Te Kupenga: Re-casting entangled networks

Abstract

The removal of objects from indigenous communities to private ownership, and sometimes to museums was clearly a one-way path, with little consideration given to the effects of this displacement. After all, collection-making was a serious enterprise and collections, as mutable sites, were pivotal in materialising compelling colonial discourses in Aotearoa New Zealand during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Recently, however, museums have engaged in negotiating the passage of object information back to their original communities. In an investigation of two individual taonga from the Mair collection, and in recasting tribal perspectives, surprising networks of interrelations are untangled, which reveal that ancestor agency materialised object-people commitments that continue to be especially poignant for contemporary descendants.