Te Uru Aute Presentation
Kia ora whanau, he uri tenei no te hokianga whakapou karakia.
Ko Ngatokimatawhaoroa te waka,
Ko Tapuwae te awa,
Ko Ngahuia te marae,
Ko Ngaitipoto te hapuu,
Ko Ngapuhi me Te Rarawa nga iwi.
Good afternoon whanau, my name is Nikau Hindin and I whakapapa back to the Hokinaga and this is my marae over looking the Harbour.
The revival of traditional practices is a key element to my research project. The Hawaiian waka haurua Hokule’a and the subsequent revival of traditional navigation in the Pacific has been a huge influence on my way of thinking.
This is a star compass up at Hector Busby’s place in Aurere. The star compass is the Polynesian system of orientation – you can see here that the pou line up with the horizon and the spaces between them represent the 32 houses in which the stars rise and fall into.
This compass usually resides in the mind of the navigator and they use points on the waka to calibrate the star houses but when you aren’t on the water this gives students the chance to immerse themselves in the practise of celestial navigation.
An important kaupapa in this project is activating theory through practice. My Maori Studies Degree became more relevant to me when I discovered Dante Bonica’s workshop. In his classes, you come to the Auckland Museum and replicate taonga tawhito using traditional methods and tools. Neither words or pictures can do justice to the experience of making taonga the old way. Working this way gives you an intimate awareness of the material your are interacting with because the process is so slow and repetitive. I often work with wood and when you use these tools you learn about the materials weaknesses and strengths, its weight and balance, its knots and grain. From Dante’s classes I became in awe of the ingenuity and craftsmanship of our tupuna and my desire to learn more about their traditional practices grew.
One Day Dante showed me this aute plant and told me it was special because our tupuna used to grow aute.
The importance of this tit bit of information didn’t sink in till I went to the University of Hawai’ and learnt how to beat wauke into kapa and then learnt that wauke translates to aute in Māori. When Maile Andrade mentioned that Maori once beat kapa too I was surprised I knew nothing about Maori tapa cloth… and that’s when I remembered Dantes aute plant and the ability to continue to this practice in Aotearoa inspired me to begin this learning journey.
What you are seeing was my first mini wanaga where we scraped the outer bark and prepared the aute for soaking.
After the bark has been soaked it becomes soft enough to beat.
One of the aspects I loved about beating kapa in Hawaii, that hasn’t manifested here in Aotearoa- YET- was the communal nature of beating, as well the refined process that came from generations and generations of practice.
I am still a student of this practice so my project seeks to refine my own skills in making bark cloth as well as share this practice with my peers and community.
An important lesson Dante has taught me over the years of working with stone tools is that your outcome is only as good as your tools. Fortunately for me I have been able to study the Auckland Museum’s collection of Maori tapa beaters.
The quality of some of these beaters is astounding – the grooves are so fine and straight. Examining these tools gives us clues into how our tupuna once beat tapa. It also instructed the way I made my own beaters, and helped me make decisions about the width and depth of the grooves.
The idea when you are beating is that you slowly spread out the fibre. It is a bit like felting.
It is a privilege to be able to have access to the beaters here and not only replicate the tools but use them, thus replicating the physical movements of our tupuna and reawaken the sound of this process which may not have been heard by this land for hundreds of years.
The Tainui whakatauki “Te kete rukuruku a Whakaotirangi” speaks of one womens far sightedness Whakaotirangi was Hoturoa’s principle wife. The story goes that on their journey from Hawaiki, while the rest of the crew ate their kumura seed she kept hers safe by tying a firm knot in her basket that helped preserve these kakano. When they arrived in Aotearoa she planted kumara, calabash and aute all of which flourished exceedingly.
From beating aute I have learnt that there are limitations to the aute tree at Dante’s due of its age. It is almost as if the aute I am using “hasn’t been told that it is going to become bark one day- so when I process it- it must get a bit of a shock from it’s transformation.”
Simmons is important to this jigsaw puzzle because Matua Dante got his aute tree from Simmons along time ago. Dante kept telling me that these aute tree send underground roots out which means aute treese pop up a few meters away. Our aute tree at school is surrounded by concrete so this hasn’t occurred. At Simmon’s place however, there is one main aute and about nine baby ones.
Ulitmately to sustain this practice we need more aute material and we need to plant more aute. The wauke in hawaii is harvested young, with intention of being processed and beaten into cloth. When I saw these beautiful, straight young aute I knew that these plants- if pruned and looked after correctly- would produce fine aute.
Looking forward I hope to plant an aute grove that can be harvested for making Maori tapa in the future. In the mean time, I have enough bark soaking and enough beaters made to beat collectively. I think that if you are following in the footsteps of you tupuna you a probably going in the right direction and in the words of Jeff Evans- on the revival of traditional navigation–
“It is both a spiritual awakening and a metaphysical passage that allows you to stand with your tupuna, invoke their knowlesge and reinvigorate their feats.”
