Cover Story - MorningCalM June 2019

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PEOPLE OF THE LAND

The traditional dress of the Māori people uses the bounty of the land to create rain capes, cloaks, kilts, hats, pendants and more. But at its core, the clothing is really a story of lineage and memory.

photography by Erica Sinclair

The first thread that Kahutoi Te Kanawa weaves is called the sacred line. It’s the moment when her vision materializes from the ether, a line that descends straight from her mind to the warp. This thread is made of muka, the fiber under the skin of the harakeke leaves found throughout New Zealand. Te Kanawa harvests hers down the hill from her home in Te Kuiti. The young shoot at the heart of the bush is called te rito — the child. Next to it are awhi rito — the parents. Only the outermost leaves are harvested; the heart is left untouched.

A finished cloak might be about a meter long, but the sacred thread stretches on, though backward, so sacred because it represents an unsevered memory. “We’ve kept it going,” admits Te Kanawa, as if surprised herself upon counting the years. Her mother was Diggeress Te Kanawa, perhaps the most renowned master of Māori weaving in the world. Diggeress’ mother was Rangimarie Hetet, who was also a highly respected weaver.

Te Kanawa is currently working on a cloak’s tāniko, a colorful border of geometric patterns, using a Māori finger-weaving technique called whatu. Zigzags might represent the tides of the ocean; diamonds can represent the flounder fish and symbolize abundance. This cloak will later be interwoven with native bird feathers and muka tassels. It will tell a story of Te Kanawa’s mother, and it was in fact started by Diggeress before she passed away in 2009. “That’s why it’s been hard for me to finish,” she says.

She dons a cloak called a korowai that her mother made in honor of Rangimarie; it has a stunning tāniko of white, yellow, brown and black, with white three-ply muka tassels and a rich spread of weka and kererū feathers. The tassels are meant to represent tears. Eventually, Diggeress gifted the korowai to Te Kanawa.

Such fine cloaks would once have been worn by Māori chiefs. Before korowai, there were pākē, or rain capes, and kaitaka, cloaks with tāniko but no tassels or feathers. A great range of cloaks was also made from the skins of animals. Maro are aprons tied around the waist, and piupiu are kilts made of strands of harakeke. Once, bark cloth garments were made from paper mulberry plants, but no examples survive.

The full richness of traditional Māori dress has been dimmed by the enormous loss of tribal land following the Treaty of Waitangi, signed between the British Crown and Māori leaders in 1840. At the time, Māori owned about 267,000sqkm of land. By 1930, they controlled less than 15,000sqkm, with diminished access to flora and fauna necessary for traditional arts like weaving. Whakapapa, the Māori way of tracing genealogy by memory, is tied to both people and place — to be separated from tribal lands was to suffer amnesia. Preservation of weaving was also deprioritized because it was the realm of women. “Our voices were wiped out, because they didn’t think we were landowners,” says Te Kanawa. “But we were. We still are.”

Weavers make their guardianship of the land clear with every twist of muka. Dyes used in traditional weaving are sourced mainly from tree bark and mud, and the Māori word for warp, whenu, is related to the word for land, whenua. In the 1950s, women like Diggeress and Rangimarie worked with the Māori Women’s Welfare League to teach weaving, and Te Kanawa is currently working on a PhD in intergenerational knowledge transfer.

This delicate transfer is also the concern at Te Rito, the weaving school of the New Zealand Māori Arts and Crafts Institute (NZMACI) in Rotorua. Students in the two-year program are taught in an open classroom where visitors can observe them. “The visitor has to have the right to look at it,” says Edna Pahewa, the school’s head weaver. The visibility helps people realize the art’s true value.

