The Iwirākau Project: A Collaborative Waiapu Approach

Abstract

The Iwirākau Project was a collaboration that stretched from urban museums to remote rural marae – the meeting grounds constituted of buildings centred on carved houses in Māori communities – between a Māori writer and a Māori photographer both with tribal connections to Ngāti Porou Tūturu on the East Coast of Te Ika-a-Māui (North Island) of Aotearoa (New Zealand). This area is referred to as Te Riu o Waiapu, the Waiapu Valley, named for the ancestral mother river, and home to many meeting houses carved by men trained in the Iwirākau tradition between 1830 and 1930. This article examines the cultural guidance required to take the camera on to marae and into carved meeting houses to photograph ancestral places. Over the five-year span of working together, new ways of understanding Māori spiritual guardianship of images emerged, aligning with concepts of photographic sovereignty. In conjunction with elders, new tikanga (protocols) for the ethics of photographing, seeking permission, publishing, and returning research were developed. Through this process, three key Māori values – whakapapa (genealogical connection), manaakitanga (hospitality), and rangatiratanga (sovereignty) – guided the project. In this article, Māori filmmaker Barry Barclay’s conception of ‘camera as a friend’ displaces Susan Sontag’s idea of the camera as a weapon, arriving at a new proposition of the camera as part of the extended family.

Keywords:

• Indigenous photography
• Māori photography
• collaborative research
• Indigenous art history
• Ngāti Porou
• photographic sovereignty

Notes

1 – Written for Rangi Bennett, daughter of John Bennett, quoted in Hirini Moko Mead and Neil Grove, Ngā Pēpeha a Nga Tipuna – The Sayings of the Ancestors, Wellington: Victoria University Press 2003, 48.

2 The complete collection of images is not wholly accounted for at present as it is not yet part of the accessioned collections at Te Papa Tongarewa being created by a staff member. Surviving negatives and most prints are at Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, while copies and some additional prints are at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington and Bishop Museum in Honolulu. The film is held by Nga Taonga Sound and Vision, Wellington. Natalie Robertson is part of the research team Te Ao Hou, lead by Anne Salmond, which is currently examining the extant record.

3 Merata Mita, ‘The Soul and the Image’, in Film in Aotearoa New Zealand, ed. Jonathan Dennis and Jan Bieringa, Wellington: Victoria University of Wellington 1992, 10.

4 Susan Sontag famously declared the camera to be a sublimation of the gun, stating ‘to photograph someone is a subliminal murder’. Susan Sontag, On Photography, London: Penguin Books 1977, 14.

5 Geraldine Peters, ‘Māori Media and Social Movements in Aotearoa’, in Encyclopedia of Social Movement Media, ed. John Downing, London: Sage Publications 2011, 310.

6 Jolene Rickard, ‘Sovereignty: A Line in the Sand’, in Strong Hearts: Native American Visions and Voices, ed. Peggy Rolf, New York: Aperture 1995, 51–59; Michelle H. Raheja, Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 2010; and Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, ‘When is a Photograph Worth a Thousand Words?’, in Native Nations: Journeys in American Photography, ed. Jane Allison, London: Barbican Art Gallery and Booth-Clibborn Editions 1998, 40–52.

7 Mita, ‘Soul and the Image’, 19.

8 For a full discussion see Barry Barclay, Mana Tuturu – Māori Treasures and Intellectual Property Rights, Auckland: Auckland University Press 2005. Barclay’s definition is on page 267. Barclay’s widely acknowledged metaphor considers the power of the camera in the hands of Indigenous people rather than from the deck of the ship (the arriving colonisers) with colonial and neocolonial imagemakers. Barry Barclay, ‘Celebrating Fourth Cinema’, Illusions, 25 (July 2003), 7–11.

9 Ngati (Pacific Films, 1987) was written by Tama Kapua Poata (Ngāti Porou), directed by Barry Barclay, and produced by John O’Shea.

10 Barry Barclay, Our Own Image: A Story of a Māori Filmmaker, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2015, 9.

