Magazines - Tribal Art Autumn 2009

By Robert K. Paterson

Introduction
The return of an eighteenth-century brass replica of a New Zealand Maori club by the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, to the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Oregon in 2005 signalled just the latest phase in the long life of a quintessentially “artificial curiosity.” Few histories of an object can be more evocative of how locations and possessors’ identities can influence how we perceive material things.
The object in question is one of forty brass replicas of a Maori hand club (patu onewa) commissioned by the British naturalist Sir Joseph Banks (fig. 1) with the intent that they be taken on Captain James Cook’s subsequent voyages to the Pacific. Patu onewa are short clubs made of polished, dark, fine-grained basalt with a hole drilled through the grip (fig. 3). A great deal of labor was involved in their manufacture and they were highly prized by the Maori. It appears that Banks was sufficiently impressed on seeing these clubs on Cook’s first voyage (1768–1772) that he decided to have brass versions of them made for taking on future expeditions. In so doing, he emulated other attempts to make replicas of Pacific artifacts, both by Europeans and even Polynesians themselves (Coote, pp. 49–51). Banks did not accompany Cook again after the first voyage, so he was not ultimately in control of how the replicas were distributed, and it is unclear whether he intended them only for distribution among the Maori. It is also not known why Banks chose the basalt version of a Maori hand club over those fashioned from nephrite, whale bone, or wood, though these materials may have been less well-suited to modeling in brass.