Te Papa museum in New Zealand offers Indigenous Maori focus
May 5, 2010
The Te Papa museum in Wellington New Zealand incorporates a unique bi-cultural approach to museums management. Strengthening the museum’s governence structure a progressive Maori staff work to hold the museum accountable to Maori protocol, and ceremony ensuring Maori histories, and contemporary communities are engaged especially when it comes to the museum’s significant Maori collections. A tour of the collections vault and the extensive Maori artifacts or Tonga (Maori cultural treasures) was conducted by adressing a prayer upon entering and a cleansing upon leaving. Maori staff and the bi-cultural approach at the museum create a sense of a dynamic culture representing themselves as opposed to the more mainstream or regular approach to museum work wherein indigenous culture and peoples are treated as frozen adressed in an ethnographic model preserving pre-contact cultures and holding them up as authentic while failing to adress contemporary communities. Currently developing a publication and exhibit on traditional cloaks Maori curator or Matauranga Awhina Tamarapa conducted a tour of other items in the collection. Particularily interesting was the way Maori staff learn from the collections for example looking at contemporary weaving in the development of the cloaks exhibition as well learning to play and carve traditional instruments based on examples in the collection. Another example can be seen in the Maori ceremony house commisioned by contemporary Maori carver Cliff Whiting that celebrates traditional carving and traditional structures but in a contemporary way in terms of the colour pallette and materials Cliff has used. A model museums should be encourged to adopt especially in the case of indigenous collections and representation.
