I sing
to you all
as you lie there
but you are far
from dead
not even asleep.
I know for sure
you are wide awake
and talking.
As soon as Hinemoana Baker saw the small greenstone tiki, the traditional Māori figure connected with creation stories, she thought: You’re my friend for this journey. You’re the taonga, or treasure, that I will write poems about.
She and Micronesian poet Emelihter Kihleng had been asked by the Übersee-Museum Bremen in Germany to look through catalogues of its Oceania collection and each choose an item to recast in Pacific terms, Indigenous terms. In poetry.
“When we’re communicating in poems, or in poetry, it feels like we’re in their zone, in their world a little bit more,” Hinemoana says. “It’s not just changing our language, it’s changing our location in a way, our psychic or spiritual location when we write poetry in the company of these taonga, these treasures.”
The tiki was a pretty easy choice for her. “Because I love greenstone, I love pounamu, which is New Zealand jade. I find the stone very beautiful in itself, but it’s also got so much meaning, tribally and mythologically. I’ve heard about pounamu originally being a fish which then became stone. And even just that, as a poet, I could riff on that for decades, just that one thing.”
The tiki form itself also draws her as a Māori tradition. “They’ve all got their own personalities, I find. And I was particularly taken by the depth of colour of this one, and also the fact that it still had this red wax around the eye so that the eyes really stand out. I felt very drawn to it.”
A tiki is worn as a pendant, with the stone – this one three or four inches long – hanging from a woven flax fibre cord on your chest. Hinemoana did not get to wear it, under museum rules of preservation, and “that’s the hard thing,” she says, because New Zealand greenstone warms to the skin, “it absorbs the person who’s wearing it. And then when you take it off and leave it alone it goes back to being very cold. … That’s why in the poems that I wrote for it, there’s a lot of language around warmth and touch and oils from the skin.”
She feels a fundamental wound in the separation of treasures like this from their origins “because there’s a belief that these taonga are imbued with the spirit of the person who owned them or the person to whom they were entrusted.”
“Of course we separate ourselves willingly from our taonga all the time. We pass them down to people, we give them away,” she says. But these are willing and equal transactions, and there are so often questions about how objects came into collectors’ hands.
“So some family or some group, some community, at home is without them.”
The loss is also one of knowledge, she says.
We have a right to the full heritage that’s embodied in those objects and that’s embodied in our language. We have a right to that full heritage, and we’re still repatriating it in various ways.
“It’s not just that the object is separated from where it comes from, but the opportunity to learn how to reproduce those treasures is taken away.
“Sometimes it’s about the differences from tribe to tribe. It’s been a lot of work for some tribes to reclaim their individuality in terms of their artistic output. A lot of those beautiful differences have been flattened by this removal and by other forms of silencing or separation, such as separation from our language.
“We have a right to the full heritage that’s embodied in those objects and that’s embodied in our language. We have a right to that full heritage, and we’re still repatriating it in various ways.”
Hinemoana’s generation faces different challenges when re-connecting with that heritage, she says. Her father’s generation was restrained in so many ways from speaking their language and practising traditions.
“There’s been political resistance from Māori since settlement. None of us has gone down easy. We’ve achieved a lot against the odds, a huge amount actually, so it’s not just a narrative of loss, not just a narrative of grief, but a narrative of fighting, and of revolution, and revival. Really a lot has been achieved, and it’s not been handed to us, we’ve had to fight for it.”
It’s very much privileging Western ideas of knowledge where all things should be available to all people
Hinemoana has been working with museums in recent years, including the return of the human remains of Māori ancestors. She thinks cultural objects could be returned as well, replaced within museum walls by replicas that would look the same and would have the bonus of not needing preservation; they could be handled by museum visitors.
“When it comes to human remains it’s kind of a no-brainer, there’s no justification for keeping dead human beings in museums,” she says. “It’s wrong and it should be stopped and those people should be returned to their communities.
“But when it comes to cultural objects as well or treasures, there’s no reason why the same kinds of learnings couldn’t happen with replicas. But there’s this kind of entitlement to this sense that we took it, now it’s ours, and we haven’t finished looking at it.
“Letting something return and be used, be touched, be held, even be used up — what’s wrong with that, why is that not okay? It’s very much privileging Western ideas of knowledge where all things should be available to all people.
“And I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, that’s the principle that libraries are based on, that’s the principle that universities and the Western education system is based on. And the internet. I’m not saying it’s necessarily a bad thing. But it’s a particular cultural perspective. And other cultural perspectives also deserve priority, even if they differ from that sometimes.”
She thinks in terms of Indigenizing museums, rather than decolonizing them. Indigenization “centres the communities of origin where those cultural treasures belong,” she says. “And it also centres the perspective of the communities of origin.
“So we start with a conversation where everything you might assume about a European museum is up for grabs. That’s really quite exciting. It’s quite fun.”
The poems by Hinemoana Baker and Emelihter Kihleng will be incorporated into the Übersee-Museum’s permanent exhibition, accompanied by the taonga that inspired them. The title of that exhibit is taken from one of Emelihter’s poems: You Need Our Eyes To See Us.