven and earth … as well as the descent lines of illustrious ancestor warriors’. The whare whakairo—the carved meeting house—represents the body of an ancestor, and contains within it the whole whakapapa of its people, reaching back through generations until it touches cosmology. Toi Te Mana examines briefly as exemplars the careers of two master carvers, Tā Heke-nuku-mai-ngā-iwi Busby and Pakariki Harrison, but also observes: ‘in larger meeting house or waka projects it is often difficult to identify the specific hand of individual carvers’.
As part of its decolonisation process, the book addresses how colonial museum collections were amassed and current steps towards restitution or repatriation, the handing back of looted objects: ‘During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, “relic hunters” and eugenicists plundered many abandoned kāinga and urupā … taking human remains … personal items … and burial caskets … for research or sale.’ We learn that there are ‘around 18,000 taonga held in over 160 museums worldwide, of which there is yet to be a single comprehensive inventory’. Some institutions are engaged in exemplary acts of restitution, while others are at least engaged in arguments around the provenance, as well as the proper display, of colonially acquired artefacts. Identifiable relics, whether confiscated or purchased, are in a way haunted ancestor-objects and sometimes call for the ritualistic care of descendants. Following the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal in 1975, the Crown was increasingly challenged to return taonga taken from urupā and other sites and sold to museums.
If whare whakairo were sometimes disassembled, transported by sailing ship across space and time, and reassembled on another part of the globe, within Māoridom in colonial New Zealand various groups and charismatic leaders emerged, intent on restoring a cohesive Māori identity through powerful emblems such as communal architecture. Beginning in the 1850s, the Kīngitanga movement in the Waikato exercised mana by building parliamentary buildings; this was followed by other tribal and non-tribal confederations—Paremata Māori, the Kotahitanga movement—manifesting self-determination through symbolic buildings. In Urewera country, Rua Kēnana built his Hiona circular council chamber at Maungapōhatu; while Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Tūruki, founder of the Ringatū church, reconceptualised wharenui as Indigenous spaces for religious worship. Other nineteenth-century Māori leaders negotiated with Christian clergy, who were often suspicious of Māori pantheistic practices undermining the imposition of monotheism—though as visual imagery here attests, this sometimes led to spectacular cultural collisions, such as a taonga carving (now held in the Auckland Museum) of a Madonna and Child, with the Madonna-figure bearing a full-face moko typically given only to men, or in rare instances to high-born women.
Toi Te Mana discusses in depth the achievements of three major early-twentieth-century reformers who used architecture to symbolise Māori resistance and cultural unity. Te Kirihaehae Te Puea Hērangi, daughter of the second Māori King Tāwhiao Te Wherowhero, was ‘one of the few Māori women … who designed and commissioned whare whakairo’; while Member of Parliament Apirana Turupa Ngata ‘instigated an architectural renaissance through his establishment of the School of Maori Arts and Crafts’ to train new generations of tohunga whakairo. And then there was the religious visionary and faith healer Tahupōtiki Wiremu Rātana, who rejected customary art-making in favour of Christian-inspired churches and Bible-based community centres. Funded by his followers, he also forged a useful alliance with the Labour Party to advance his community goals.
Despite its encyclopaedic scope, Toi Te Mana doesn’t chart all the currents of the mighty river that is contemporary Māori art, but—as with its treasure-trove of fascinating and resonant images—it selects and summarises the most significant events, artists and artworks, connecting them through a kind of string game of associations, allusions and references. In a way, the whole book is a kaleidoscope whirl, which, when browsed through, allows various intriguing observations to emerge. We learn, for example, that harakeke—‘the most widespread weaving resource in Māori art’, and often translated into English as ‘flax’—is actually from a completely different botanical family to the European species. Then there is toi whenua, or rock shelter art: ‘with more than 700 sites around the country, it is one of the most prolific and widespread forms of Māori expression’. Although it is ‘no longer an active practice’, it is proving inspirational for some contemporary Māori artists.
Another observation the book makes is that beginning after World War II almost half the entire Māori population moved from iwi homelands to towns and cities, and this percentage has gone on increasing, marking a turning point: ‘The challenge has been to maintain the mana of Māori on lands that have become cities.’ Indigenous gateways and park installations in urban locations by Selwyn Muru and the duo of Shona Rapira Davies and Kura Te Waru Rewiri are illustrated, along with examples of public sculptures and murals by Robin Kahukiwa, Michael Parekōwhai, Shane Cotton and Xoë Hall, but not the civic artwork of Ralph Hotere, partially eclipsed in this new narrative of Māori art.
Ultimately perhaps it is the visual images chosen for the book that readers will return to again and again, re-reading those excerpts of writing that tease out their meanings and place them in context. Many are uncanny and yet familiar, published in other books or on public display. Partly, the purpose of this book is to make them uncanny again so that they startle and awe us anew with their mauri and mana: the pounamu adzes, chisels, fish-hooks and hei-tiki; the stylish wood, bone and fibre heru (ornamental hair-combs); the shadowy taonga stored on different shelves and racks, and all neatly ticketed or labelled: photographed with a penetrating intensity by Neil Pardington back in 2006. Other carvings are memorable for other reasons: they have been mutilated in the name of Victorian prudishness and nineteenth-century ideological censorship. And then there’s Brett Graham’s atmospheric sculpture ‘Wastelands’ (2024), exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2024. Made from steel, found wagon wheels and black-painted macrocarpa, ‘Wastelands’ is one gigantic carving, showing eels lifted from a drained wetland taken for dairying. Clumped on a colonial wagon, this is a massive conclave of organic shapes that have barely stopped wriggling and churning in their death-agony. ‘Wastelands’ is an elegiac salute to habitat loss and the plundering of the whenua, while its exquisite carved details affirm it as belonging to the traditions of the tohunga whakairo. It’s a re-stated foundational expression of tūrangawaewae, representing ‘rangatiratanga, fecundity, wealth and a community bound by whakapapa’.
DAVID EGGLETON is writer and poet based in Ōtepoti Dunedin. He co-edited Katūīvei: Contemporary Pasifika Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand (Massey University Press, 2024), and his recent poetry books include Respirator: A Laureate collection 2019–2022 (Otago University Press, 2023) and Lifting the Island (Red Hen Press, 2025).
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