Una Dubbelt-Leitch spent four months working alongside Amber Aranui as part of her Master of Museum Practice placement on the Acknowledging our Colonial Past project. This project contributed significantly to understanding Te Papa’s taonga Māori collection, a large proportion of which is currently unprovenanced. This blog is based on the provenance research undertaken during that time, and is the second blog in the Acknowledging our Colonial Past series.
Coloniality in museums
Coloniality is ever-present. Even decades after the period of formal colonisation has ended it has persisted through structural forms of privilege and bias. Beyond their more obvious economic and social manifestations (such as the racial stratification of labour and the proliferation of inequality and racism) these oppressive hierarchies also pervade the realm of culture but so much of the modern world we know and experience has been constructed out of Western imperial categories that the coloniality of knowledge is perhaps harder to discern and much more insidious to overcome.[1]
Museums, as we know them in the West, are bound to their colonial pasts and carry an unwavering responsibility to understand and acknowledge the contents, stories and people of their collections. For this internship, I examined the early acquisition records of the Colonial Museum to identify the origins, histories, and kōrero of taonga Māori in Te Papa’s collection. This process brought to light just how recent and how bound the colonial past is to our national museum.
The Colonial Museum is the foundation of Te Papa’s collections. Many significant taonga Māori in the collection today were acquired during this time. A considerable number of taonga have lost their provenance and accession information due to inaccurate recording and a major change that occurred in 1904, when directorship changed from James Hector to Augustus Hamilton. This change came with a complete transformation of the registration and cataloguing process, including a new classification system (Māori Ethnography (ME), General History (GH), and Foreign Ethnology (FE)), and in the process many of the objects were renumbered out of sequence – sometimes without their original accession information (if any existed) carried over.
Recovering provenance
This long-term project aims to ensure that all taonga Māori collected during Hector’s directorship have their provenance reconciled and correctly linked to their current ME numbers and updated in the collection management system EMu.
This mahi is essential to fulfilling the Hāpai Ahurea strategy, which prioritises “transforming museum practice by centring Māori and communities in the care, understanding, and sharing of their taonga, mātauranga, and kōrero”. This project also helps to uncover the contexts in which taonga were originally obtained, an essential step in ensuring Te Papa is acting more ethically and honestly in acknowledging its colonial past as a museum. With repatriation now being a priority, proactive identification of taonga that should be returned to communities due to their questionable collection methods. Proactive transparency is a critical step in honouring Te Tiriti and building an ethical, mutually beneficial future alongside Māori communities.
The earliest museum registers describe each acquisition by date, object type, location found (often blank or simply “N.Z.”), whether it was gifted, donated, or deposited, and the name of the sender. We identified around three hundred taonga Māori acquired by the museum over the course of four decades between 1865 and 1905, and located forty of these taonga within the current collection.
In understanding when, how and why taonga came to be in the museum collection, we can better understand, confront and respond to the colonial, imperialistic beginnings and intention of Te Papa’s current collection. Established in 1865, the Colonial Museum was the first museum under the directorship of James Hector, a collector and enthusiast of natural history – geological surveys dictated the trajectory and genesis of the collection. These registration numbers created by Hamilton are what remain today.
The first taonga Māori
Amber encouraged me to examine the first taonga Māori to come into the Colonial Museum. The first three entries were coal, from Pākawau, Whakatū (Nelson) and the Waikato. And the fourth entry, the first taonga Māori to ever be acquired, was a tauihu waka. The records stated that on 29 September 1865, this taonga was deposited by ‘Geo H. Wilson,’ it’s provenance, maker, and location unknown – blank.
Kaitiaki Taonga Cameron Woolford remarked how symbolic it is for the first taonga Māori to be acquired, being a tauihu, the front of the waka, the part that leads. This taonga was removed from its tinana, scooped up by the prying eyes of Wilson and placed into the museum where it remains today.
The donor
George Henry Wilson (1832–1905) migrated from Ireland to New Zealand in 1857 and was working as a storekeeper and agent for the Wellington Independent at Pāuatahanui when he donated the tauihu.
Contending with his fetishisation of Māori, Wilson wrote Ena, or the Ancient Maori in 1874. Ena is a colonial observation of Māori life, a fictional, pan-indigenous tale of pre-European Aotearoa presented in a palatable, digestible format for a British settler audience. The tone of this novel alludes to his engagement with Māori and the circumstances around his acquisition of this tauihu. While holding coveted, interesting curios and antiquities, Wilson was not known to be a prolific collector, and the extent of his private collection remains unknown.
Wilson donated four additional taonga in 1868, three tauihu and one toki (“1 model prow of Maori Canoe, 2 Large Prows of do., 1 Maori Adze of Greenstone”), and a patu muka (“Flax Beater Māori”) the following year. Around 1880, he moved to Gisborne, later working as the editor of Te Waka Maori o Niu Tirani. Before returning to government service[2].
Finding the forgotten taonga
Building on Una’s initial research, I began tracing which of the 80 tauihu in Te Papa’s collection might be Wilson’s first donation. Early ME numbers seemed promising, but none were definitive.
The breakthrough came while searching the Turnbull Library’s online catalogue for unrelated research. I found an 1868 photograph showing a tauihu in the foreground. At that date, only Wilson’s three tauihu were in the museum’s collection.
Comparing the image against our database, I discovered an old black-and-white photograph, likely taken by Augustus Hamilton in the 1890s, that matched the Turnbull image. The registration number ME010928, was surprising: the tauihu wasn’t formally registered until 1963, nearly a century after it was acquired.
Finally, just before the end if the 2025, I saw the tauihu in person. It was resting in an open crate, likely from its earlier relocation from Buckle Street in 1998. Despite later “repairs” (an added foot, reconstructed huaki section, added pāua eyes, and coats of “museum red” paint), it was unmistakably the same taonga.
With the support of Collection Managers Shane James and Cameron Woolford, we carefully tilted the tauihu to inspect the underside, revealing “Geo. H. Wilson 1865”.
Partially obscured by paint, but clear enough to confirm what we had hoped. This was the very first taonga Māori to enter the Colonial Museum and the longest-held taonga in Te Papa’s collection. After 165 years, it was no longer forgotten.
But this is only half of the story. Our next task is to understand how this tauihu came into the hands of George Henry Wilson. Where did he obtain it, when, and who did it truly belong to? These are now the new questions that guide the next stage of our provenance research. What clues, if any, did Wilson leave behind? And where are the other taonga he donated in the 1860s? Are they connected, or do each carry their own distinct journeys?
Future blogs will follow this unfolding story, tracing the steps we take to reconnect this significant taonga with its people.
Resources and further information
- Listen: The Taonga Files ,
- Read: Te Rautaki o Te Papa | Strategy
[1] https://www.afterall.org/article/thoughts-on-curatorial-practices-in-the-decolonial-turn
[2] Poverty Bay Herald, Volume IX, Issue 1604, 29 April 1882, Page 2.
