Interview with Cliff Whiting, based on discussions with Mary Barr, Robert Leonard, John McCormack, Bernice Murphy, and Cheryll Sotheran.
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Tell us where Maori art comes from.
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Cliff Whiting: The Maori came here from the Pacific carrying with them a culture that was portable and adjustable, containing all the fundamentals for transplanting and developing their society—religious and philosophical concepts, a sense of family identity, an experience of their Pacific heritage. This package was a map of their whole cultural being, and it’s still with us today. It’s been developed further and it’s still being used. That they bought a cosmology with them is obvious because you can still find elements of it elsewhere in the Pacific, where you also have stories about Tangaroa, Maui, and you still have reference to Tane. However, the stories’ and characters’ importance seems to change from group to group—from the Tahitians to the Hawaiians—within Polynesia itself.
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How did they bring this knowledge with them if they didn’t have a written language?
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It’s terrible that people say Maori didn’t have a written language—it’s not that at all. They did. They did it with their arts. And their arts were mnemonic. For instance, when you look at a war canoe, you are looking at a statement of cosmology. Its prow is a statement of creation; its stern piece is a statement about the condition of man; and the centre, where people sit, is a statement about the present. It’s complicated. That’s why it had to be all mapped out.

Those early Maori had an interesting way of describing evolution. It started with absolutely nothing, and then you arrive at the great darkness. It’s in there that everything evolves, and, out of there, come the parentless people. First, there were Io Matua te Kore, the creative force, and others. Among them were Rangi, the sky father, and Papa, the earth mother, who are the most significant for our story. Their family was born, about seventy of them, all male. They lived in an uncomfortable, restricted environment, firmly enclosed between their parents, which made them want to break out. They needed to do something, they needed to be expanding, developing. They had to do something drastic about the ones dearest to them. So, they started discussing the whole issue of separation—how to deal with their parents. Some wanted to kill the parents, some didn’t want to do anything, and others wanted to separate them. It was difficult, it was hard, they did not all agree, but, in the end, they reached a consensus—to separate their parents. The way they found that consensus was to develop the concept of a space on which a speaker could stand and be heard. As well as the speaker having that right to stand and speak, the others also had a right of reply. Those are the simple rules, the protocols of the marae that have come through from those times to now. Whether it was in informal or challenging circumstances, they went through that ritual, as we still do today. The concept of marae developed into a physical thing. They gave it boundaries and they gave it protocol. In a sense, you might say there was a kind of treaty way back then, as part of their very being.

Te Po, Te Whaiao, Te Ao Marama. From out of the darkness, the world of being, to the world of light.

From out of the darkness you come and you have to do something—Te Whaiao—literally chase the world of being. You suddenly realise you are something and have to act and enter the world of light. This is the pattern for creative processes. There has to be that first step, then the second one, and the third one. It is a continuous pattern that goes through everything.
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So, what happened to the family?
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With Rangi and Papa is the source of what we call whakapapa, genealogy. Their sons, the brothers—Tane Mahuta, Tu Matauanga, Tawhiri matea, Tangaroa, Rongo matane, Haumia Tiketike, Ruaumoko, Whironui—become the creators of the natural world of storms, winds, bush, birds, and so on. The rest become minor folk. But, the anxiety of the parents unsettled the family, so it was decided to turn the mother, Papatuanuku, face down so she couldn’t see her mate.

In the new environment the families of the brothers would expand and develop. The next important phase was the acquiring and developing of experience, the gathering of the baskets of knowledge. Io Matua to Kore, the supreme force, lived in the highest of the skies. He was curious about what had taken place with the separation of the primal parents, so he sent down messengers to investigate the family and report back to him. That is really how it happened. After the messenger reported, he returned to the family and requested that one of their number be selected to make the journey up to Te Tihi o Manono, there to obtain knowledge.

Tane was elected by his brothers to go. An older brother, Whironui, was jealous—Tane was very much the younger. Anyway, Tane set off. Then the older brother attacked him with all of his forces. Tane reigned supreme when he got to the top. He collected Nga Kete o Te Wananga me nga Whatu Kura. These were the baskets of knowledge and some special stones. The battles continued on the way down until they both arrived back onto Papatuanuku, and it’s there the final battle took place. Before being defeated completely, Whiro descended to Rarohenga, the underworld, taking Nga Kura (the stones) with him, while Tane kept the baskets of knowledge to share with all men. The baskets of knowledge contained the good and the bad. People could take what they wanted from them. All of that knowledge was available. They contained karakia (ceremony), they contained the arts of war, they contained all sort of things. Meanwhile, from the underworld, Whironui, in his jealous rage, inflicted awful diseases and mishaps on man.

