Mina McKenzie was a key figure in moving New Zealand’s museological practice towards a bicultural approach to the treatment of Māori taonga tuku iho (treasures handed down) held in public collections. In this 1990 radio interview with Henare Te Ua, she reflects on the Taonga Māori Conference, which brought together museum professionals from New Zealand and overseas to discuss this issue.

Audio transcript

HENARE TE UA: Mina McKenzie, the Taonga Māori Conference, which is being held under the auspices of Rōpū Manaaki Ngā Taonga Tuku Iho, is coming to a close now. Perhaps it might be a little unfair to ask you to assess how you feel the conference has gone so far, but what sort of reaction have you personally got, particularly from the international guests?

MINA MCKENZIE: Well, I think it was something unexpected, I guess. When you set something up, it doesn’t ever progress the way you think, because the interplay of personalities and the things you’re discussing then take on a life of their own. And so one of the things for me has been that while we hoped that we would be able to bring together to New Zealand a group of very important people who care for our taonga in their institutions overseas, at the same time, in doing that, and revealing ourselves to them, and embracing them, and maybe even adopting them, we’ve had to re-evaluate our own position.

HENARE TE UA: In what way?

MINA MCKENZIE: Well, I think we’ve looked at our museums, and we’ve looked at what we were doing, and I think many of us thought we were leading the world in some ideas, and bringing more Māori opinion on, but when we really looked and examined it, it really is only the beginning of the debate, and we keep saying that debate began with Te Māori, and we listen to the voices of our kaumātua, who were concerned about the things overseas, and worried about who was going to keep them warm, and hence Taonga Māori, this new exhibition at the National Museum, and now the Taonga Māori Conference which grows out of it, and here we are on another stage.

And I think that what we lack in our museums in New Zealand now is the strong Māori voice, a Māori voice that speaks in two ways – it speaks at a level with European academic voices, but at the same time it has its own quality, and its own stance, and its own viewpoint, and that is its Māori viewpoint that it brings. And so it’s the presence of young Māori academic people who were also, maybe, academic in the Māori sense, who are able to bring us closer to an equal debate.

HENARE TE UA: There seem to be a lot of young Māori kaitiaki, who are involved with museums, and with private galleries and so on, but do you think there might be some years before they can reach that level that you’re speaking about now, Mina?

MINA MCKENZIE: Yes, I do, because in the Māori world, we are not divorced from our kaumātua, and our mokopuna, and so we are all one, and what happens in the museum world is we dislocate the young people as well as our taonga, and we put them in museums too, and they are divorced themselves from the Māori world, and that’s a real danger, that we expect our young people to have the answers.

I don’t mean we Māori people, but we museum people, we expect them to take decisions on our behalf and for taonga, that really they shouldn’t be expected to take, and wouldn’t be expected to take, in the Māori world. They would have support, and they’d been guided by our kaumātua with special knowledge as to the correct procedures, and that’s what we have to open our doors to, the specialist knowledge that’s contained in the whole world of the Māori.

HENARE TE UA: And yet, it’s rather ironic that in one of the addresses at the National Museum during the conference, an address given by Barbara Moke-Sly, curator Waikato Museum of Art and History in Hamilton, she related an experience where she was setting up an exhibition, and because of the fact that she had to go the kaumātua, come back, go back for reassessment, go back to the museum authorities, she talked about two different timeframes, and these frames, it was so difficult keeping those timeframes going step by step, so, to do things properly, as it were, it does need, perhaps, the authorities to be conversant with this Māori penchant, as it were, to do all the discussions and to get that level completely right before we go to the statistics of the exhibition.

MINA MCKENZIE: Yes, and I think the dichotomy – ‘dichotomy’ is a wonderful word we’re using all day today – but the problem is that we’re not only dealing in two timeframes, we’re dealing in two different structures.

We’re dealing with a hierarchical structure, where the director sits on the top of the pyramid, and in the Māori world you could almost say the pyramid’s reversed, and we are together, and the decisions are made in the middle, with everybody consulting around us, and we’re dealing with two totally different, if you like to say, management structures, and they’re not compatible, and our problem in the Māori world is how, in some way, we bring ourselves to this other world and are effective, so that we both can accommodate each other’s needs.

I deal in the same way with my kaumātua in my institution, but then I’m the director of my institution, and so I am the person between the organisation and the kaumātua, and I’m able, in some respects, to help the process, but in the case of young curators, they are not the power brokers, and so they need the authority of the kaumātua or to be recognised by their institutional managers.

HENARE TE UA: On a personal level, then, John Takarangi gave a brilliant discourse, in that he was using a form of taiaha plus a form of mere, and illustrating that these aren’t just objects, which should sit in glass cases to reflect the subdued lighting, but he performed with those particular weapons. Now he’s from Manawatū, how do you get on with John, between these two different structures that you speak about?

MINA MCKENZIE: Ah well, I would say that in this respect, John is me and I am John, we work to the same concept and to the same aims and objectives, and he is a vehicle.

He is the male counterpart in our institution, and without his strong male presence, and special male knowledge, and male responsibility, we couldn’t progress the way I want us to. And so what he does is, he adapts to our philosophy, he interprets our philosophy, that what we are doing is we are looking at the taonga and their essential elements, and of course their essential elements are the human elements, and the dynamic elements, and the real reasons, they are really what happens when you open the door on the taonga.

It opens up, it’s te ao mārama, and so it opens up the world of the Māori, just a chink, mostly, for most people, but it’s a beginning, and so in bringing the objects into a dynamic world, which he does for us, because they are men’s weapons, generally, although of course, women do have taiaha and patu, but they’re used in a different sense.

