Ayesha Green, Te Pōwhiri, preview catalogue

Te Pōwhiri brings together a new body of work that looks closely at Queen Charlotte Sound/Tōtaranui as a site of first encounters and myth-making. Focusing on Ship Cove and Endeavour Inlet, places repeatedly visited by Captain Cook and his crews, Green considers how these landscapes became staging grounds for refuelling, repairing, mapping, and claiming territory. Cook referred to the cove as “our old station,” a sanctuary that sustained his voyages and, in turn, became inscribed with imperial intention.

Rather than retelling these histories directly, Green asks a wider question: "What is land when it is reduced to its resources, and who gets to manage or maintain them?" The works in Te Pōwhiri introduce a set of “characters,” from Queen Charlotte to introduced animals and vegetables, signage, kōwhaiwhai, and birds, that gesture toward the beginnings of these relationships. Some works look to the whakapapa of image-making and how landscapes were painted, circulated, and used as propaganda. Others consider Māori motifs detached from place, reproduced as generic symbols of “Māori-ness.” Across the exhibition, Green reflects on how representation shapes understanding, belonging, value, and power.

Te Pōwhiri sets the scene for an unfolding story, a first act that probes how histories of resource extraction, imagery, and authority continue to structure our relationship to whenua.

And so, the kids learned of James Cook, and wrote their pepeha, reciting Ko Endeavour te waka to one another. Even the Māori kids, until one remembered that their waka was actually Tākitimu so all the Māori kids wrote that, then made their way down his pepeha and copied his river and mountain too. Words they didn’t know the meaning of though they spent their afternoons in streams fed by the rivers they had named. They knew Endeavour though, it’s many masts and the holes in the side of the boat through which the canon fired, pow pow pow!

They recited the pepeha and felt proud, even the kid whose mother was born in India and father was from Australia, and the kid who had recently moved to the school from the local kura kaupapa and who had sat there thinking this pepeha was weird compared to what he would say at kura. He was new though, and already stood out so didn’t want to stand out even more. Ko Endeavour te waka. What a cool sounding boat, adventurous and brave. The children were proud.

The children learned of this Cook man, and how he traded with the locals, some kaimoana for some nails, or some paper. A benevolent, kind man, who was a kind of short and a bit portly. His skin was very pale and the children learned this word ‘scurvy’, which is what happens if you don’t eat your fruit and vegetables and the children resolved to consume their five plus a day. Later that day, the children would participate in the ‘Big Crunch’, sitting together on the netball courts with apples in their hands waiting for the signal to all bite into their apples together. None of the children knew why they were doing this but a free apple is a free apple, and they’re all happy be out of the classroom.
 
As they got older, his story unwound,
not a founder of a land unfound,
but re-namer of a de-named Sound.
Whakahoki mai te ingoa Tōtaranui,
nā Te Ātiawa, arā, āu uri,
nā rātou i whakatau, i whakanui.
This man so famous his shorthand is Cook,
forced a revision, a history re-looked,
no longer a hero, from the Māori he took,
and took, and took,
and took, and took.
His story looks a little different now,
the canon no longer draws an awed ‘wow’,
because it is a weapon.
 
They grow up. Remembering biting the apple as some hazy memory, questioning whether it really happened and did their older siblings remember it? It was a good school, and they liked their teachers who took them on camps at this place called ‘the great outdoors’ where each class would get a night following the sisal trail parents had wended through the bush. They’d remember the long walks they’d take on these camps, that being the day no one looked forward to and it feeling like the DOC signs were always lying about the time it took. During this walk, the teachers would get the kids to stop somewhere along the path and spend an hour reflecting in the bush by themselves; no talking to the other kids. As adults they’d remember this and realise the teachers were probably tired of their noise and wanted a ciggie.

They get jobs and those working in offices become very familiar with having to introduce themselves with their pepeha. They’re enlightened now though; they know the right words to say and not to claim maunga they don’t whakapapa to. The Endeavour is still there somewhere, a shadow of a memory, from a time when insidious histories were taught by good teachers. When the nostalgia pangs, they look each other up on Facebook: ‘Remember him?’ ‘Remember her?’’ Remember when they had a rumble on the playground?’ ‘You had the biggest crush on him!’ ‘Remember that teacher, he was a bit of a creep?’ ‘Remember when he fainted and cut his head open?’ ‘Remember when the Spice Girls came out and we all wanted to be them and she told me I had to be Sporty even though I wanted to be Posh?’ ‘Remember when a cat ate our class bird?’

Some kids can’t be found, one died in a car crash, another is in jail, some have married and their names have changed, many have moved to Australia and now have houses with big pools.

The memories surge and overtake the querying as to why they were taught the way they were, because they came through it right? They know what is right, and whatever that is, that Cook was wrong. They know that it’s okay for their own kids to be taught the Māori days of the week and maybe to have karakia at the start of the day. Except for those who don’t, for those who (ironically) say that things need to be in the official language, and that they don’t want their kids exposed because where will it take them? Perhaps they’ve forgotten that they also stood and recited a pepeha. The details might have been wrong but at one time, they knew how to acknowledge the land they lived on and the stream they lived beside.

Matariki Williams