The story of Tane’s journey to obtain the baskets of knowledge comes out as a major pattern, used on whariki (mats) and in tukutuku weaving, known as Poutama. The pattern is a stepped pattern generally placed right in the middle of the meeting house, on one side ascending, on the other descending. The old folk say the verticals describe the journey up and down and the horizontals the battles. Today this pattern has other interesting interpretations. Christians interpret it as the ‘Stairway to Heaven’, but they don’t talk about the downward track as the pathway to hell. It’s a good pattern for education.
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You have been talking about all these brothers. When do women arrive on the scene?
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Later Tane and Tu Matauanga started searching for a way to reproduce themselves. This is where the female element starts to come in. They have to refer back to Io Matua who suggests they can find it in the earth itself, in Papatuanuku. So they start experimenting with clay and make a form. To make this thing live they have to go back to Io Matua and he gives them Te Ha, the essence of man. Tane returns, breathes into the form and she becomes Hine-ahu-one. Tane mates with her and they have a daughter, Hine Mama. As she matures, Tane mates with her too. Then she is curious to find out who her father is. When she finds out it is Tane, it really upsets her. This sets up a whole lot of new developments. She becomes so incensed by that knowledge she changes her name, and becomes Hine Nui Te Po, and goes to join her uncle, Whironui, in the underworld. Tane pursues her, trying to stop her. She tells him to return to carry on with the development of man, but she will be down there to receive the souls of men and care for them in that way.

We now have to jump forward to Maui. There are many stories about Maui. He’s a superhero—he captures the sun, fishes up a great fish from the ocean. He’s the character in many stories who demonstrates all the human qualities. He realises for man to become immortal he must somehow defeat Hine Nui Te Po, his great-grandmother. So, he takes off on this journey to overcome her, taking with him certain characters to witness this, including a fantail. He turns into a lizard and crawls up into her uterus while she’s asleep. His purpose was to get at her vital parts and stop them from working. But, as he’s disappearing into her, the fantail laughs, because it thinks it’s such a funny sight. Of course, she wakes up, closes her legs, and he’s a gonner, finished. Maui’s action was an attempt to immortalise man. His failure meant that, from then on, the only way you can become a god is by dying. Then the ancestors, rather than the gods, become important. Out of that come concepts of ancestry, the whakapapa, which is the focus for traditional Maori art.
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How did Maori find out about these sorts of things?
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In the traditional society, knowledge was not openly available. Very little of it was known to the common person and this maintained a hierarchy, a social order. Some people assume that you could go to any Maori and get all the information from them, like going to a library. But it wasn’t like that at all. The social structure was such that you progressed from one level to the next. So, while parts of the knowledge could be given out, other parts were held back. You had a social structure based on knowledge, with the tohunga (religious expert, priest) and rangatira (chief) at the top, down to the common people.
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What was the impact of European contact on this structure?
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The alienation of Maori land and resources by colonial force, the musket wars, and the new religion broke down traditional values and a traditional relationship with the natural environment. The missionaries cast the tohunga as a heathen, undermining his mana. He lost influence. The old hierarchy and ways were replaced with a philosophy of commonality and individualism. The old cosmology of many gods was replaced by the one Christian god. The gods had been integral to the whole environment. Like Tane, whose gifts to the arts include trees for carving the ancestors, leaves for weaving mats and baskets, feathers for cloaks. This integrated world was undermined.

