Special consideration does need to be given to the digitisation and online delivery of resources which are considered to be Mātauranga Māori. There is a need to protect these taonga and to try to ensure that they are not misused or exploited. However simply preventing access and rejecting digitisation is not necessarily the right choice. Work can be in copyright and still publicly accessible. In the same way much historical material which contains or is Mātauranga Māori could be made generally accessible while still asserting a moral right to the knowledge and providing a context in which the resources should be seen and used. Communities should be able to describe and contextualize their culturally and historically significant collections in their own words and from their own perspectives. That should be part of the digitisation and online delivery of the resources.

We are currently in the middle of gathering as much contextual material and informed commentary as possible. We already have several works by Elsdon Best online which discuss moko and we will be digitising or linking to a number of relevant articles from the Journal of the Polynesian Society and Journal of the Anthropological Institute. We are working to gather as much material as possible specifically from a Māori perspective so we will be linking to relevant articles in Te Ao Hou, digitising an article from Te Iwi o Aotearoa (if permission is given), and adding the text of the 1854 Te Rangikaheke manuscript "Mo Te Tainga Moko" to the collection along with D R Simmons English translation. We are also keen to add contemporary commentaries and will be republishing, amongst others, Christina Thompson's 2006 essay "Smoked Heads" as a paper from Mervyn Tano (Director of the International Institute for Indigenous Resource Management) on "Mokomokai: Commercialisation and Desacrilisation".

We would be really interested in hearing your opinion of the value (or otherwise) of the proposed project.

You should post this thread on aocafe.com

So if it was only meant to be viewed by certain people, then it should be left offline. If it was meant to be read by anyone and everyone, then by all means, make it publicly available. I think as long as the wishes of the dead are respected, there really shouldn't be a problem.

Moa: Thanks for the suggestion to post to aocafe.com - the more opinions I can get, the easier(?) it will be to make an informed decision about this text. Also, if there are some Samoan texts that you can suggest (preferably out of copyright) then we would be interested to here from you.

tane_ariki: The book was written by an Major-General Horatio Gordon Robley, an English soldier that was stationed here during the land wars. He intended the text for English readers. According to [url=http://www.teara.govt.nz/1966/R/RobleyMajor-generalHoratioGordon/RobleyMajor-generalHoratioGordon/en]Te Ara[/url] his intent was to put together a text to support the collection of drawings of moko that he'd made while stationed here and the collections of heads that he had procured himself.

The problem here is that, whatever his intentions, he does make quite a few misrepresentations of Maori in his text and he included images of moko (some of them drawn after bloody battles in the land wars where he went down to sketch the bodies of dead Maori) and mokomokai.

Part of our concern is how will people react when confronted with images of their tupuna?


Whāia e koe ki te iti kahurangi,

Kia tāpapa koe,

He maunga tiketike.

quote:

---

tane_ariki: The book was written by an Major-General Horatio Gordon Robley, an English soldier that was stationed here during the land wars. He intended the text for English readers. According to [url=http://www.teara.govt.nz/1966/R/RobleyMajor-generalHoratioGordon/RobleyMajor-generalHoratioGordon/en]Te Ara[/url] his intent was to put together a text to support the collection of drawings of moko that he'd made while stationed here and the collections of heads that he had procured himself.

The problem here is that, whatever his intentions, he does make quite a few misrepresentations of Maori in his text and he included images of moko (some of them drawn after bloody battles in the land wars where he went down to sketch the bodies of dead Maori) and mokomokai.

---

Samantha-Your welcome for the link to aocafe. I think aocafe.com has some very qualified people to speak on such a subject. I saw your poll and it's important to take into account the wide accessibility of non-maori and trolls who could also vote. So emphasis should be on those who posted.

Edited by - moa on May 29 2007 12:31:28 AM

ie: In hawaii a court case has been happening over some time now. Some Hawaiian remains that were found in old burial sites on Hilo and found their way into museums ( i think it was the Bishop???) Some kanaka maoli hawaiians took the remains back - without the museums knowledge o permission - by removing them from the museum , back to Hilo. The Hawaiian community has been polarized by this incident. one group feel it only right and natural (Kapu being considered )that their ancestors be laid to rest once again. Where as another group of hawaiians just as passionate want the remains to remain in the museum for public viewing as a means of education and a link to a past that some parts of have dissappeared completely - so for some a means of further understanding what was thought was once lost - from the taonga that may be with the body(ies), the clothing, mats, tapa/kapa etc that may give further insight into cuture and custom?

both valid - how does one reconcile such veiws?

just like mokomokai or photos/ images related to dead ancestors.

Their are no doubt similar arguments.

Though i think where an individual or individuals (group) can be identified - perhaps whanau or elders be represented and heard on thier respected rights to their own family or people.

I did a mural once and wanted include aboriginal people from the area of Nowra in NSW, so i met with community representatives and they then in appreciation they explained what was permissable and what was not.

Where also if a link to a image or persons is unrealised - who then makes decision on the use of such things?

That haveing been said - i truely feel that sometimes the more we can learn , realise and identify with, the richer we all may be for it in the long run - knowledge is power and the keeprs of that knowledge hold that power!

perhaps we all need to share in that power!

Edited by - Mikey on Jun 06 2007 8:54:54 PM

After a great deal of consultation we have been able to come to a decision about digitisation of "Moko": you can read more about the process of consultation here - http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-MokoDiscussionPaper.html

Nga mihi nui to all those who posted here and to those who posted to a similar board at Aocafe.com.

