February 20, 2024
Kendall hoard hiding in plain sight
A Māori architectural historian has identified an important group of early carvings which had been dispersed to museums across the globe.
In the latest issue of Waka Kuaka | The Journal of the Polynesian Society University of Auckland Professor Deidre Brown recounts her eight-year search for whakairo collected by missionary Thomas Kendall and shipped from the Bay of Islands to London in 1823.
She says they are the earliest whakairo to have their spiritual meanings explained by Māori and recorded in writing.
The 1867 catalogue of a missionary exhibit in Paris, which was posted online in 2013, allowed her to track down three whakairo rākau in museums in Switzerland and Germany.
From that she was able to identify other carvings in the Canterbury Museum, Brooklyn Museum and Tūhura Otago Museum as being some of those described by Kendall.
“The published meanings have been highly influential on our understandings of customary Māori art, and now we have the actual carvings they were describing” says Brown.
“Kendall was passionate about communicating Māori knowledge to other Europeans through the translation of te reo and also these whakairo, which he had been told by Māori community members contained their ancestral stories and spiritual understandings..