Book of the Week: The book of the greatest show on earth

He toi whakairo, he mana tangata: through artistic excellence, there is human dignity. The words of this whakatauākī have been ringing in my ears as I’ve read the newly published illustrated book Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art, wondering about the impact this epic narrative will have here in Aotearoa and in the wider world – on the (future) artists it will inspire, and the writers and curators who will seize on one of the many kaupapa illuminated within and begin to dream.
I’ve had to concentrate. At over 600 pages with hundreds of dazzling images and dozens of fascinating tributaries, the wide reach of Māori art is laid out in a manner that is impossible to resist. In Aotearoa we are blessed with one of the great art traditions to be found anywhere.
Toi Te Mana’s authors Deidre Brown (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Kahu), Ngarino Ellis (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Porou) and the late Jonathan Mane-Wheoki (CNZM, 1943-2014, Ngāpuhi, Te Aupouri, Ngāti Kurī) and their supporting team of emerging Māori scholars have spent well over a decade researching and documenting the breadth and whakapapa of the taonga that illustrate centuries of ‘artistic excellence’.
That toi whakairo goes hand-in-hand with the human dignity articulated by Dr Piri Sciascia (ONZM, 1946-2020, Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Raukawa, Rangitane) is simply whakatauākī as truism I might hear you say. But as I said I’m having to concentrate hard. There’s quite a bit of static out there around the motu at the moment. It’s called the Treaty Principles Bill – and it’s making a helluva racket while I’m trying to read a book. Hīkoi mō te Tiriti will be passing by my door soon. If I didn’t have a book review to complete I’d be joining as tangata tiriti.  As Pākehā I find it mortifying that Māori are having to relitigate an issue that was addressed in 1975 by Dame Whina Cooper and Te Rōpū Matakite o Aotearoa – Those with Foresight. Here’s hoping that by the time you have finished reading Toi Te Mana the moment has passed and Mana Tangata has been restored.
Right now, Māori art is trending, going global. Chapter 19, ‘Haumi Ē! Hui Ē! Tāiki Ē!: Māori and Indigenous Art on the Global Stage’, reviews just how Māori artists are representing Aotearoa at the Venice Biennale or the Royal Academy of Art in London and art galleries all over the world. In May of this year, four wāhine of the Mataaho Collective were awarded the Golden Lion Award at the 2024 Venice Biennale for their soaring, woven installation Takapau. Just this past October, the Reuben Paterson (Ngāti Rangitihi, Ngāi Tūhoe, Tūhourangi) exhibition in New York caught some heat on Insta and was visited by heaps of proud Kiwis in the Big Apple. Arts Laureate Lisa Reihana (CNZM Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Hine, Ngāi Tūteauru) has exhibited in Singapore, Hong Kong and Vancouver. Talk about world famous in … er, the world.
I guess the first big question that needs to be addressed is what is Māori art history and how might it differ, or even improve, on ‘orthodox’ art history of the sort that I was trained in. Western European art history is relentlessly chronological and ‘disruptor’ focused, centred around protean change-making figures. Caravaggio jack-knifed Italian art in the 1590s and created the Baroque and so on. I recall compiling tables of artist and artwork dates to chart the baton being passed from the elegant Renaissance painters to the refined sweetness of the Mannerists and thence to the ‘Caravaggisti’ the bad boys of the Counter-Reformation such as Guido Reni, whose Saint Sebastian (circa 1625) is currently on view at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki in the exhibition Threads of Time.
Time. How it is viewed, applied and interrogated is a fundamental difference between the art historical arotahi or lens as applied so perspicaciously in Toi Te Mana and the one I’ve used to peer at art for the past four decades. The authors describe their approach as follows: “We propose a revision of Western-influenced classificatory systems of Māori art, and look towards an Indigenous dynamic sense of time … What is artistic continuity within the non-linear contexts of Māori time and history? The definition of time that underpins the art history presented here is derived from te reo Māori. Linguist and tribal historian Patu Hohepa has described Māori time as a movable continuum that appears as a three-dimensional model when compared to linear chronologies … The task of art history, then, is to navigate us through this complex matrix of time and stories, taking us from one point of understanding to many others.”
