Centuries-old Māori warrior's cloak returned to Aotearoa

The return of a centuries-old Māori warrior's cloak to Aotearoa New Zealand has brought surprise, intrigue, and an ancestral connection for the traditional Māori weaving experts studying it.

The cloak, a pauku, is one of only seven warrior cloaks known to exist around the world, and it's the first to return home.

Dr Kahutoi Te Kanawa, pou ārahi, curator Māori, at Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum, said the pauku is a "living treasure".

"The importance for me is that the taonga is home. It's home."

Dr Te Kanawa is co-director of Auckland Museum's Māori and Pacific textile and fibre research centre, Te Aho Mutunga Kore, where the pauku is on a five-year exhibition and research loan from the Oriental Museum at Durham University, England.

She said it was "intriguing to come so close to the minds and thoughts and skills of our ancestors that left us with these".

Dr Te Kanawa and her sister, Dr Rangi Te Kanawa - herself a specialist researcher and conservator of Māori textiles - grew up immersed in the knowledge of traditional weaving, passed on from their mother and grandmother.

They are both members of Auckland Museum's tohunga expert weavers' advisory group, Taumata Māreikura, which is analysing the cloak.

It's the oldest cloak Rangi has seen in Aotearoa in her 25 years as a conservator, and a great example of tūturu Māori, an authentic Māori object, she said.

The cloak was made with a close twining stitch, she said: "So close, it would have been impenetrable to a wooden spear, so thus it became a warrior's cape."

Made from harakeke, flax, the pauku has two sections, one of which is constructed of dyed black fibres. Rangi said the dyeing process has caused the fibres to deteriorate.

"From a conservation point of view, we've had this great loss of black, the loose threads have become vulnerable."

But that loss has exposed the underlying, undyed fibres which gives more information about the construction, Rangi said.

The group's investigation of the pauku goes beyond identifying the techniques used - they also intend to revive those skills.

"You can see for yourself that it's done in chunks and different blocks, and how to manipulate the fibres so that it's raised and gives that raised and recessed effect with the pattern," Kahu said.

"Those are the skills that we're about to attempt to do."

The pauku is thought to have been made in the 18th century, and through studying the pauku, they are gaining insight to the weaver's world.

"To do something like this, it would have to be an absolutely skilled kairaranga, weaver," said Kahu.

The weaver's focus would have been on making the pauku, and to do that, she would have been supported by other villagers, she said.

"So if the weaver had two or three tamariki, children, they would be looked after by the aunties, they would be fed.

"She would be looked after so that she could focus on her task at hand."

Such a task would require a great deal of mental stability and focus, Kahu said.

It is unknown how the pauku came to be on the other side of the world, although investigations are underway to track down its journey, said Rachel Barclay, senior curator at the Oriental Museum.

"The cloak first came to the Oriental Museum in the mid-1960s, from a family called the Trevelyan family who had a large estate in Northumberland, just north of us.

"But then how it came into their ownership has been one of the things that we've been struggling with in recent years."

The pauku had been at the museum for decades "with no one really understanding how incredible it was until that amazing day when Rangi, and Patricia Wallace, and other people came to visit us," she said.

While work continues at Auckland Museum to understand how the pauku was made, in the UK, Rachel Barclay is getting closer to solving the puzzle of how it got to Durham.

It looks increasingly like there was a network of women collectors within the British aristocracy, whose histories haven't been recorded, "that people are just beginning to discover", she said.

And prior to its arrival on British shores, "all roads lead us back to Joseph Banks and Cook's first voyage," she said.

Auckland Museum said Te Aho Mutunga Kore will schedule bookable visits for members of the public to see the pauku to minimise movement and risk to the fragile taonga.

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