Images of displacement: Portraits of Māori in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.

Abstract

A collection of portraits of Māori, painted in Nelson in the early 1840s by English-born Isaac Coates, was rediscovered in 2005 at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. The subjects include Ngāti Toa rangatira (chief) Te Rauparaha, and while others remain unidentified, the collection—the subject of a 2012 publication—is recognised as an invaluable historical record. It represents a wide range of Māori society, at a time of widespread disruption and demographic change. It is likely the collection entered the Pitt Rivers between 1887 and 1902, a period of British imperial expansion when Indigenous material was being amassed and fitted into European notions of social development. The Pitt Rivers, whose extensive Māori and Pacific holdings include its Cook-Voyage Collections, has recently carried out major changes to displays which reinforced stereotypical attitudes towards Indigenous cultures. More broadly, museums are now recognising the part colonialism played in the formation of their collections. This has resulted in a number of instances of repatriation, as in the return of stolen Māori and Moriori ancestral remains to TePapa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand in 2022. Discussions continue, as on such well-known cases as the Parthenon marbles, held in the British Museum, and Benin objects resulting from a British punitive expedition in 1897 and now held in a large number of institutions worldwide.