That matrix of ‘taonga tuku iho’ treasures handed down from ancestors is woven over three kete, or baskets of knowledge which articulate the passage of time from ancestral beginnings, through the change and turbulence of the 19th and early 20th centuries when Māori and their arts were challenged by, imperiled and responded to the arrival of colonial settlers, missionaries and troops. Then the, at first, rearguard actions of the Māori modernists post WWII create the stage for the subsequent puāwaitanga or flourishing we see in our galleries and all over social media in 2024.
Hovering behind this history is the widely accepted view, within the Pākehā political cohort, that from the mid 19th century that Māori as a race were on the road to extinction and the role of Europeans was, to quote Dr Isaac Featherston, “smooth the pillow of the dying Māori race”. That unctuous observation was made in 1859. By the early 1900s this (thankfully inaccurate) belief, became codified in the portraits of Charles Frederick Goldie who prefaced his canvases with titles such as ‘Life’s Long Day Calmly Closes’ or ‘A Noble Relic of a Noble Race’. At this time, in the main, Māori art as it was experienced by the majority of the population was a museum-based ethnographic project to record the material arts of Māori before they dwindled or disappeared. That this did not happen, is today, a given. But Toi Te Mana tells us how and why the supposedly inevitable did not come to pass. Decisive intervention was required – and this came from, amongst others,  the foresight and political clout of Sir Āpirana Ngata (1874-1950, Ngāti Porou) and Princess Te Puea Hērangi (1883-1952, Tainui) who emerge as central, heroic figures. I will return to these two iconic leaders a little later.
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First, I would like to discuss initial impressions and the art of bookmaking. Toi Te Mana is exemplary on both counts. This is a big book, both in terms of physical heft and the scale of its kaupapa. On first peruse it might feel almost overwhelming to many readers: the notes, bibliography, glossary and index alone run to some sixty pages – the fruits of a decade of research and scholarship. A companion to Toi Te Mana is the catalogue for the exhibition Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art (2020/21, Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tāmaki, which I reviewed in Newsroom.
At that time one of the notable responses to that vast exploration of Māori art post WWII came from the artist Ngahuia Harrison (Ngātiwai, Ngāti Pukenga, Ngāti Kahu o Torongare) in the Pantograph Punch. She describes needing a lie-down with a bag of frozen peas pressed to her forehead, a weep and a commitment to return: “I have returned to the show five times, in large part because returning is what the show demands of you.”
Toi Te Mana prompted a similar response from me, requiring almost two months to read and prepare my notes for this review. Like Toi Tū it is enormous and seemingly never-ending. Patience and stamina is required. However, for the reader the rewards are equally immense. A vital part of any BIG BOOK experience is structure and wayfinding, so one can navigate the matrix, return, think, stop, reach for that bag of peas if required and continue on your haerenga. To that end special mention must go to designer Neil Pardington (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Ngāti Kahungunu) for his elegant layout, balanced hierarchy of fonts and deployment of nearly 500 images.
Those three kete or sections hold the reader on course and enable a clear understanding of how artwork, maker, iwi and whakapapa relate. This structure takes its lead from ‘Ngā Kete e Toru’ – the three baskets of knowledge. The three kete were recovered from the world above by Tāne, the atua of knowledge and the son of Ranginui and Papatūānuku: He was the main protagonist in the creation of the present world, Te Ao Mārama (the world of light).
Te  Kete Tuatea or ‘the basket of light’ begins the journey and contains ‘the continuum of Māori art that is from and within the customary world.’ Here we find the development of waka, whakairo (carving), kākahu (textiles), whare (architecture) and foundational genres such as rock art and adornment. Chapter 1 addresses the fascinating history of waka creation and navigation, commencing naturally with Kupe and his journey from Hawaiki to Aotearoa aboard the legendary waka Matahouroa. Waka taua (war canoes) with their signature highly carved and decorated Tauihi (prow) and Taurapa (stern) carried tribal mana from about the 1700s to the 1850s. A great fleet of waka taua transported Ngāpuhi leader Hongi Hika from the Bay of Islands as far south as Rotorua in 1823. From that point, as intertribal dynamics changed and colonial forces targeted waka taua for destruction, they became almost obsolete, “By the turn of the twentieth century most waka taua had been destroyed or were lying in pieces in sheds or on riverbanks. A few complete war canoes were in museums … considered quintessential examples of Māori art which, according to the museums, was fast disappearing.”
