12 



him and disputed, but finally they agreed, and Tane used all his 

 strength to put props between Rangi and Papa, and light 

 flooded into the world. This was the first tu tangata, when the 

 ancestor of men stood up and asserted his power to change the 

 universe. The themes of this feat are echoed in "the Maori 

 language: 



ihi: split, divide, separate; fear, dread; power, authority, 

 rank, essential force; a form of sacred shrine (tuahu); 

 spell, charm, incantation; dawn, a ray of sun 

 Like their ancestor Tane, men in the Maori world sought to 

 control the world by exerting their strength in magic and in 

 war: 



kaha: strength; line on which niu rods are placed for di- 

 vination; line of an army 



hau: vitality of man, land; strike, smite; food offered to 

 atua in propitiatory rites 



Tane went on to create the first woman, Hine-hau-one, 

 and, while his brothers made fish, kumara, fern root, the 

 winds, evil and disease, war and peace, Tane slept with this 

 woman and made her pregnant, and so the generations of man 

 began. In this East Coast tribal cosmological account, as in 

 every other, the universe, land, gods, men, and all living crea- 

 tures are kinfolk bound in a tangle of shared ancestry, and this 

 binding of man and world was expressed in the term for the 

 people of any locality: tangata whenua (land men). 



The principle that ordered the apparent weltering chaos of 

 plants, animals, objects, and men in the tribal world was 

 genealogy, described as the twining tendrils of the gourd plants 

 with its stem (tahuhu, also "main line of descent") and 

 branches (kawae, also "subsidiary lines") in one ancient 

 metaphor and still thus represented in the curving red, white, 

 and black paintings of the underside of the ridgepole (tahuhu) 

 and rafters (heke, also "descent line") of the modern meeting 

 house. 6 



Genealogy, the preeminent object of Maori scholarship, 

 was an aristocratic reckoning, but this was not a simple aris- 

 tocracy of birth. Descent lines were claimed according to their 

 vitality and power, and the greater the success of one's ances- 

 tors in war, magic, oratory, and feasting, the greater the mana 

 (prestige) that they passed down the descent line to their de- 

 scendants. This power was like the power that made plants 

 grow and flourish, and I have heard elders speak of one's de- 

 scent lines as te iho makawerau (iho of a hundred hairs): 



iho: heart, kernel, pith, essence; that which contains the 

 strength of a thing; the principal person or guest; umbi- 

 lical cord; lock of hair, upward, in a superior position. 

 This expresses the thought that lines of descent came 

 down to a person like the hundred hairs on his head, bringing 

 him power from his ancestors and effective force in the world. 

 Just like a gourd plant, or a tree, a descent line might flourish 

 and thrive, or if its vital force is attacked in magic or in war, it 

 might fail altogether and die. And like the plant it is rooted in 

 land, as in this characteristic tribal proverb: 

 Ko Hikurangi te maunga 

 Ko Waiapu te awa 

 Ko Porourangi te tangata 

 Ko Ngati Porou te iwi. 



Hikurangi is the mountain 

 Waiapu is the river 

 Porourangi is the man 

 And Ngati Porou the people. 



The taonga whakairo (patterned treasures), the works rep- 

 resented in this exhibition, are above all a celebration of this 

 unity of men, ancestor gods, and land. It was precisely because 

 descent lines branched and divided, and new lines took root 

 elsewhere, that Maori social life and the treasures it produced 

 were fundamentally tribal and referred to particular land- 

 scapes. Aotearoa (New Zealand) ranges from subtropical habi- 

 tats in the north to chilly fjords in the south, and there was no 

 one way of living that can be described for all of the country. 

 Agnes Sullivan has spoken of regional differences in the 

 archaeological record, and David Simmons has described re- 

 flections of these differences in tribal art. I will turn to the early 

 historic accounts to try and bring these differences, and the 

 taonga whakairo of this exhibition into the context of tribal 

 life. 



When Captain James Cook brought his shipload of scien- 

 tists, artists, and sailors south to New Zealand in 1769, they 

 spent six months circumnavigating the islands and anchoring 

 in various harbors. As they traveled, the observers on board 

 were struck by differences in Maori life in the various com- 

 munities they visited. At Anaura Bay on the East Coast, for 

 instance, two old chiefs came on board the Endeavour, one in a 

 dogskin cloak and the other wearing a cloak ornamented with 

 tufts of red feathers, and they accompanied Cook ashore. 

 About one hundred people were living at Anaura in scattered 

 small clusters of houses among their gardens. Monkhouse, the 

 surgeon on board, wrote that night: 



The cultivations were truely astonishing . . . the ground 

 is completely cleared of all weeds — the mold broke with 

 as much care as that of our best gardens. The Sweet pota- 

 toes are set in distinct little molehills which are ranged 

 some in straight lines, in others in quincunx, in one Plott 

 I observed these hillocks, at their base, surrounded with 

 dried grass. The Arum (taro) is planted in little circular 

 concaves, exactly in the manner our Gard'ners plant 

 melons . . . the Yams are planted in like manner with the 

 sweet potatoes; these Cultivated spots are enclosed with 

 a perfectly close pailing of reeds about twenty inches 

 high. 7 

 Joseph Banks estimated that these gardens ranged from 

 one-to-two to eight-to-ten acres each and totaled about one 

 hundred fifty to two hundred acres in high cultivation. Later 

 that evening Monkhouse wandered up into the hills and 

 visited a family of a man, his wife, two sons, and two female 

 servants living in a single house on its own. The husband 

 showed Monkhouse his paddles and digging tools and some 

 red ocher and brought out of his house a collection of spear 

 tips. The house was low and thatched, with a carved board 

 over the door — the first pare (door lintel) ever to be seen by a 

 European. 



Anaura was an agricultural community, with some 

 carved canoes, no great quantity of greenstone goods, and not 

 much carving on the houses. At Tolaga, only ten miles to the 

 south, things were very different. The landscape was attrac- 

 tive; one of the artists on board said of it, "The country about 

 the bay is agreeable beyond description, and with proper 

 cultivation, might be rendered a kind of second Paradise. The 

 hills are covered with beautiful flowering shrubs, intermingled 

 with a great number of tall and stately palms, which fill the air 

 with a most grateful fragrant perfume." 8 There were cultiva- 

 tions there too, but in Tolaga the local preoccupation was carv- 

 ing. On an island in the bay. Banks saw a carved canoe seventy 



