A famous mere (hand club) was a great gift, for reasons 

 that are explained in this translation of an early Maori text: 

 The group of young people got up and put on their gir- 

 dles, ready to leave, and their hosts gathered for the 

 ritual of farewell. The chief of that fortified village took 

 his greenstone mere and gave it to the young visiting high 

 chief, and he in return presented his greenstone weapon 

 to his host. Those mere were manatunga (heirlooms) and 

 in the old custom it was proper for such men to exchange 

 such weapons, because they represented the descent 

 lines which held them in keeping. A prized greenstone 

 weapon was kept for a time by the descendants in one 

 line of descent, and then they carried it and presented it 

 to those in another line of descent from the tribal ances- 

 tor who first made it. That was the way of exchanging 

 those weapons. 18 



A woman berating the kinfolk of a man who has taken her 

 daughter without consent might say to them, "Come out of 

 your stockade. Why did you rob me of my daughter? What 

 property have I of yours, that you should presume to take my 

 precious greenstone to wear on your breast? Come outside, 

 that we may fight our battle."" 



Greenstone heirlooms could be included in genealogies, 

 and all these manatunga (greenstone treasures, literally, 

 "standing mana") had an extraordinary power of binding, ty- 

 ing the living to the living in alliances, peace, and marriage, 

 and the living to the dead. A peace ratified by greenstone 

 should stand fast, and there was no more bitter treachery than 

 one where a greenstone treasure had already been passed over. 

 A weapon called Te Uira was given by Ngati Maru to Ngapuhi 

 during the nineteenth-century warfare, but no sooner was Te 

 Uira received than Ngapuhi attacked, killing many of the local 

 people. About fifty years later a Ngati Maru scribe wrote to the 

 government asking for this treasure to be returned: "If you are 

 the Government, and as Ngapuhi are so loyal to the Govern- 

 ment, you might speak to Ngapuhi, and ask them to give the 

 mere Te Uira back to us, the Ngati Maru. We do not ask for the 

 people — they are dead, but Te Uira is still in existence, nor can 

 it decay. . ." 20 



At marriages, and the funerals of great chiefs, greenstone 

 treasures were passed over to show loyalty and love and were 

 at a later time returned. The pathways of alliance were traveled 

 by women, children (in adoption), and greenstone, and so the 

 tribal groups were bound together. 



Carved images also summoned up the ancestor they de- 

 scribed. Taylor describes how "the friends of the dead either 

 carved an image, which they frequently clothed with their best 

 garments, or tied some of the clothes of the dead to a 

 neighbouring tree, or to a pole; or else they painted some adja- 

 cent rock or stone, with red ochre, to which they gave the 

 name of the dead; and whenever they passed by, addressed it 

 as though their friend were alive and present, using the most 

 endearing expression and casting some fresh garments on the 

 figure, as a token of their love." 21 



The heads of dead kin were preserved for this same 

 reason, so that they might be wept over and cherished, and at a 

 funeral in the descent group they were arranged around the 

 head of the body, so that all the dead could be mourned and 

 remembered together. Today, framed photographs are used in 

 just this way. The chief's house of early contact times and the 

 modern meeting house also embody ancestors, quite literally, 

 18 for the house is named after some great predecessor and is built 



in his likeness, with the ridgepole (tahuhu, "main line of de- 

 scent") as his spine, the koruru (carved head at the gable) as his 

 head, the outstretched bargeboards with their end carving 

 (raparapa) representing his arms with hands spread wide in 

 welcome, and the interior as his belly. When an orator stands 

 to speak on the marae forecourt he addresses the house by 

 name, and when the kin group assemble inside the meeting 

 house at night and lie beneath its carved side posts (poupou) 

 and the photographs on the wall, all of the descent group — 

 living and dead — have come together in the belly of their 

 ancestor. 



The alchemy of taonga was to bring about a fashion of 

 men and ancestors and a collapse of distance in space-time. 

 The world was understood as a medium (wa) in which inter- 

 vals could be marked out (taki) in social space by ritual, in 

 groups by numbers, in physical space by boundaries, and in 

 time by genealogy, but within this medium distance was not 

 immutable. The power of kura (treasures, knowledge, chiefly 

 men) could give men absolute access to their ancestors. Listen 

 to an old Tauranga chief speaking in a great debate about a 

 century ago, about the canoe origins of the kumara: "As for 

 your canoe Tainui, it was built after my canoe Mahanga-a-tua- 

 mahara came here: what's more I made both these canoes, and 

 I still have the adzes and the priests (their history and names) 

 in my keeping. Of every single canoe that came here to New 

 Zealand, my canoe was the first!" 22 His first knowledge (kura) 

 of the traditions of his tribe and his conviction of their absolute 

 validity transcended perhaps a thousand years of distance and 

 placed him among his ancestor craftsmen as they labored to 

 build their canoe on the beaches of Hawaiki. 



Names, knowledge, ancestors, treasures, and land are so 

 closely intertwined in tribal thinking that they should never be 

 separated. An irony of this exhibition is that we know so little 

 of the history of its individual taonga, just because they have 

 left the keeping of their inheritors. The early collectors saw 

 these works as "artificial curiosities," and later as "artifacts" 

 and "primitive art," and they had neither the interest nor in 

 most cases the understanding to note anything more than a 

 physical description of the item, and sometimes a place and 

 date of collection, and an approximate label of use. The "artifi- 

 cial curiosities" were put in storerooms and given to museums, 

 which is indeed the European way of caring for relics of the 

 past. But the distancing and separation from people that this 

 involves could not be more different from the Maori way of 

 caring for manaaki (their treasures). It is only when a work 

 stays with the people, when it is touched, wept and talked 

 over, and takes part in their great gatherings that its history 

 stays alive. It is now impossible to discover the names of most 

 of the taonga in this exhibition — in Maori terms the only really 

 vital piece of information about them — or anything of their 

 history; because either they come from archaeological sites, 

 or elders refused to pass over the stories when the works were 

 first acquired, or their collectors did not think to ask that sort of 

 question, and the works have been held in museums for too 

 long. For all our efforts of interpretation, those of us who write 

 in this catalogue cannot tell the stories that really matter about 

 most of these works. We can only seek to demonstrate that 

 these objects were once — and to Maoris still are — not artifacts, 

 nor primitive art, but things of power. 



"Well then, the works themselves stand ... in collections 

 and exhibitions. But are they here in themselves as the works 



