Illuminating the Invisible: An analysis of the importance of Women and their Cloth and Fibre Arts exchanges at the Rangihoua/Te Hohi Mission from 1814 to 1823

Abstract

Seeds were planted of new aggregated cloth-and-fibre art practices when Māori women first met Pākehā women at Rangihoua/Te Hohi, the first Church Missionary Society (CMS) Mission in Aotearoa New Zealand in 1814. These women discovered that their shared gendered responsibilities, such as clothing the whānau and educating the daughters, meant they could easily find common ground between themselves. On 22 June 1815 the art of hand-sewing with cloth entered the world of Māori garment-making and wearing, initially as a means of women’s cross-cultural communication. By December 1820 a Māori woman who lived in the Rangihoua/Te Hohi mission had made a sampler, a statement of educational achievement usually recorded in embroidered pattern on a piece of cloth, and sent it to the Secretary of the CMS in London. This sampler was likely to have made visible the otherwise silent voices of some, if not all, of the women at the mission. The mission archival records were overwhelmingly written by evangelical English-speaking men affiliated to the Church of England, writing for an audience of like-minded Christian English-speaking men wherever they lived. Early missionary settlers’ letters rarely mentioned their wives, let alone the Māori women with whom their wives interacted or any of the women’s shared activities. There are no letters in the authentic hands of any of the 1814 women known to exist. Yet the few cloth objects which survive from this pivotal moment turn the spotlight to these women, expand the scant written mentions of women’s cloth and fibre activities in their husband’s letters, and provide a mission-based source and perspective for their stories. To understand the legacy of the artistic seeds that were consciously and/or unconsciously planted, it is first necessary to know these women’s stories. Introduced are the women who came with their toolboxes, which enabled this bicultural technological transfer of hand-sewn significance to occur. The chapters introduce hand-sewn objects, where available, around which their lives, contributions to historical records and legacy of new cloth-and-fibre practices can be examined – Dinah Hall and purposeful flag-making, Hannah King and garment-making and teaching, and Jane Kendall and fragments of a wedding dress that was not hers. The “sampler” marked by “Oreo” – the punctuation is in the original document – concludes the decade.