Locating Hinemihi’s People

Abstract

The care of taonga (Maori treasures) outside the Maori community takes place within varying degrees of inter-cultural engagement, in which encounters with the past can be seen to be negotiated through the changing nature of personal and institutional relationships in tbe present. The desire to develop Hinemihi, the historic Maori meeting house at Clandon Park, as a functioning marae (ceremonial gathering place) has provided a challenge to conventional heritage conservation practice. A response to the conservation of Hinemihi has been to adapt practices developed by the Pouhere Taonga I New Zealand Historic Places Trust for tbe conservation of historic marae. The success of this approach relies on tbe formation of an active and sustainable marae community. Therefore, a series of community-based events have been delivered to nurture the developing relationships between Hinemibi and her people as an essential element of tbe conservation project This has questioned the central role of Maori in tbe long-term care of Hinemihi. As a result, tbe formation of 'Hinemibi's People' is an attempt to develop a sustainable conservation community for Hinemibi at Clandon Park that reflects a spatially and temporally grounded reality, based on lived experiences.

Hinemihi o te Ao Tawhito

“…Even from her conception, when the first panels were made by renowned carvers Tene Waitere and Wero Taroi, Hinemihi o te Ao Tawhito meant many different things. She was commissioned and built to combine several functions: a marae ("ceremonial gathering place"); a whare tupuna ("ancestor house"); the center of the Ngāti Hinemihi and Tūhourangi hapū community in Te Wairoa; and a place to accommodate tribal meetings for making important decisions, to remember the past and imagine the future, to celebrate and confirm local Māori identity and affirm whakapapa ("genealogies"), to celebrate births and marriages, and to mourn the dead (Sully et al 2014).…”

“…Māori meeting houses embody the living ancestors of their iwi ("tribal group"); Hinemihi, as a female, is therefore referred to as "she. " The construction of Hinemihi represented a statement of tribal prestige (Sully et al 2014). 2 She was also built to entertain, in part as a response to the burgeoning tourism industry in Rotorua, and her construction was made possible by the revenue that Te Arawa had amassed from visitors.…”

“…In the first instance, Hinemihi's may appear to be a story of opposing attitudes, opinions, and cultures, but I argue that it is ultimately one of collaboration and partnerships-Hinemihi as a mobile "contact zone. " Both perspectives are evidenced by considering a range of audiences: those who visited her in her original home in nineteenth-century Te Wairoa and where she ended up in twentieth-and twenty-first-century Surrey; and those who lived with, used, and cared for her-who saw her as a taonga tuku iho ("treasure handed down") of Ngāti Hinemihi and Tūhourangi hapū ("subtribe") of the Te Arawa tribe, an expression of their genealogical identity, a living being who embodies and conveys a range of ancestral knowledge, character, and values (Sully et al 2014).…”

Traveling Houses: Performing Diasporic Relationships in Europe

“…Hinemihi has been used as a functioning marae since 1995, and the UK National Trust is currently collaborating on a heritage conservation project with Ngāti Hinemihi, Ngāti Rānana, and Māori architect Anthony Hoete to change Hinemihi into a living house in which meetings can be held and people can sleep. The project develops the relationships between "Hinemihi's people" (Sully, Raymond, and Hoete 2014;Raymond and Sully 2010) and makes her part of Māori lives in the diaspora. This Māori (re)appropriation has "created a new profile for Hinemihi both in the UK and New Zealand through which she has been re-imbued with a Māori physical and spiritual presence" (Sully, Raymond, and Hoete 2014, 210).…”

“…2 These perspectives include Benjamin 1999;Durie 2000;Engels-Schwarzpaul andWikitera 2009a, 2009b;MacCannell 1992MacCannell , 2008Mead 2003;Refiti 2015;Sully 2007;Sully, Raymond, and Hoete 2014;Thode-Arora and Hempenstall 2014;Tui Atua 2008;and Wikitera 2015. 3 See also Wikitera 2015, 267, for a discussion of whakapapa korero (tribal narrative, kin-based ways of cultural knowledge transmission) as further engaged by writers like Paul Tapsell (2002,2012) and Ngarino Ellis (2012).…”