In the face of these changes new Maori leaders like Te Kooti emerged. They fought individualisation—the fragmentation of land title and the erosion of community identity that came with it. Many of these new leaders actually drew on Christianity, but always with the aim of preserving communal interests, protecting their land, their turangawaewae, against the colonists. They mixed a little of the old with a lot of the new. But they kept some big concepts like marae intact. They directed the creation of larger wharenui, new whare kai (dining halls), and other structures. As the traditions were broken down, new ways of doing marae art emerged. In the old days, the art had been symbolic and stylised. The new developments were more interpretive, mixing traditional forms with a naturalism foreign to the old art. There were new materials and new tools too. The kokowai (ochre) traditionally applied to carvings gave way to paint. The ochre was the blood of Papatuanuku, spilt in the original separation. As such, it afforded protection from malignant spirits, curses, spiritual diseases. Whereas paint provided color, contrast, and line—a new fluidity to interpretation. And that’s where you start to get the contemporary thing.
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In what ways do you think Maori artists working today relate to the traditions of the culture? 
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Some do and some can’t. Maori art is tribal. In all cases, the teaching of tribal traditions is fragmented, if it does happen at all. This process isn’t helped by the fact that most Maori live away from their tribal areas. Knowing tribal and personal genealogy, history, and the resources and the landscape of your tribal area are still the main ingredients to create traditional tribal Maori art. Of course, the old conditions necessary for the creation of traditional Maori art cannot now be duplicated. Today, we find ourselves torn between the old and the new. For instance, with carving, you have to deal with totara, kauri, or timber of some kind, because surrounding it are the ritual and experience of people. That’s couched in the words, in the karakia and the chants, that tell you how to deal with that thing, that it too has a life. Your working is all in the korero (stories) that surround it. Those sorts of supports are not easily found today. The resources have gone and had probably already gone by the 1930s and 1940s. Now, we can only look at Tane in a National Park. We have to really beg to go and talk with him, because you might trample something or break some other rules and regulations. We no longer have the direct relationship of being able to name the trees, watch their growth, determine their future. That stopped way back when the tohunga was abolished, demolished, or disappeared with the musket. All of his supports disappeared with him. It sounds like doom and gloom, but we are moving down track in other ways.
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You’ve talked about the importance of people with knowledge and the passing on of that knowledge. How has this happened more recently? 
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We can now look at a very important period in New Zealand’s educational history, from the 1940s to the 1960s, when there was quite a different emphasis placed within the system on developing the arts. This came about because Maori recognised the need to get into the political scene. There was the emergence of enlightened young Maori people who had trained in universities—they were doctors, lawyers, and those sorts of people. Maui Pomare, Peter Buck, Apirana Ngata. There weren’t enough of them, but at least they were there. Those figures were vitally important in the lead up to when the education system began wanting to engage itself with the indigenous culture. I think that’s important and it had very important after-effects.
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How would you assess Apirana Ngata’s influence? 
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In Ngata’s time, artists were chosen people. They were chosen by a system, a hierarchy—a rangatiratanga. Because of Ngata’s position in Parliament, he was recognised as a new kind of rangatira. His selecting people for particular jobs qualified them in those jobs: carving, painting, building, weaving. That was the system throughout the country, and he controlled it, in consultation with prominent tribal leaders, of course. Ngata went about building meeting houses throughout the country, re-establishing family links through the ancestral house, reknitting together communities to take a collective position on their land interests. A very potent force was the development of the community meeting houses because establishing the tupuna (ancestors) in there was a way of trying to come to terms with the individual ownership of land. Certainly, the learning of the arts was part of that, and re-establishing quality in a different kind of way. Ngata oversaw that. If you didn’t have your weaving right he would cut the whole panel and you would have to redo it. There were certain standards set—work had to be seen by the dominant culture as being of excellent quality, etcetera—but there was also the question of tribal identity. So coming out of that was the establishment—the re-establishment—of marae, and the refocusing of a whole host of issues: health issues, land issues, political issues.

Now, there really are no places that focus specifically on the teaching of tribal art, other than the Institute in Rotorua, and possibly a place in Te Awamutu. There’s always been a generalised approach and it’s been called Maori art. This is where we’ve had difficulty in earlier years, because the Institute in Rotorua seemed to think they were fulfilling all the art and cultural requirements for Maoridom in the traditional sense. But, of course, people started to recognise—we certainly did as younger people—that it was only doing a certain kind of thing, very much based on a maintenance system, and that any depth of knowledge of the art itself or of tribal orientation seemed not to be there.

That school in Rotorua developed during the Ngata era. For a time, they went in search of a particular technique, and the master carver they brought in seemed to have a knowledge of older ways of teaching the art of carving, and a knowledge of the older traditions. He came to the school and said to the trainees that they shouldn’t learn that, that it would be too difficult for them to follow it through, and that they would probably end up in more trouble than was good for them. Whether that was a good way out of having to front up later to the deeper issues of traditional work, I don’t know. But that school certainly served the purpose up to a point, which was mainly tourism. It did one or two major things, but it refined techniques and design within traditional areas rather than adding to the dynamic process of the art. There’s a conservatism that identifies Maori art. People look at a fairly modern piece and say, ‘That’s not Maori art.’ Then you say, ‘What is it then?’ And they say, ‘It should be like this.’ And, of course, they come up with the near-souvenir form and shape.
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What about the state education system? 
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From the late 1940s into the 1960s, there was a re-focus by state education back into the Maori community. There was, firstly, an advisory service, and into that they then brought young Maori people like myself and others before me. And, working in conjunction with Pakeha, we developed—we weren’t taught—we developed a Maori course. That really set the challenge. It was a challenge that was put on our plate, by Gordon Tovey mainly, to run in-service training courses for teachers, so that children, Maori children in particular, would have the opportunity to engage in their own culture and their own arts and crafts. Tovey was the key figure. He got a lot of ideas from A.S. Neill at Summerhill, the alternative school in England, and Herbert Read. Tovey brought young Maori potential into the Art Education Advisory Service and into in-service training. And this is where you get people like Ralph Hotere, Para Matchitt, Clive Arlidge, Muru Walters, and myself. There were also women like Mere Kururangi and Mihiata Fairlie, who later had influence.

