The Iwirākau Project: A Collaborative Waiapu Approach

The Iwirākau Project was a collaboration that stretched from urban museums to remote rural marae – the meeting grounds constituted of buildings centred on carved houses in Māori communities – between a Māori writer and a Māori photographer both with tribal connections to Ngāti Porou Tūturu on the East Coast of Te Ika-a-Māui (North Island) of Aotearoa (New Zealand). This area is referred to as Te Riu o Waiapu, the Waiapu Valley, named for the ancestral mother river, and home to many meeting houses carved by men trained in the Iwirākau tradition between 1830 and 1930. This article examines the cultural guidance required to take the camera on to marae and into carved meeting houses to photograph ancestral places. Over the five-year span of working together, new ways of understanding Māori spiritual guardianship of images emerged, aligning with concepts of photographic sovereignty. In conjunction with elders, new tikanga (protocols) for the ethics of photographing, seeking permission, publishing, and returnin...