“Images Still Live and Are Very Much Alive”: Whakapapa and the 1923 Dominion Museum Ethnological Expedition

Abstract

The first major photofilmic record of the Waiapu River region of Aotearoa New Zealand occurred over a three-week period in March–April 1923, when the filmmaker and photographer James McDonald documented local cultural activities on the East Coast. McDonald was a member of the fourth Dominion Museum ethnological expedition from Wellington, invited to Waiapu by Apirana Ngata to record ancestral tikanga practices’ that he feared were disappearing. Despite the criticism of ethnographic “othering” in the resulting film He Pito Whakaatu i te Noho a te Maori i te Tairawhiti—Scenes of Māori Life on the East Coast, this paper suggests that the fieldwork, from a Ngāti Porou perspective, was assisted and supported by local people. It addresses the entanglements of this event and delineates the background, purpose and results of the documentary photographs and film in relation to Ngata’s cultural reinvigoration agenda. This article also reveals the various relationships, through whakapapa ‘kin networks’ hosting and friendship, between members of the team and local people. Drawing on the 1923 diary kept by Johannes Andersen and on other archival and tribal sources, the author closely analyses these relationships, what Apirana Ngata calls takiaho ‘relational cords’, which are brought to light so that descendants can keep alive these connections through the remaining film fragments and beyond the frame. These kinship and relational networks were forged and deepened through education, politics, wartime experiences and loss, pandemics and health reform, as well as shared cultural understandings. This reflection on the takiaho, the cords of connection, demonstrates the complex relational logic that informed the Māori subjects in the films, enabling the “photo business” to be carried out by the expedition team, in the process producing a lasting cultural legacy for descendants. As Merata Mita memorably put it in 1992, “Images still live and are very much alive”