Toi Te Mana charts the rebooting of waka building from the 1930s, with a powerful catalyst being the 1940 100th anniversary te Tiriti celebrations. Princess Te Puea Hērangi commissioned three new waka to represent Tainui, one of which Te Winika stands today in pride of place at Te Whare Taonga o Waikato Museum & Gallery.
As anyone who has recently visited Waitangi Day will attest, the sight of dozens of waka led by the mighty waka taua Ngātokimatawhaorua (also commissioned for the 1940 te Tiriti anniversary) is one of the most spectacular available (for free) in contemporary Aotearoa.
One of the inevitable consequences of Toi Te Mana, anticipated by Jonathan Mane-Wheoki will be the rewriting of the wider canon of art in Aotearoa New Zealand so that, in particular those documented carvers of the 19th and 20th century who created the great whare whakairo (carved houses) from the 1870s such as Wero Tāroi, Tene Waitere, Ānaha Te Rāhui, Neke Kapua  and Te Ngāru Ranapia of Te Arawa and the sextet of prolific Ngāti Porou carvers including Hone Taahu, Hone Ngatoto and Hoani Ngatai, will at last be integrated into a wider artistic discourse. They are progenitor figures who revitalised whakairo in the later 19th and early 20th centuries and inspired new generations including Pine and Hone Taiapa, Paakariki Harrison, Lyonel Grant and many others that space does not permit me to mention.
This is the male or mana tāne side of the equation. Mana wāhine and Mana takatāpui mahi toi is also a vital, but less documented, or even marginalised expression of diversity amongst tangata whenua as Ngarino Ellis notes pointedly, ‘The introduction of the heteropatriarchy by Europeans, especially Christian missionaries, diminished these identities … which in turn suppressed the use of and acceptance of imagery by women and takatāpui (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex or part of the rainbow community) in art.

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Part two, Te Kete Tuauri, ‘the basket of the unknown’ picks up the taiaha when Pākehā arrived from the 1760s and began to interact with tangata whenua as explorers, missionaries, settlers, soldiers, whalers, farmers, collectors and artists – all of which piqued Māori curiosity. One consequence was the immediate and sustained trading of taonga with Europeans. From Cook’s first voyage, when significant taonga were traded and collected for display in London, to the late 19th century successive waves of missionaries, traders, dealers and museum agents acquired by various means thousands of weapons, cloaks, whakairo of all genres as well as entire carved wharenui. The museums of America and Europe contain as many carved houses as do those in Aotearoa: Te Rauru now resides  in the in Hamburg Ethnological Museum, Ruatapukepuke in at the Field Museum in Chicago, Hinemihi o Te Ao Tawhito in England and Te Wharepuni a Maui in Stuttgart.
Toi Te Mana charts the dispersal of over 15,000 taonga across 180 museums around the globe with a sleuth’s attention to detail. The British Museum alone holds over 3000 taonga from Aotearoa. For many iwi this publication will be a means to reconnect with taonga illustrated from collections such as that of the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts or the dozens of hei tiki and whalebone adornments collected in the 19th century by the Italian zoologist Enrico Hillyer Giglioli (1845 – 1909) held in the collection of the Pigorini National Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography in Rome.

The chapter that really caught my attention in Te Kete Tuauri is number 10: ‘The Art of Utu’ by Deidre Brown which charts the role of taonga in maintaining balance and intertribal alliances. It speaks to the potent agency of art within Māori societal relationships as well as the centrality of artistic expression at times of tension and conflict or resolution, “For Māori, art has been the mediator between life and death, peace and war … co-management of resources and land boundaries depend on the maintenance of balance, sometimes through utu (reciprocal actions), such as the exchange of taonga. Such exchanges by rangatira, emphasise the sincerity of their utu, and the taonga themselves accumulated mana and tapu as they were exchanged.”
