Former Whanganui Regional Museum curator Michelle Horwood will return on November 11 to give this year's Samuel Drew Lecture.
It's free and starts at 5.30pm in the museum's Davis Lecture Theatre.
Her title is: An Interesting Relationship on the Whanganui River: Ngā Paerangi and Charles Smith. It's about European settler Charles Smith, who collected taonga from Kaiwhāiki in the lower reaches of the river in the mid 1800s.
The taonga tell the tale of iwi:settler relations on the river at that time.
Mr Smith's large collection of taonga was sold to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, England, in 1923. Research revealed where the items were from and when they were collected.