Stevie Reweti, from Te Roopu Kapahaka o Ngati Ranginui, photographed as part of recording the kapa haka's journey to the national kapa haka championships. Photo: SUPPLIED
Stevie Reweti, from Te Roopu Kapahaka o Ngati Ranginui, photographed as part of recording the kapa haka's journey to the national kapa haka championships. Photo: SUPPLIED
Four days at Te Papa Tongarewa has helped a local woman create an exhibition at Huria Marae for Anzac Day commemorations on Saturday.
Teresa Nepia, of Ngai Tamarawaho hapu, works for the Huria Trust and earlier this year was an intern at our national museum learning to preserve and documentlocal taonga [treasures], be it activities, historic objects or photos, for future generations.
The interns focused on photography, archiving and storing media files.
"It's about learning how to use your camera, get the lighting right, take the photos and also how to archive it in your own personal collection," Teresa says.
Since returning from Wellington, she's been recording and digitising local taonga, such as the marae's ancestral taiaha [traditional weapon], "so they're more accessible to our people".
Teresa says it's important to record local stories.
"We've got a lot of stories around the different pou [carved wooden posts] and the different tukutuku [woven] panels that are inside our whare tipuna [ancestral house]... what we don't have is an archive around the photographing and documenting of those taonga, along with the korero [stories]," she says.
"So when our old people pass on, if we're not able to capture that information in a succinct way, then we could possibly lose it."
She says Huria Marae is hosting an Anzac dawn ceremony for the first time in many years.
From left, Te Papa researcher Jean Claude Stahl, with interns Jamie Lee Jack-kino, Teresa Nepia and Alby Bott in Te Papa's Tory Street storage facility. Photo: SUPPLIED
A monument has been carved by Whare Thompson, which will be unveiled on Saturday. It has a list of the marae's ancestors who fought in various wars.
"We've taken those names and started to research and request from whanau photos of those particular men and women so that we can actually hang them in a gallery," she says.
"If I hadn't gone through this Te Papa workshop, we would have actually been hanging the original photos in the displays.
"But having gone through this process and understanding what it means to preserve our taonga, I've been able to digitise them and hand the originals back to the families, so it's been a really, really awesome thing to have come out of the programme."
Teresa took this photo of her grandfather William Te Ao Nepia's Waka Huia after her internship at Te Papa. Photo: SUPPLIED
What does that mean?
- Taonga: Treasures
- Taiaha: Traditional weapon
- Whare tipuna: Ancestral meeting house
- Tukutuku panels: Woven panels, usually adorning walls in marae or whare tipuna