11 Ibid.

12 Ngarino Ellis, with new photography by Natalie Robertson, A Whakapapa of Tradition: One Hundred Years of Ngāti Porou Carving, 1830–1930, Auckland: Auckland University Press 2016.

13 For a more thorough exposition on this point, see Natalie Robertson, ‘Activating Photographic Mana Rangatiratanga Through Kōrero’, in Animism in Art and Performance, ed. Christopher Braddock, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2017, 45–65.

14 Māori Marsden and T. A. Henare, Kaitiakitanga: A Definitive Introduction to the Holistic World View of the Maori, Wellington: Ministry for the Environment 1992, 63.

15 Ngā Kaiwhakaahua (est. 2007) with John Miller, Aimee Ratana, Orewa Kingi, Himiona Grace, Rochelle Huia Smith, and Davina Monds.

16 These people included Te Whānau-a-Pōkai elder Canon Mōrehu Boycie Te Maro, trustee of Tikapa Marae, and Wallace Atkins, Chair of Tikapa Marae committee; Keri Kaa, Ngāti Porou arts educator and cultural advisor, of Hinepare Marae; Kaitiaki (guardian) of Parihaka Marae, the late Te Miringa Hohaia; Taranaki Māori language exponent, educator and broadcaster Dr Huirangi Waikerepuru; and Rongowhakaata, Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti elder, the late Tautini Moana Glover, Chairman of the Ngā Tamatoa Trust.

17 An outcome from this was an essay: Natalie Robertson, ‘Can I Take a Photograph of the Marae? Dynamics of Photography in Te Ao Maori’, in Unfixed: Photography and Postcolonial Perspectives in Contemporary Art, ed. Sara Blockland and Asmara Pelupessy, Amsterdam: Jap Sam Books 2012, 96–105.

18 For more information on McDonald see Jonathan Dennis, ‘McDonald, James Ingram’, first published in Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol. 3, 1996. Te Ara – The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, available at http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/biographies/3m5/mcdonald-james-ingram (accessed 12 July 2017).

19 Tanara Whairiri Kitawhiti ‘Whai’ Ngata (ca. 1942–2016) was a Māori broadcaster, journalist, and lexicographer.

20 My grandfather David Hughes grew up there, so it is naturally assumed that my name is Hughes as well. My surname as given, Robertson, has no local currency in Waiomatatini, but mention Hughes or Boyd and everyone knows the family connections.

21 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, Dunedin: Zed Books 1999.

22 There are many important resources in this field; the authors recommend Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies; and Leonie Pihama, ‘Kaupapa Māori Theory: Transforming Theory in Aotearoa’, He Pukenga Korero, 9:2 (2012), 5–15.

23 Only one person refused this for very complex personal reasons.

24 Daniel Heath Justice, ‘Seeing (and Reading) Red. Indian Outlaws in the Ivory Tower’, in Indigenizing the Academy: Transforming Scholarship and Empowering Communities, ed. Devon Abbott Mihesuah and Angela Cavender Wilson, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 2004, 100.

25 Angela Cavender Wilson, ‘Reclaiming our Humanity: Decolonization and the Recovery of Indigenous Knowledge’, in Indigenizing the Academy, ed. Mihesuah and Wilson, 73.

26 Indigenizing the Academy, ed. Mihesuah and Wilson; and Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing About American Indians, ed. Devon Abbott Mihesuah, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1998.

27 Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Matters: Narratives on Postindian Survivance, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1999, vii.

28 Personal communication, 1996.

29 Arapata Hakiwai, ‘The Meaning of Ancestral Photographs in Māori Culture’, in A Glimpse into Paradise: Historical Photographs of Polynesia, ed. Wulf Kopke and Bernd Schmelz, Hamburg: Journal of the Hamburg Museum of Ethnology 2014, 145. Hakiwai’s role as Kaihuatū translates as Māori coleader of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

30 Personal communication, 2017.

31 Barclay, Our Own Image, 7.