If anyone wants to comment on the paper feel free to post here.

Of Maori & Fijian Soldiers taking part in the great war - images of Haka in the Sinai etc

very old photos , the books are from 1918 i think?

will get around to scanning them later!

The books are

THE GREAT WAR by H.W.Wilson ( whole volume set )

Edited by - Mikey on Nov 13 2007 5:38:07 PM

The collection can be found here http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-corpus-moko.html

The project was centred on the digitisation of an annotated copy of the 1896 publication “Moko; or Māori Tattooing ” by Horatio Gordon Robley. An additional six texts have also been digitised to provide contextual information about Ta Moko, mokamokai, Robley himself and his art. These texts include

* A manuscript on moko prepared by Wiremu Maihi Te Rangikaheke in the 1850s for Sir George Grey * "Robley — Soldier with a Pencil" by L. W. Melvin (1957) * "Mokomokai: Commercialization and Desacralization" by Christian Palmer and Mervyn L. Tano (2004) * "Smoked Heads" by Christina Thompson (2006) * "Robley: Te Ropere, 1840—1930" by Timothy Walker (1985)

The project raised various issues for the NZETC because, notwithstanding the status of the Robley text as a significant part of our documentary heritage, the Centre recognised that the mātauranga that it contained belonged to the wider Māori community and providing online access to this material had the potential to offend as much as to inform. The NZETC therefore undertook consultation with a range of groups such as academics, librarians and the general public, as well as source groups, Māori and Ta Moko artists. As a result of these conversations “Moko; or Māori Tattooing ” has been made freely accessible online with additional contextual material and those images depicting mokamokai or human remains have been suppressed and cannot be viewed. The same approach has been taken to all other images in the NZETC collection.

The decision to provide contextual resources and to suppress parts of the digitised book is an attempt to balance the interests of scholarship in the integrity of the work, the importance of free public access to New Zealand’s documentary record, the need to respect the tupuna depicted in Robley’s illustrations, and the need to inform readers about the context in which the text was created. A full report of the project provides more details on the issues that were considered. It can be read here http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-MokoDiscussionPaper.html.

We would welcome feedback on the project and the paper.

I applaud your foresight coming into this forum to gauge popular reaction to your project. I know of a certain person that works in the Wellington archives that has been entrusted with the digitisation of maori manuscripts, news paper articles and other miscellaneous texts currently being stored in the Archives but are currently un-searchable, except in person, due to the fact that they exist only as hard copy documents.

Also the many photos un named of maori rangatira and tutua alike stored without a connection to their descendents as they were not indexed or given to the people in question. A very sad fact. As I browsed the many photos there i couldnt help wonder how proud some people would have been to have such excellent quality images of thier tupuna in their posession.

The sadest part being, they will never get a name put to them and therefore are lost forever as unknown images..

Tena koe and I look forward to reading this document should it be published.

likewise text and the ta moko book. Digitise and publish is in the interest of everyones knowledge advancement.

The days of gate keeping of knoweldge are long gone (unless of course you work for TPK).

I respect the need to be sensitive, but i emphasize the need to have a free for all knowledge approach amongst Maori, or we gate keep ourselves into ignorance

DDD

I have to agree that it is a great shame that there is such a large amount of information, textual and images, that would mean a great deal to whanau if only they were aware it existed! Some institutions are trying to address this - for example Otago University's library has digitised a number of the photographs from the Hocken Collections in a digital collection called 'He Taonga Mokemoke' (http://digital.otago.ac.nz/) as an attempt to identify the tupuna within them and making that information available to whanau, hapu and iwi. I don't know if this approach would be popular with other archival collections but it would be great if it were!

and DDD: I agree with your opinion, but like many working in the library/archives environment, we are inevitably concerned with the possible backlash of going about digitising images and knowledge in which we only share a right to - other people who have a share have a right to say in how that material is made available to the wider public.

Freely available access to matauranga maori for maori raises the question of how you'd go about restricting access to non-maori. There are sites out there that are iwi or hapu specific but I think that to have sites that were for maori only would raise the paranoia levels above what they already are (see aocafe.com). Whether we should care about that particular response is another question entirely.

Nga mihi nui to you both for your comments.

Would we also restrict those many many thousands of maori, who have become urbanised, lost ties with their roots and are unable to prove or identify they are maori.

Would we also restrict those many thousands of maori, who have very small amounts of maori blood, and have always been classed as pakeha by their looks, but deep within are yearning to learn about their tupuna??

Idealists would say that these later two groups should return to their marae. yet we all know the huge barriers this poses in reality, and the fact that such a re alignment with papakainga can take a life time.

Elitest maori thinking, that reinforces traditonalist control freak Maori idealism should never be bowed down to.

Photographs and text are seperate issues.

Photographs that can be identified by family, obviously go back to the family for authorization

Text , should be digitized and made available under most circumstances. You use the term "share a right". The same term can be applied to absolutely anything that is currently publicly available.

If there is a trade off to be made between fear of causing offence and the freeing up of knowledge for the growth of the all, then i would err toward freeing up knowledge.

this is actually quite a serious topic, as it pertains to the way in which we as maori see matauranga. and see the future development of knowledge amongst ourselves.

The practice of concealing knowledge has to eradicated from our people,. Or we will never grow fully ; .. to our fullest potential

DDD

One of the comments made by a te reo tutor of mine was that tikanga is something that is dynamic, it changes in response to pressures from within and without and that to try and 'lock it down' (restrict access/be hostile to change) can hinder it more than it protects.