Source: Radio New Zealand
By Māpuna
Te Kura Toroa, chief executive of Te Wānanga o Aotearoa Evie O’Brien Evie O’Brien, Te Kura Toroa, Te Wānanga o Aotearoa
A partnership between the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford, Te Wānanga o Aotearoa and Te Māori Manaaki Taonga Trust will create curatorial residences for Māori at the famous museum later this year.
Evie O’Brien is Te Kura Toroa, chief executive of Te Wānanga o Aotearoa. She told Māpuna it’s an opportunity for someone with a background in caring for taonga Māori to spend three months at Oxford and will cover their travel and accommodation costs as well as a stipend.
“They will be supported by some of the world’s leading, from a Western perspective, curators at Pitt Rivers Museum to spend time in the museum, to access our taonga, to also access and understand the approach to tiaki taonga from the museum’s perspective of indigenous taonga that are held in that museum.”
O’Brien said it’s a reciprocal arrangement and will provide the opportunity to exchange knowledge on Western and indigenous approaches to caring for taonga.
“We wouldn’t be establishing this relationship without ensuring that the… Pitt Rivers Museum, and in particular, the director of that museum has an approach to decolonising museums and that’s most certainly the case.
“The director of Pitt Rivers Museum is Dr Laura Van Broekhoven, who since 2020 has been leading an extraordinary, and I call it extraordinary because it’s…an a global context of anti-decolonization, radical inclusion, doing things differently, particularly in the UK, an approach to how they look after taonga, but also a focus on repatriation and repair.”
O’Brien was previously the executive director of the Atlantic Institute based at Rhodes Trust, Oxford and is currently a member of the Board of Visitors for Pitt Rivers Museum.
Te Wānanga o Aotearoa in Waikato RNZ / Cole Eastham-Farrelly
“Often our whānau will say, ‘what? You’re on Pitt Rivers Museum board?’ And my response is exactly as I’ve shared in terms of any kind of partnership or engagement, we know this is never about the institution, notwithstanding institutions hold systems and approaches. It’s always about the people, always.”
One of the broader opportunities for the residences will be learning how Pitt Rivers, and other museums, approach the repatriation of taonga held in their collection, that includes how they establish provenance and the different ways they work with indigenous groups across the world, she said.
“I think sitting in behind this initiative is a commitment, not just by Te Māori Manaaki Taonga Trust, but by Te Wānanga o Aotearoa and many of our iwi, to grow the capability and the capacity of individuals, of collectives, of hapū, of iwi, in tiaki taonga, in the broader sense of tiaki taonga.
“So that eventually, and it’s happening in places across the motu, that our taonga do not come home and are solely held in museums, but are held in our own whare taonga.”
O’Brien said the relationship between the Wānanga and Oxford can be traced all the way back to the 1920s and the work of the pioneering scholar Mākereti Papakura, who was awarded a posthumous degree by the university in September 2025.
“So in amongst everything else that Mākereti was doing, her relationship, her primary relationship to the University of Oxford was through two anthropologists, one of whom was the founding director of Pitt Rivers Museum.
Mākereti loved the museum, she loved being in that place and bringing forth our voice, mātauranga māori, not to be studied as objects, but to contribute to the literature, to the knowledge on indigenous knowledge systems, etc,” she said.
Mākereti Papakura. Supplied / University of Oxford
The second director of Pitt Rivers, T K Penniman, became Mākereti’s “closest scholarly friend” and helped her write her manuscript as she was very frail and had difficulty writing towards the end of her life, O’Brien said.
Penniman was responsible for posthumously publishing her thesis in a book entitled The Old Time Māori.
“So that’s the basis, and that’s the thing about relationships… they’re intergenerational. This relationship has a legacy that’s important and I think Te Māori Manaaki Taonga Trust, Te Wānanga o Aotearoa, are privileged to continue that.”
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand