Magazines - Tribal Art Autumn 2010

By Alex Copeland, an associate editor for Tribal Art magazine.

Introduction
The following pages showcase a little-known series of hand-colored prints depicting scenes of Maori village life in New Zealand’s Rotorua region in the early twentieth century. Produced most likely for publicity purposes for the New Zealand Department of Tourism, these images were taken at the Whakarewarewa Thermal Village, which had been constructed in the first decade of the twentieth century as a tourist attraction and model exhibit of the nation’s indigenous culture. Though not intended as deliberately exploitative and engaged with more or less voluntarily by the local Maori population, this state-conceived “living exhibition” was a product of the ever-growing dominance of the European-derived government’s influence over Maori life that had been underway since the former was first established.