Return of treasured Ma¯ori wahaika from US
A wahaika carved in the Rotorua area almost 150-years ago is coming home after two decades on a dining room wall in Denver, USA.
A car breakdown in a small rural US town called Twisp more than two decades ago was the unlikely catalyst for the return to New Zealand of an almost 150-year-old taonga.
It’s a story that starts in a ‘‘small, dusty somewhat junky antique shop’’ in the small town – population 958 – in Washington state.
Two decades ago, Sherri and Stephen Hunter wandered into the shop while waiting for their car to be fixed, and saw the wahaika –a traditional Ma¯ori hand weapon.
‘‘My husband and I argue about which of us actually caught sight of it, but I believe the wahaika was with other miscellaneous decorative wood carved objects on a cluttered shelf,’’ Sherri said.
She believed it caught her attention first, as she had some experience as a wood carver and was also interested in cultural objects. Her husband, an art reviewer and historian, ‘‘immediately judged the piece as quite old and exotic’’.
Sherri could not remember how much they paid for the wahaika, only that ‘‘we did not pay very much at all for it’’.
The couple initially believed they had acquired a work made by an indigenous carver from the northwest of the United States, largely because of the fact of its presence in rural Pacific Northwest Washington.
‘‘I certainly recognised the talent and aesthetic sophistication of its creator,’’ she said. ‘‘ I also did not relate to it as a war club.’’
That changed in 1993 after the couple travelled to New Zealand, visiting again in the late 1990s.
‘‘At some point as I looked at it in Denver, where it hung on the wall of my dining room [ and] it dawned on me that the carved motifs were highly reminiscent of Ma¯ori artefacts we had seen at the War Memorial Museum in Auckland and possibly at Rotorua,’’ she said.
The couple got in touch with the Auckland War Memorial Museum in 2001. Their photo of the wahaika landed on the desk of Dr Roger Neich, the then curator of ethnology.
Neich believed it was carved by a man of the Te Arawa tribe living around Rotorua, probably in about the 1880s. He said earlier wahaika usually had plain, uncarved blades but theirs, carved all over, was in a later fashion starting around the 1880s.
Intriguingly too, Neich said he was familiar with the carving style.
‘‘ I recognise the work of this
‘‘Even on a piece like this there are signatures of the master.’’ Taparoto Nicholson
individual carver in other clubs and walking sticks, but have not put a name to him,’’ Neich said at the time.
Neich told the Hunters his ongoing research into linking known individual carvers with surviving works meant he hoped one day to be able to name the man who made their wahaika.
Neich died in 2010 and, due to the Auckland lockdown, the museum has been unable to access his archive to ascertain if the carver was identified in the intervening years.
‘‘I am still hopeful that I will be able to put a name to this carver one day,’’ Neich told the Hunters.
‘‘ Apart from my personal research interest, this is a very fine club that any museum would be pleased to hold and display.’’
That museum was set to be Rotorua Museum, which was in talks with the Hunters about the wahaika’s repatriation.
Sherri said her and her husband are ‘‘beyond’’ the long trip themselves, but ‘‘ clearly now is the time to make an effort to rejoin this wahaika to its ancestral home’’.
‘‘ For 22 years we have so enjoyed this piece and have honoured it with care and prominence in our home,’’ she said. ‘‘Though I have no idea where this wahaika has been in the previous years before it found me, I do believe that everyone who kept it gave it similar respect, because it remains in very good condition.
‘‘ Let’s try to continue to preserve it, so that generations to come may know of their legacy, learn, be grateful and take pride in it.’’
According to Ma¯ori Arts & Crafts Institute cultural advisor and carver Taparoto Nicholson, the wahaika was unlikely to have been used in battle – but it shines a light on Te Awara’s pioneering role inthe Kiwi tourism market.
Nicholson cautioned he could be surer of its provenance if he was able to see the wahaika itself, rather than a photo, but he said he believed it would have been made as a souvenir.
He believed Neich’s dating was likely accurate too, describing him as ‘‘one of the few I know that’s taken time to get background material – he knows Te Arawa’’.
Nicholson said the six different decorative designs suggested an aesthetic, rather than practical use. ‘‘ I doubt it’s killed anybody.’’
He said the ‘‘ very, very unusual’’ incorporation of Tahitian design also suggested the wahaika was not made as a weapon of war.
He said that between 1840 and 1920, Te Arawa were ‘‘ well and truly engrossed in carving’’ for souvenir purposes, and also backed Neich’s view it might be possible to identify the person who carved it.
‘‘Even on a piece like this there are signatures of the master.’’
He said it would have been made using steel chisels. ‘‘Anyone who tells you that was done by bone or stone is mistaken, you won’t get that level of detail.’’ He said the fact the wahaika was made as a souvenir didn’t lessen its value and similar objects had helped add to the depth of knowledge about Ma¯ori carving and carvers from the past.
He also said the Hunters’ decision to see the wahaika returned to Rotorua was ‘‘noble’’.
‘‘What makes a taonga? What the person was feeling at the time they acquired it.’’
It was likely a sentiment the Hunters would agree with. ‘‘We both felt that it was such a treasure,’’ said Sherri.
‘‘One that has great significance artistically and culturally to a people somewhere, and we vowed to try and return it to them someday.’’