John and I are struggling along with a concept. We haven’t perfected it yet, because somehow or other we have to make it intelligible to our people.

So it’s a really interesting struggle, we always feel as though we’re struggling with concepts and ideas, and sometimes we do something and it doesn’t work, and we are first to admit it, because these are new ideas, just as the new encounters between Māori and Pākehā, off marae, are new protocols, and for Māori we start on the ground, we start with our marae protocols, and our rituals that we have for encounters between Māori and Māori, in a marae, which is where everything starts for us, and we have to look at those rituals and see how we’re going to deal with those in a museum, between Māori and Pākehā, or Māori and Māori, or Māori and [the] Swedish ambassador, and yet still make them meaningful for us, and give a glimpse to those people of us as twentieth-century people.

HENARE TE UA: And yet, quite poignantly, I remember the talk given by Dr Clara Wilpert, of Hamburg, in that wonderful wharenui at Whakarewarewa, the Māori Arts and Crafts Institute, and she was bringing back to Aotearoa, I think, something marvellous, because that magnificent meeting house of the early part of the century, Rauru, is now in Hamburg. A lot of Māori would never ever have seen it, yet because she brought back the photographs of it, talked about it, talked about what they’re doing to it, talking about how it escaped unscathed during two world wars, to me, it brought the tears, because here was this academic woman from Germany, bringing that, in that spiritual sense, that house which was crafted by Ngāti Tarāwhai carvers, which stood at Whakarewarewa, and she’s bringing it home, and so it’s almost a reverse that each one of these people is bringing something back to us.

MINA MCKENZIE: And I think that we both noticed, we all noticed at that stage, that her tears mingled with ours, and her feelings for the house, and for us and what was happening, were as strong as ours were, and I think we’re getting this from all of these 16 very sensitive and very good people. They’re bringing us images of our taonga, but they’re bringing them [to] us themselves, and I think most of us are reassured that we already have all the platforms there for support and dialogue created between us.

HENARE TE UA: What would you like to see being the most lasting effect from the Taonga Māori Conference, Mina?

MINA MCKENZIE: I’d like to see lasting relationships made between our people in New Zealand, Māori and museum people, and those museums and the people that work in them, for the sake of the taonga. I think that we can teach each other something, we can bring each other something, and we can share some of the wonder, and as Cliff Whiting said this afternoon, and I thought that was pretty wonderful, he said: ‘if those museums can show us on the world stage as being Māori people of great substance and artistic vision, and a tremendously rich culture, and put us on the world stage, well, that is marvellous’, and that is one of our other aims, so that somehow or other we can stand side by side, not as primitive people but as a great culture.

HENARE TE UA: Perhaps this decade, in retrospect, we might be able to look back on, as having created all sorts of wonderful things regarding taonga, I think in terms of Te Māori, this conference, the Taonga Māori conference that went to Melbourne, Sydney, in Australia, and in Brisbane, and now back at the National Museum. I think of the exhibition in Dublin, for instance, there seems to be a tremendous awareness in the very fact that a lot of the institutions, during 1990, in Great Britain, staged special exhibitions – this, I think, is quite something electrifying, compared perhaps with the other decades, where you’d say very little was done.

MINA MCKENZIE: Yes, and I think up to now we’ve actually been largely, although this [is] probably a bit of a generalisation, studied as primitive peoples, or as primitive art, through the fields of anthropology, and art history maybe, but now we can be looked at as a civilization of people equal on the world stage, who can speak for ourselves, and we don’t need, necessarily, [to] only be studied in the realms of another culture’s discipline. We can stand and speak as a people ourselves with our own voice.

HENARE TE UA: And yet something I have noticed in the sessions of the conference that I’ve attended, Mina McKenzie, that professionals have not held themselves back if they have felt that criticism has been necessary, and I remember the brilliant address by James Mack, of the National Museum, speaking about a particular exhibition, where he felt that the way it was being presented didn’t really capture some of the nuances of the spirituality of that particular exhibition, and so on, so was this conference also that, where straight talking could be actually said between professionals?

MINA MCKENZIE: Yes, it was designed for that, because in the Māori world, straight talking takes place, and the words are laid down, and left there, and we don’t go away feeling bad, we go away feeling that we’ve begun something, and maybe we have left a few questions to be answered, but not with anger, but with reflection, and I think that’s what this is.

We’ve actually allowed this conference and this tour to be largely a Māori experience, and our kaumātua have set the tone and set the pace, and largely helped set the programme, and that’s very important. Normally these kinds of things are all set in an office by a group of people who bring in the Māori voice afterwards, to give it some kind of authenticity, but in this case, the Māori voice was what started this off.

So it’s a different way of going about doing something in what would have normally been a very structured Pākehā fashion. It’s a new world for museums, hopefully, and the Māori people and our colleagues together.

HENARE TE UA: This te ao mārama you’ve spoken about.

MINA MCKENZIE: Te ao mārama, āe.

HENARE TE UA: And yet, Mina, I have heard one or two, not so much cynics, wags perhaps, saying that ‘wouldn’t it be marvellous if the ultimate within Māori kaupapa philosophy was taken to the highest degree, and in our terms, that objects which have left the whānau, left the hapū, are eventually returned? I mean, perhaps it’s a bit too altruistic to hope that that will eventually happen?

MINA MCKENZIE: If we are on the world stage, we do not want to hide ourselves away in barns at home. We need to be seen collectively, too, on the world stage, standing proudly there as part of the whole universe, and so there’s that dichotomy, that was a debate that was taking place during Te Māori too, that was fiercely spoken out in words with the kaumātua.

I think the message was that, ‘yes, they are there, we cannot expect them to come home, but let us keep them warm in some way.’ And this is the response of Taonga Māori Conference.