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In Book Takes, authors share three things readers will gain from their books as well as an insight into what they learnt during the researching and writing. This weekend, Jennifer Cattermole talks about investigating the origins and development of Māori and Moriori musical instruments in her book Echoes from Hawaiki.
University of Otago lecturer Jennifer Cattermole has been teaching and learning about taonga pūoro and miheke oro (Māori and Moriori musical instruments, respectively) since 2012. She brings together findings from her explorations in a new book, Echoes from Hawaiki: The origins and development of Māori and Moriori musical instruments. Along her journey, she made some discoveries that potentially challenge conventional thinking.
Here, Cattermole shares three insights readers will gain from the book, as well as something she learnt.
Where the immediate ancestors of Aotearoa and Rēkohu’s indigenous peoples came from:
This question is of deep spiritual and cultural importance to Māori and Moriori, and it has intrigued Pākehā scholars since European contact. Scholars have proposed a variety of answers using evidence from, for example, indigenous oral histories, genealogies, place names and languages, the transference of commensal species (ie, species that travelled with humans on their migrations, such as the Pacific rat) historic changes in sea level, prevailing wind directions and climate and material culture.
This book focuses specifically on an example of the latter – musical instruments, using them as a lens through which to examine the question of Māori and Moriori origins. It also considers existing research from other fields and disciplines.
Echoes from Hawaiki updates the work of previous researchers, including anthropologist Sir Te Rangi Hīroa (Peter Buck) in the first half of the 20th century, and ethnomusicologist Mervyn McLean in the second. While much of McLean’s later work concentrated on the origins of Polynesian peoples and their music, this book concentrates on the immediate geographical origins of Aotearoa and Rēkohu Chatham Islands’ first settlers.
Perhaps frustratingly, it doesn’t provide any conclusive answers to the question of Māori and Moriori peoples’ immediate geographical origins. It shows there are strong similarities between Māori and Moriori musical instruments and those of central East Polynesia (particularly the Society and Southern Cook islands), confirming the now widely accepted view that Māori and Moriori ancestors most likely voyaged from this region.
More surprisingly, though, a few instrument names, types and usages may be adoptions or adaptations from Hawaii, or from Western Polynesia of Eastern Melanesia. There is no way to know for sure whether these similarities are merely coincidental, but they are quite striking and raise some intriguing questions.
Are they the result of cultural transmission to central Eastern Polynesia from these areas before Māori and Moriori ancestors’ departure? Could there have been a limited amount of direct voyaging from Western Polynesia or Eastern Melanesia to Aotearoa before the onset of the Little Ice Age (1303-1850), which isolated Māori and Moriori peoples from the rest of the world for hundreds of years – or did cultural transmission occur only in post-European contact times? Are these similarities vestiges of practices that, in historical times, had been discontinued in central Eastern Polynesia but preserved in marginal Polynesia (ie, Aotearoa and Hawai`i)?
If cultural contact did occur before the Little Ice Age, the homeland region or “Hawaiki zone” for Māori and Moriori peoples may have been even more extensive than is commonly accepted today.
The extent to which Māori and Moriori peoples continued their ancestral musical instrument traditions or created new ones:
One of the most interesting things is the sheer extent of creativity, innovation and adaptation evident in Māori and Moriori musical instruments. These peoples developed innovative instrument traditions in response to the availability of new materials (and the absence of older, more familiar ones) and their evolving cultural needs.
Materials used to make instruments in tropical Polynesia were unavailable in Aotearoa and Rēkohu, resulting in some profound changes. For example, the absence of bamboo, a prolific and naturally hollow material, was a tremendous driver of innovation, resulting in a variety of new types of flute, trumpet and percussion instruments. In some cases, Māori found substitute materials: for example, harakeke (flax) and raupō (bulrush) replaced equivalent tropical Polynesian materials such as coconut or pandanus leaves, and wood was used instead of tropical fruits and nuts.
The differences in the iwitanga (tribal culture) concerning taonga pūoro:
One of the most striking things about the research in this book is taonga pūoro’s tremendous diversity in terms of locally distinctive names, uses and materials. This highlights the vital role musical instruments have played, and continue to play, in the maintenance and formation of iwi (tribal) identities.
Some instrument types or certain instrument-making materials are very limited in terms of their geographical distribution, while others are specific to either the North or South islands. Given much of this iwi- or island-specific information is not widely known today, I hope this book will play a role in the ongoing maintenance and revival of iwitanga for Aotearoa’s Māori communities.
What I learned:
I knew nothing whatsoever about Moriori music before doing this research, so one of the most personally satisfying aspects of writing this book has been investigating Moriori miheke oro.
It’s been exciting discovering scattered gems of knowledge about Moriori musical instruments, from the oral and written historical records, and bringing that information together. The timing of this work has been serendipitous, building on, contributing to, and sometimes coinciding with work being led by the Hokotehi Moriori Trust to restore and rejuvenate aspects of Moriori culture as part of the ongoing Moriori cultural revival. I hope that this book will aid and inspire Moriori in their cultural revival journey.
Echoes from Hawaiki: The origins and development of Māori and Moriori musical instruments by Jennifer Cattermole (Otago University Press, $50) is out now.
