Niue

Niue is an elevated coral atoll with fringing coral reefs encircling steep limestone cliffs. It lies 2400 km northeast of New Zealand between Tonga, Sāmoa, and the Cook Islands.

Our collections represent stories of Niue and its people. Today Niuean communities maintain connections to their homeland and their language, customs, and culture in a range of new contexts.

Explore some of our Niuean stories about our communities and collections from kahoa hihi to katoua, tiputa to titi, the coral atoll to coconut, and more.

Two people are in a store room and looking at the camera.

Curator Pacific Sean Mallon and Inangaro Vakaafi talk about the Niue collections at Te Papa

Senior Curator Pacific Histories and Cultures Sean Mallon and PMN Niue host Inangaro Vakaafi from 531 PI talk about some of the Niue collections at Te Papa.

Browse the collections from Niue

Named Savage Island by James Cook – because he received an unfriendly reception from native Polynesians – Niue was part of Cook Islands until 1922; official language is English, though a Polynesian dialect is also widely spoken.

A burnt orange woven skirt on a model dummy

Read: Niue posts in our blog

Read our blogs about life on Niue, and items we have in our collections.

Men in a field harvesting a plant to eat. There are two men in the foreground carrying a basket between them

View: Photographer Glenn Jowitt's photographs of Niue

Photographer Glenn Jowitt (1955–2014) is best known for his images of Pacific people and their cultures, both in New Zealand and in the Pacific Islands. Look through his photographs of Niue.

A large cloth made of mulberry plant paper with patterns inked on it

Hiapo: Niuean tapa cloth

Hiapo is made from the bark of the paper mulberry tree. Little is known of pre-nineteenth-century forms of Niuean cloth, but we do know that in the 1830s, Sāmoan methods of making siapo or tapa barkcloth were introduced to Niue by Sāmoan missionaries.

A woven basket sitting on a white background

Tuhinga 22: Exploring ‘the Rock’: Material culture from Niue Island in Te Papa’s Pacific

Our Pacific Cultures collection holds around 300 objects from the island of Niue, including textiles, costumes and accessories, weapons, canoes and items of fishing equipment. Read about how the history of the collection is described, including the increasing involvement of the Niue community and collecting possibilities for the future are considered.

A white coral that is in the shape of a squashed donut

Niuean corals in our collection

We hold one of the largest collections of cnidarians in the country, with more than 1500 specimen lots, thirty-three of which are name-bearing types. View some of the ones from Niue in our collection.