In the immediate aftermath of the US Civil war, white writers bitter at no longer being able to enslave people complained in letters to the editor about seeing Black perambulating on city streets and country roads. They accused the walkers they saw as wanderers of shirking work.
Generations later, historians, many of them Black, consulted the records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. The federal agency known as the Freedmen’s Bureau was tasked with providing relief to formerly enslaved people. Historians found in statements taken by Freedmen’s Bureau staff who spoke to the newly freed accounts that showed the walkers were far from aimless. Though they often had few clues to guide them, they were out searching for family members who had been sold away. Daughters and sons, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters who had been wrenched from their families sometimes decades before, but never forgotten. Black people were on the road determined to reunite their families as they started new lives as citizens, no longer chattel.
The Freedmen's Bureau records give us an insider's view of an episode to which outsiders brought little understanding. I thought of that as I read "The Old Time Maori" by Makereti Papakura. Papakura traced her lineage through oral history to Polynesians who arrived in the 1350s by canoe to settle in what we today call New Zealand's North Island. She went on to study at Oxford University in England, where she used notes she made and journals she kept over a lifetime to write her anthropological account of the economy, cosmology, family relationships and customs of her Te Arawa Maori community. Her work was published as a book in 1938.
Papakura wrote -- sometimes with sadness or defensiveness, sometimes with understated humor, always with empathy -- with a double consciousness that will be familiar to African Americans. She knew what Europeans thought of Maori civilization, which an English scholar who wrote the introduction to "The Old Time Maori" described as Neolithic. Papakura had read, for example, accounts by Captain James Cook, who explored the South Pacific in the 1700s for England's Royal Society, and French explorer Julien Crozet's “Voyage à la mer du sud,” published in 1783. In one passage in "The Old Time Maori" Papakura quotes from John Liddiard Nicholas's "Narrative of a Voyage to New Zealand," the British entrepreneur's account of his visit to New Zealand with missionaries in 1814-1815.
Maori farms, Nicholas wrote, were generally far from homes, "and the latter are always constructed upon either the summit or at the foot of some high and almost inaccessible hill. This is most certainly occasioned by that state of disunited barbarism and feudal enmity in which the different tribes reside among each other; who, having no moral institutions, but resorting on all occasions to physical strength, are obliged to choose those places for their defence which is best calculated for that purpose, without any regard to the barrenness or fertility of the situation."
Papakura corrects Nicholas. She describes, for instance, agricultural practices refined over generations that allowed her people to raise an abundance -- in terms of volume and variety -- of crops and live a communal life. Homes were often built on hot springs, which were used for cooking meals and made the land unsuitable for farming. Europeans, Papakura wrote, did not realize what they were seeing, or saw through racist lenses, so "have not known or have failed to note the extensive plantations of the Maori and so have failed to give a just account of their economic organization.''
That organization and much else was disrupted by European colonialism.
Papakura does not romanticize the people she knew so well. They were human, therefore flawed. Her book also explores crime and punishment and war, which existed among the Maori as in any culture. She writes forthrightly, fitting for a Maori.
“There was no such thing as mock modesty among the Maori people,” she wrote. “In their vocabulary there was no word considered rude; no bodily functions were treated as unworthy of mention in plain language. To this admirable frankness, the high moral standing of the people is probably traceable.”
I first learned about Papakura and was inspired to find and read her book during a visit this summer to Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum, which holds some of her and her family's ceremonial clothing and other items.
Pitt Rivers stores and displays more than 500,000 anthropological, ethnographic and archaeological artifacts collected over 130 years for the most part by British colonial officers, soldiers, missionaries, researchers and curators.
The museum closed for three years to make a kind of ethnographic assessment of itself. When it reopened in 2020, it acknowledged that many of its objects were described in terms that were derogatory or reinforced stereotypes. It has undertaken to correct that record.
"The history of the Pitt Rivers Museum is tied to British imperial expansion and the colonial mandate to collect and classify objects from all over the world," according to the museum's description of itself written after the three-year hiatus. "The processes of colonial 'collecting' were often inequitable and even violent towards those peoples being colonised."
Its new mission is to be a "space for self-determination and to bring silenced knowledge systems and voices to the centre of museum practices, as a means of resistance against the existing dominant colonial structures."
Papakura and the items she and her family donated to the museum, which can feel like a Victorian attic, stand out because she was not an imperialist. A display on her that I saw at the museum was presented as central to the new mission of decolonization at Pitt Rivers.
I learned at Pitt Rivers about Papakura’s birth in Aotearoa, New Zealand in 1873 to a Maori mother and an English father, and her mother's family raising her in a village for her first 10 years. In her book, I read that in her village, children "went to bed at sunset and rose at sunrise, and when they lay down on the whariki (floor mats in a multigenerational dwelling ) the children heard from their elders the history of their people, their folklore, and other stories, which delighted them until they fell asleep."
That is how she learned her genealogy, which she could recite back to the 1300s. A culture without a written language prized storytelling, oratory and memorization, and Maori passed those passions on to their children as the treasures they were.
Later Papakura’s father, a shopkeeper, sent her to English schools and hired a governess for her. As an adult she worked as a guide, including for British royalty who visited her homeland. In 1911 she went to England for a "Festival of Empire," and helped launch a 45-foot Maori canoe at the Henley Regatta. She settled in Oxford, where she began anthropology studies in 1927.
Papakura died in 1930, weeks before she was due to present her thesis. Thomas Kenneth Penniman, a fellow anthropologist who went on to be the Pitt Rivers curator from 1939 to 1963, worked with her family and community in New Zealand to have her thesis published as a book. Oxford calls it the first ethnographic study published by a Maori author. The university awarded her a posthumous master's this year.
I was disappointed the book wasn't for sale in the Pitt Rivers gift shop. I had to wait to get home from holiday to order a copy, a 2013 reprinting. I found it to be serious scholarship with this compelling lesson for anyone anywhere in the world.
Papakura writes, "the life of a Maori was surrounded with love from his infancy, and this love continued through the whole of his life. A person has to realize this thoroughly, and understand all the Maori customs, knowing why he does certain things and not others, before he can sit down and write about the Maori. Otherwise his criticisms lack understanding."