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Free museum entry for New Zealanders and people living in New Zealand
This project seeks to ensure that all taonga Māori collected during the time of James Hector’s directorship at the Colonial Museum have their provenance and associated information reconciled with their current registration numbers, and therefore made available to our visitors and those connected to them.
Project Description: This project will be a significant contribution the provenance of taonga Māori within Te Papa’s collection, of which a large proportion remain unprovenanced. This is a key factor in fulfilling our Te Papa Strategy, specifically our priority of Hāpai Ahurea, which states that we prioritise “transforming museum practice by centring Māori and communities in the care, understanding, and sharing of their taonga, mātauranga, and kōrero”. By working towards building provenance for our taonga Māori, we are better able to enable our iwi, hapū and whānau to reconnect with their taonga.
This project will also help to uncover the contexts in which taonga were originally obtained, which is essential in ensuring we are acting more openly and honestly in acknowledging our colonial past as a museum.
The most exciting part of this project are the stories that will be uncovered. Museums are proactively identifying taonga which should be returned to communities due to their questionable collection methods. This proactive stance demonstrates our commitment to honouring Te Tiriti and working in partnership with iwi and hapū to build a better and more mutually beneficial future.
A series of blogs that will be written to share with our visitors the progress and stories uncovered as part of this project.
Featured in season one of the podcast The Taonga Files.
Our national museum’s history began in 1865, and early documentation wasn't as thorough or careful as it is today. Curator Mātauranga Māori Amber Aranui takes us back to this creatively documented time and what it means for tracking our collection items.
Master’s student Manon Verdello worked with the Mātauranga Māori team on the Acknowledging our Colonial Past project. A part of her work was reconciling the original collection records from the 1860s to the current collection database. Here, Manon describes how she went about it and some of the challenges she faced along the way.
The Taonga Files by Curators Dr Amber Aranui and Migoto Eria, and Dr Monica Tromp is a podcast about provenance research – the detective work of uncovering the histories of taonga Māori held in museum collections. Each episode explores how research reveals not only what sits on museum shelves, but how those taonga arrived there, and the stories they carry.
This link will take you to the Taonga Files podcast on RSS.com.