Te Rito was founded by Pahewa’s mother, Emily Schuster, so the school has always felt like a home to her. But she didn’t want to learn as a child; it was her grandmother who insisted. “She was quite strict,” Pahewa says. “She would shoo our friends away and say, ‘No, they’ve got to do this.’” Because of such iron-willed determination, though, the number of weavers is growing. Pahewa’s grandson is in the classroom, working on a project he’s planned out. He gives up his weekends to come to Te Rito. There’s no doubt that he wants to be here.

Young Māori people are recovering memories everywhere. Cori Marsters is a student in NZMACI’s wood carving school, adjacent to Te Rito, but he’s also a skilled weaver — taught by his grandmother — and one of the few people who make potae, or hats. “No one had been making them for a long time,” Marsters says. He fashioned his own by studying the few examples in the archives of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. His potae is a crown of weka and albatross feathers, iridescent peacock feathers flashing around the edges.

During his research, he learned that widow’s caps might have been worn for a mourning period of a whole year. “And when they visited other tribes, they knew that their families were still mourning. So they could greet them in the proper way,” he says. He’s also woven a korowai cloak that’s a plain flaxen color, with loose tassels. “See how that’s unraveled? It’s supposed to look distressed.” These tassels are called kārure or hūpē — hūpē meaning “snot” in the Māori language, referring to the tears you’d shed at the loss of a loved one. “I learned so much about grieving,” says Marsters. “You were never allowed to cry alone. You had to be with people to cry.”

Cloaks today are worn mainly for funerals, weddings and graduations, and not every family has such a prized garment to wear. But kapa haka, a Māori performance art involving dancing and singing, provides a modern context in which to garb yourself in tradition, connecting you to an iwi (tribe) or hapu (sub-tribe) even if you don’t live near your ancestral lands. Every two years, groups compete in a national competition called Te Matatini. The kapa haka group of Te Whānau-ā-Apanui, based in the Bay of Plenty, won in 2015. One of the marae (meeting grounds) they associate with is Kauaetangohia, where they gather for special occasions. “We liken our houses to ancestors,” says Rawiri Waititi, a prominent voice in the tribe, as well as a member of its kapa haka group. “So when people come onto the marae and they get a pōwhiri [welcome ceremony] onto the marae, they always greet the house.”

Women in the tribe’s kapa haka group wear a tīpare (headband) and pari (bodice) both woven with a tāniko distinct to Apanui, while men wear a tāniko belt called a tātua. Everyone puts on a piupiu kilt. Many of the members display traditional face or body tattoos based on their genealogy. When the whole group performs, their piupiu swish as one and their voices ring out as one. Haka is a dance that shows off your mettle and your pride.

Shona Tawhiao expresses her Māori pride by creating clothing with dyed harakeke that’s plaited using the raranga technique. Kahutoi Te Kanawa was her teacher. Female armor has always been a fascination for her, and her designs feature tops with spiky shoulders and collars and headpieces that resemble Spartan helms. She’s also won awards for costume design, including for a version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that had the fairies introducing themselves in Māori. She recalls seeing many Māori cultural treasures such as korowai in the back rooms of the Metropolitan Museum of Art during a residency there a few years ago. “It was sad. Some of them, they don’t know where they come from, which iwi they belong to,” she says.

Last year, Te Papa held a huge retrospective on the Pacific Sisters, a collective of artist and activist friends who started out in Auckland in the 1990s with the aim of uplifting indigenous voices. Suzanne Tamaki is one of the founding members. “I am not traditional,” she says. But she often works with traditional textiles. In Papatūānuku (Mother Earth), she crafted an outfit of shells and knitted harakeke. She liked the idea of absorbing a technique that the British had introduced into a Māori worldview — instead of the other way around. “It takes you to a place where you just are,” she says of creating art. “You’re making something out of nothing.”

But of course, it doesn’t appear out of thin air. Like the sacred thread of whatu, the line starts in the past, which isn’t just a chronology of events but a landscape of people — people to cry with, people to sing with. It reflects a Māori proverb: “Ka mua, ka muri,” which means, “Walking backward into the future.” In the end, the sacred line is a circle.