A supreme example of this passage of utu and mana is Te Kahumamae o Pareraututu, “the cloak of pain”, a magnificent kahu kuri or dog-hair cloak, dating to the 1820s and assembled from the pelts of kuri Māori dogs “that had belonged to… Ngāti Rangitihi rangatira who had been killed by Tūhoe in the 1821 battle of Pukekaikahu.” The Chieftainess Pareraututu created and wore the cloak to carry the pain of both iwi and to lobby for an utu resolution to the conflict. The kahu kuri then passed by gift and descent to Rewi Maniapoto (circa 1810 – 1894, Ngāti Maniapoto) and a number of other prominent kaitiaki including the soldier-surveyor Gilbert Mair.
After the signing of te Tiriti in 1840 Māori art became increasingly politicised, a potent vehicle to express tino rangatiratanga and Māori alarm at the quantity and quality of the waves of new immigrants and their rapacious desire for land. The numbers tell the story, at the signing of te Tiriti in 1840 the Māori population of Aotearoa is estimated to have been 80,000 with only 2500 Europeans living in Aotearoa. By 1860 Māori and Pākehā populations were near parity and just 10 years later after waves of immigration the new arrivals outnumbered Māori five to one.
With this influx came new technologies which had a direct bearing on Māori art production namely pigments and perhaps most importantly steel chisels which enabled carvers to cut deeper, faster and work at greater scale. At the same time Māori needed to respond to the incursions of settlers building churches and administrative buildings which carried colonial mana as Māori saw it. This spurred a great wave of whare rūnanga (meeting house) construction which gained momentum from the 1870s as Māori sought to assert their mana whenua status by building wharenui to honour ancestral leaders and emphasise that these epic carved structures were tūrangawaewae – a place for iwi to stand and unify. This passage of Māori art history is exhilarating, as built structures, flags and artforms articulate Māori resistance and new political, military and religious entities emerge such as the Kingitanga, the Ringatū faith powered by the world view of leaders such as Te Kooti Arikirangi (? – 1893, Rongowhakaata) and Rua Kēnana (1869 – 1937, Ngāi Tūhoe). In a few decades wharenui which proudly stand on their marae to this day were commissioned, carved and adorned with kōwhaiwhai and tukutuku or in some cases decorated in free-wheeling polychromatic paint schemes – new pigments unleashing Māori creativity. Houmaitawhiti and Uenuku-mai-Rarotonga on the shores of Lake Rotoiti, Te Tokanganui-a-Noho in Te Kuiti, Tamatekapua at Ōhinemutu, Mātaatua (after extended  stays in Sydney and London) at Whakatane (all 1870s), Porourangi on the East Coast and Rongopai (1888) at Waituhi in Tūranga-nui-a-Kiwa Poverty Bay are iconic wharenui from this period, each containing spectacular carved and decorated cycles that have provided inspiration to leading contemporary Māori artists including painter Shane Cotton and photographer Natalie Robertson as well as generations of weavers and carvers.

Te Kete Aronui or the basket of pursuit “could be described as a survival kit equipped with the tikanga-based arts knowledge needed to begin to repair the damage done by colonisation to hapū and iwi, and to seek different modes and relationships in other parts of the world and with other indigenous peoples”. That means today you can see art by Māori at the Venice Biennale, at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris or the waka Te Kawau with a crew from Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei leading out Team New Zealand’s America’s Cup defence in Barcelona.
