Author(s): Wayne Ngata & Anne Salmond

Te Ao Māori

From 1919 to 1923, at Sir Apirana Ngata's initiative, a team from the Dominion Museum travelled to tribal areas across Te Ika-a-Māui/the North Island to record tikanga Māori (ancestral practices) that Ngata feared might be disappearing.

These ethnographic expeditions, the first in the world to be inspired and guided by indigenous leaders, used cutting-edge technologies that included cinematic film and wax cylinders to record fishing techniques, art forms (weaving, kōwhaiwhai, kapa haka and mōteatea), ancestral rituals and everyday life in the communities they visited.

The team visited the 1919 Hui Aroha in Gisborne, the 1920 welcome to the Prince of Wales in Rotorua, and communities along the Whanganui River (1921) and in Tairāwhiti (1923). Medical doctor-soldier-ethnographer Te Rangihīroa (Sir Peter Buck), the expeditions photographer and film-maker James McDonald, the ethnologist Elsdon Best and Turnbull Librarian Johannes Andersen recorded a wealth of material.

This beautifully illustrated book tells the story of these expeditions, and the determination of early twentieth century Māori leaders, including Ngata, Te Rangihiroa, James Carroll, and those in the communities they visited, to pass on ancestral tikanga hei taonga mō ngā uri whakatipu as treasures for a rising generation.