Iwi wants to protect and own their memories with archive partnership

Sunday, 26 December 2021

The chair of Te Pae Kōrako (Ngāi Tahu Archive Advisory Committee), Tā Tipene O’Regan talks to Stuff about Ngāi Tahu's relationship with Archives New Zealand.

Ngāi Tahu has leased state-of-the-art office and archive space to store its historical papers and research the history of the tribe in a bid to “own their own memory”.

The iwi has taken out a three-year lease on space in an Archives New Zealand building in Christchurch. The building houses hundreds of boxes of iwi files dating back to the 1940s, with 4000 boxes of files being sorted for possible future storage at the facility.

Iwi researchers will use the office space to gather digital copies of relevant items from other archives across New Zealand and use them to share the story of their tribe online.

Te Pae Kōrako (Ngāi Tahu Archive Advisory Committee) chair Tā Tipene O’Regan said the move was intended to secure their memory for future generations.

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The chair of Te Pae Kōrako (the Ngāi Tahu Archive Advisory Committee), Tā Tipene O’Regan, in the archive.

“Our first priority is we must own our own memory,’’ he said.

“The maintenance of that memory is the one thing that maintains us as a tribal people,” he said. “If we lose the memory we are just another footnote in someone else's document stack.”

The Archives New Zealand building in Wigram, Christchurch, has become home to a new Ngāi Tahu archive.

Ngāi Tahu archives manager Takerei Norton said the partnership with Archives New Zealand began with a project to digitise 19th-century survey maps and make them available online. The maps, held by Archives New Zealand, include iwi trails and original place names.

“These maps are incredible, but they’ve been hidden for over 100 years,” Norton said. “Our job is finding these golden nuggets that the government has and bringing them to life and showing them to people.”

Ngāi Tahu senior researcher Helen Brown said they would use the facility to continue digitising items from other archives relating to Ngai Tahu history in a “digital repatriation’’ drive.

They had digitised material from the National Library of Australia, Auckland War Memorial Museum, the Hocken Collections, and the Alexander Turnbull Library collections.

O’Regan says protecting and owning the iwi’s memory is important to its survival.

Iwi researchers then recontextualise the archive material to tell the story of their tribe. For example, Brown worked with 19th century letters, records and hand-drawn maps to find the original te reo Māori names of places across the South Island.

The research has informed many te reo Māori place names becoming officially recognised by the New Zealand Geographic Board.

“I scurry around in archives and find things all over the place and make them digitally available and tell the [Ngāi Tahu] stories behind them,’’ she said.

“You have to do a lot of work as they are not on the surface.”

Brown has been able to find the names of Ngāi Tahu ancestors who provided those original te reo place names to colonial survey teams in the 19th century.

The research is then shared publicly on online archive kareao.nz.

Norton said the project was entirely funded by the iwi and there were tentative plans for a custom-built facility.

“We would like to think that there will be a permanent facility somewhere, but we don’t know yet.

“We are going to start dreaming the dream.”

Archives New Zealand regional archivist Joanna Condon said the partnership with Ngāi Tahu made the collection relevant to more people.

“We’ve learnt that we need iwi knowledge about the taonga that we hold,’’ she said.

“We are used to gathering things in and putting our own narrative on things. This is the opposite. We are pushing things out digitally to allow indigenous knowledge to come to the forefront.”

O’Regan said the digitised survey maps represented Ngāi Tahu people and knowledge that would otherwise have been lost.

“For every place name there would have been local people who knew it and used it, but the people of Ngāi Tahu didn’t know it.

“When we bring it all together you have the memories and backgrounds of a huge diversity of people within Ngāi Tahu.

“It’s not necessarily retained memory. You need grandchildren for that. So if you die prematurely, you never existed.”