The impetus for Māori art going global begins after WWI and is captured in chapter 14, The Art of Social Reform: Te Puea, Ngata and Rātana. Māori participation in WWI came at a heavy price, the war memorials of rural marae throughout Aotearoa tell that story. However, their sacrifice provided Māori leaders with some leverage to promote Māori health, education and wider cultural status for the first time in decades. For Te Puea Hērangi the early 1920s was the time for Tainui and the Kingitanga to re-establish their status as mana whenua at Tūrangawaewae Marae on the banks of the Waikato River at Ngāruawāhia, whose ngākau or heart is the carved wharenui Māhinerangi which opened in 1929. The documentation, plans  and photographs of the design and whakairo of this great whare, “a flagship project for one of the world’s most important Indigenous building revivals” is one of many highlights of Toi Te Mana, revealing Te Puea’s ambitious vision. For nearly a century Māhinerangi has been the scene for many historic events, including in January of this year, Kiingi Tuuheitia’s call for kotahitanga, for tangata whenua to ‘Be Māori all day, every day.’
A similar kaupapa can be seen in the photograph (above) of Sir Āpirana Ngata leading an epochal haka in front of the then newly opened carved house Te Whare Rūnunga at Waitangi to mark te Tiriti centennial celebrations in 1940,  the culmination of a grand vision to revitalise Māori arts whose catalyst was an alarming realisation, “in 1916, Ngata discovered that there was only one surviving carver, Hone Ngatoto, still working on the East Coast – an area once renowned for its continuous whakapapa of artistic tradition from ancient times.”
Ngata took immediate action. A decade later the School of Maori Arts and Crafts opened in Rotorua. Amongst the first intake of apprentice carvers was Pine Taiapa (1901 – 1972, Ngāti Porou) who would go on to train new generations of carvers and be involved in the concepts and carving for over sixty wharenui, including Te Whare Rūnunga. Sir Āpirana is not just celebrating te Tiriti in that photo, but the rejuvenation of a complete suite of Māori arts – whakairo, tukutuku and kōwhaiwhai, that a few years earlier had been reduced to a handful of practitioners. Toi Te Mana provides ample evidence of Ngata’s legacy, via a body of detailed archival photographs. But the image of then MP for Eastern Māori leading the haka comes freighted with the knowledge that, “The objective of training a new generation of Māori artists was realised: many men and women had been trained in their own communities… Most importantly, whare whakairo and their marae had been revitalised… where te reo Māori was spoken and tikanga observed.”
Such decisive moments carry momentum throughout Toi Te Mana, and the stakes are always high. The mahi toi of Māori artists tell the epic tale of iwi hanging on, regrouping and finding a way to express the wairua or essence of the moment, frequently under duress.
The final chapters demonstrate that Māori artists are hard-wired to simultaneously innovate and maintain the traditional arts of their tūpuna – whakairo and raranga weaving flourishing alongside film, digital arts, complex built structures and epic-scale installations by practitioners such as the Mataaho collective that are feted internationally. From that moment when Sir Āpirana Ngata realised that Māori were literally down to their last man, the subsequent history is cause for enormous pride.
Perhaps this should not be surprising, Māori culture traces its whakapapa to Hawaiki. The earliest item illustrated in Toi Te Mana, a whale-tooth necklace dates to c. 1300,  what in Europe was known as the Medieval period.
Lisa Reihana’s whakaahua photograph from 2001 of the ancient Tūhoe ancestress Hinepukōrangi, the legendary mist maiden, tells this tale better than any words on a page can muster. Ngāi Tūhoe trace their whakapapa to the union of this graceful maiden and Te Maunga, a mighty mountain. It’s a story that is literally elemental and as old as the hills – one worth fighting for.
Toi Te Mana is clear from the outset on its mandate, it is a “koha (gift or offering) to art history, to our ancestors and to all those who are interested in Te Ao Māori”.
However, that it should be published literally to the day when the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti arrived in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington is a tohu or sign too potent to be a coincidence.
Toi Te Mana takes its title from the whakatauki which reads. “Toitū te whenua, toitū te tikanga, ka ora ngā toi: When we hold fast to our land and values, our art flourishes.”
Very soon this book will become a taonga in its own right. Unlike the proposed bill it makes eminent sense on the first reading, even more on the second. Mauri ora.
Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art by Deidre Brown, Ngarino Ellis and Jonathan Mane-wheoki (Auckland University Press, $100) is available in bookstores nationwide.