Māori Textiles and Culture

• Published in: Czech Polar Reports
• Main Author: Smith, Catherine
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Amsterdam University Press 2023
• Subjects: Arctic
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.5117/9789463729086_ch02; https://scienceopen.com/book?vid=e05fecc4-a1a2-44d9-aa18-b85eba054b3e

Māori settled Aotearoa New Zealand from East Polynesia in the early-fourteenth century AD. Polynesian people travelled with a “portable economy,” importing domesticate food sources and textile crops. However, this suite of food and textile crops and animals was only partially successful in New Zealand due to the change from a tropical climate with little seasonality, to one that ranged from sub-tropical to sub-arctic zones across two large islands. Māori textiles thus show little resemblance to Pacific textiles, and provide material evidence of pervasive cultural change upon arrival. The migratory experience of Māori settling in Aotearoa created a sense of dislocation from the Pacific homeland, or, as Bhabha puts it, “unhomeliness.” The “in-between” space occupied by Māori on arrival in Aotearoa required the production of new cultural meanings, and textiles, this chapter argues, were a potent vehicle to do so.