Abstract
Mauri and Museums: Who really cares? The tensions between kaitiakitanga and museology investigates Māori (Indigenous peoples of New Zealand) engagement in museums and considers the ongoing custodial care of their treasured ancestral belongings and resources of knowledge, called taonga, as held by the four metropolitan museums of Aotearoa New Zealand. At the heart of this research is an examination of a fundamental cultural value called mauri (broadly meaning cosmological energy). It provides a unique window to investigate the inherent tensions and potential solutions underpinning the operational management of museum-held taonga. Mauri is a concept that has been written about for many decades. The disruptive forces of colonisation, not least ethnographic accounts of the Māori by European writers, have confused, simplified and obscured the deeper meanings of mauri, especially in relationship to taonga. But we can still explore these and Māori interpretations of mauri, and see how it has been addressed contemporarily in Waitangi Tribunal reports on Te Tiriti o Waitangi/Treaty of Waitangi claims and in environmental management and planning.
This thesis demonstrates that mauri provides a critical pathway to understanding tangata (local kin) engagement with both their whenua (land), as well as to all taonga resting on their whenua, so be it within a museum. At the heart of this social, political and environmental relationship rests the ethic of kaitiakitanga (custodianship). But who is responsible, in customary terms (kinship), for the care of these taonga when under the legal/operational control (office) of museums? By addressing this question, I propose new Te Tiriti-informed pathways of custodianship jointly developed by museums and local kin-communities (hau kāinga). These pathways recognise the complementary roles of each.
My research is guided by Kaupapa Māori research methods, in particular, kin-accountable Māori values as underpinned by a philosophy called whakapapa (relational structuring of all things in the universe through kinship and descent). I write from the perspective of a Ngāi Tahu descendant looking out to the world and looking back within my iwi (collective of hapū), as I learn my whakapapa connections and obligations arising from this research.