9.2 Interactions Within and Across Cultures in Pacific Art

The Pacific Ocean is the largest on Earth, and it is dotted with tens of thousands of islands. Big islands like New Guinea, volcanic peaks like Hawai'i and low rings of coral (atolls) like Nukuoro offer very different resources, so artists worked with very different materials. People reached New Guinea and Australia tens of thousands of years ago. Much later, starting roughly 3,500 to 4,000 years ago, the Lapita people and their descendants sailed east across open ocean, bringing crops, animals and pottery. The sea is everywhere in Pacific art, as both a highway and a barrier.

Europeans arrived from the 1500s, and most heavily after the mid-1700s. In the 1800s, the French explorer Dumont d'Urville divided the region into Micronesia ("small islands"), Polynesia ("many islands") and Melanesia ("black islands"). Trade, colonial rule and missionaries then changed what was made and why.

Navigation chart (Marshall Islands, Micronesia; 19th to early 20th century CE; wood and fiber). Marshallese navigators tied sticks of palm rib into frames showing how ocean swells move, bend around islands and cross each other. Shells or knots marked islands. Navigators studied a chart on land and memorized it; at sea they felt the swells through the canoe's hull. Each chart was personal and often readable only by its maker, so navigation knowledge stayed with trained families.

Staff god (Rarotonga, Cook Islands, central Polynesia; late 18th to early 19th century CE; wood, tapa, fiber, and feathers). Rarotongans carved long wooden staffs with a head at the top and rows of small figures, possibly showing generations of descendants. Most of the staff was wrapped in a huge roll of tapa, sometimes with red feathers and pearl shell inside. The wrapping contained and protected the god's mana. In the 1820s, after London Missionary Society missionaries arrived, converts handed their gods over. Missionaries stripped and burned many, cut off parts they found offensive, and sent some to London as trophies of conversion; the British Museum has a rare staff god still in its wrapping.

Buk (mask) (Torres Strait; mid- to late 19th century CE; turtle shell, wood, fiber, feathers, and shell). The Torres Strait islands lie between Australia and New Guinea. Artists heated plates of turtle shell, bent them into shape and stitched them together, a technique special to this region. The Met's buk combines a human face with a frigate bird above it, perhaps a personal totem, plus feathers and fiber hair. Senior men wore such masks with rustling grass costumes in funeral ceremonies and rites for good harvests and fishing, acting out stories of culture heroes. Masked rituals faded after missionaries arrived in 1871.

Tamati Waka Nene (Gottfried Lindauer; 1890 CE; oil on canvas). Lindauer, a painter from Bohemia (now in the Czech Republic), settled in New Zealand and painted many Maori leaders, often from photographs. Tamati Waka Nene, a Ngapuhi chief who died in 1871, urged other chiefs to sign the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 and fought on the British side in the 1840s Northern War. The realistic European oil portrait shows his full ta moko (facial tattoo), which records identity and rank, a kahu kiwi (kiwi-feather cloak), a greenstone ear pendant and a carved weapon called a tewhatewha. For Maori descendants, such portraits embody the ancestor and are treated as taonga (treasures), greeted and spoken to: a European medium given Maori meaning.

Presentation of Fijian mats and tapa cloths to Queen Elizabeth II (Fiji, Polynesia; 1953 CE; multimedia performance (costume; cosmetics, including scent; chant; movement; and pandanus fiber/hibiscus fiber mats), photographic documentation). In December 1953, during her tour of the Commonwealth, the new queen visited Fiji, then a British colony. Fijians welcomed her with ceremonies that included presenting finely woven mats and bark cloth. Women in layered costumes, scented with coconut oil, moved and chanted as they presented the gifts.

The work is the event itself, known today through photographs and film. Gift exchange in Fiji follows strict rules about who gives what to whom, and a gift creates obligations both ways. So the ceremony honored the queen, but on Fijian terms, in Fiji's own customs of status and reciprocity. It shows how a Pacific culture used its own traditions to shape an encounter with colonial power.