February 21, 2024
Call for reunion of taonga after 200 years
A Māori architectural historian says she’d like to see a collection of pre-colonisation whakairo rākau brought back together.
University of Auckland Professor Deidre Brown has eight years of identifying and locating the carvings, which were collected by missionary Thomas Kendall and sent off to London in 1823, along with a detailed inventory of the spiritual significance of each piece.
She says she has whakapapa to the cove where Kendall established his mission, so she would love to share the taonga wih her whanau.
By searching Church Missionary Society records and a 19th century exhibition catalogues she was able to link some of the taonga to items sold by notorious mokomokai collector Horatio Robley to London collector William Oldman in 1910, and subsequently dispersed to musuems and private collections around the world.
Roman numerals carved in each piece before shipping allowed her to identify other taonga from Kendall’s collection, including three at the Enthnological Museum in Berlin, one in the Museum Reitberg in Zurich, one in the Brooklyn Museum, one at Otago Museum and another one at Canterbury Museum.
“It’s really up to iwi and hapu to engage with the museums if they want to repatriate them. Otherwise some of the European museums have been talking about bringing them back together anyway, but I’d love for us just to reconnect with them again and make them warm,” Professor Brown says.