It’s interesting hearing Beeby, then Director of Education, talking about visiting Maori communities and trying to find out what they would like for their children. They all wanted nothing but the best, the best that was being taught to Pakeha children. Try as he might to get them to think that there might be some way of retaining those things they would feel were precious to them—no way! They wanted the best that Pakeha had.

In-service training was a kind of authorisation process that came through the first induction of the mainly Maori advisers into Maori art and craft. The first two-week course was at Ruatoria, where Ngata had come from, and was organised by Tovey. At that particular course, the authorisation of Maori art and craft was given full support by Ngati Porou, Ngata’s people. Tovey had gathered in the support of tribes throughout the country, so he was involved in a kind of nationalisation. Having a figure such as the prominent carver Pine Taiapa was another very important move in terms of gaining that authorisation. These people were very supportive and gave that authorisation to the use of Maori arts and crafts in schools for all children, and, from there, it expanded out. So, you can start to see, from here, that the sharing of cultures was certainly put in place and that the recognition of the cultural source was also of concern. The initial training programme was carried out in a Maori district and authorisation gained from the people. You’re starting to look at biculturalism—it’s a planned process.

While Tovey was interested in Maori, he was more interested in the mixture. He had a very strong intuition that there are two traditions to draw on, instead of pulling in behind one and being overwhelmed by it. Tovey’s programme, then, started looking at biculturalism. An ‘Arts of the Pakeha’ course was to follow the Maori one, and then a course for teachers called ‘The Integrated Arts’. That was one where there was an attempt to weld the two cultures together in the areas of dance, poetry, and visual arts. All of this was being guided by Tovey, who was using his intuition, reading overseas people who were also dealing with indigenous cultures, like Levi-Strauss, and, at the same time, observing what was happening here. Excursions or discoveries like that leave a lot of people behind. And dealing with teachers, who were and are a very, very conservative group of people in the main, was difficult. However, it was a brave attempt and I still believe that it did much to enhance and develop the concept of shared cultures.

So, out of this was where we started ourselves to realise the mix and that we could invent, we could create if we wanted to, and I think that was when we developed as a group of people. Away we went. That’s when we started inventing what we thought were new traditions, only to find later on that they weren’t.
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What sort of support did your group get? 
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When I talk of the educational process I’m talking about a form of patronage. Government and local bodies have also offered great patronage for the arts in the form of commissions. What it’s doing to the arts, I think, is another discussion, and what it’s doing to the marae focus is another matter, but the links with the traditional are still there, the earlier business of authorisation by the tribe itself. The outcome of that would be some major structure such as a canoe, a storehouse, certain marking posts, or things like that, and, later, the meeting house. Some of these issues are not clear in the minds of the artists now, in that they don’t recognise that really it’s themselves doing it for themselves, and dealing publicly with what used to be a very private affair—tribal status, pride in the establishment of houses.
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What about people outside this more traditional patronage system—say, a young Maori artist who has been to art school? What happens to them as Maori? 
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They end up in a bit of a dilemma. The art schools don’t have any Maori training, so those artists, if they don’t return to their tribal base, they must surely continue on with the forms their training has led them to, which is western, European-oriented, individualist. These are the things we are trying to address now, that training area.
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How? 
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We need a decentralised system, facilitating a sharing of expertise and traditional skills in communities, allowing that sort of development alongside the individual thing. Using facilitators to activate the art in communities, in tribal areas and cross-tribal areas. This allows for tribal privacy in the development of traditions. That’s what we’re trying to do with Te Waka Toi, our Arts Council. The government access schemes are trying to train people so they can get jobs. We want to train them to have, to find, responsibility within our culture, so we can be assured of the transmission of the culture.
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[IMAGE: Cliff Whiting Te Wehenga o Rangi raua ko Papa 1969–76]