[Note: the font in the images on this website cannot display the macrons in Māori long vowels. The Māori name for Auckland War Memorial Museum should read Tāmaki Paenga Hira]

This is one of the known seven remaining traditional Māori kites in the world and was collected by ethnologist Elsdon Best in the late 19th- early 20th century from Ngāi Tūhoe in Aotearoa-New Zealand. It is currently at Tāmaki Paenga Hira - Auckland War Memorial Museum.

Its name manu taratahi comes from the single plume of toetoe (a native New Zealand grass), at the pointed end of the kite, tara meaning point, and tahi meaning one. Māori kites in general are known as manu tukutuku, with manu referring to kite or bird, and tukutuku referring to the line or string being let out. They are also sometimes known as manu aute.

When I first started to look for a kite to add to this collection of playthings, I thought I might end up choosing something from Asia, and indeed my first searches involved the Jaipur Kite Festival, and the miniature kites made by accomplished Japanese kitemaker Nobuhiko Yoshizumi. I also repeatedly came across the statement that kites originated in China around 2300 years ago, and many references to Marco Polo seeing a man attached to a flying kite in 1282. I did not look further into these sources, though I have bookmarked the topic for the future, as I am sure it would be a fascinating, especially as regards attaching men to kites.

While idly looking through the collections of large museums in search of interesting kites from different parts of the world, I came across  this beautiful early 19th century manu aute ‘Birdman’ kite at the British Museum. It recalled the previous idea of men attached to kites – the idea of not a bird flying or floating, but rather a human being high in the sky, held up by the wind and linked to earth by a piece of string.

Māori kites are part of a rich tradition that brings together many aspects of life, including storytelling, myths, ceremony, and a specific world view. I turned to the collections of Aotearoa-New Zealand’s museums for more information about traditional Māori kites as playthings, given that I had only been reading about ceremonial or spiritual functions. Did children ever play with them?

One of the sources we can refer to is Games and Pastimes of the Maori (1925), where Elsdon Best describes children flying smaller, simpler kites such as this one, while adult men flew larger kites. He also includes accounts from other ethnologists who refer to kite-flying as a pastime for children, in addition to playing with strings (cat’s cradles) and tops, among other things.

As with other former colonies, the records and collections of ethnologists of this time are often the main source of information available. Over the years, Elsdon Best (1856-1931), who likely collected this kite while living in Te Urewera with the Tūhoe from 1895 to 1910, became ‘New Zealand’s foremost ethnographer of Māori society.’ Now, reading through his biography on the Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand, we also get a glimpse into our evolving, complex and complicated relationship with these kinds of sources:

“His works remain a valuable record of Māori tradition as recorded in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, the evolutionary and racial assumptions that informed his theorising detract seriously from their ethnological value. The historical accuracy of his reconstructions of Māori migrations and pre-European Māori society, based as they were on oral tradition and imagination, have also been increasingly questioned by archaeologists.”

The biography includes more personal details that give a glimpse into Best’s character, stating that his ‘strongly independent character found expression in his sartorial tastes. When walking around the Wellington district he had regularly worn a tartan kilt, and on occasions he wore a cowboy outfit purchased in the United States.’ 

In this video, which shows a photograph of our kite, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa curator Awhina Tamarapa tells us

“Māori kites are Taonga [treasured possessions] and for us, the living descendants, they connect us to the knowledge, customs and values of our ancestors. And so they provide really important links to our past for us in the present for the future. […]

There are seventeen known types of Māori kites, but traditional examples have survived of just three kinds. Certain kites were made for children to play with, and the larger kites were made for more ceremonial purposes and were used by Tohunga priests to foresee events and forecast into the future. […]

In terms of Māori Taonga in kites for instance, you are going into the realm of […] the natural world. From those natural materials, from Papatūānuku [the Earth Mother], you are creating something that can live.”

Māori New Year or Matariki, which occurs when the Pleiades cluster of stars, known locally as Matariki, first rises over the skies of New Zealand sometime around June, is a big kite-flying event in New Zealand.

One of the reasons for this is that this cluster of stars plays a part in one version of the Māori creation myth. It tells of Papatūānuku the Earth Mother and Ranginui the Sky Father being locked together in a tight embrace that forced their children to live in unbearable darkness. One of their children, Tāne, the god of forests and birds, kicked them apart to let in the light. Tāwhirimāte, the god of the wind and storms, got so angry about this that he tore out his eyes and threw them into the sky. The two meanings of Matariki are ‘little eyes’ (mata riki) or ‘eyes of God’ (mata ariki).

Last year Matariki was declared a public holiday for the first time in New Zealand. Part of the celebrations include a kite day, where families gather to fly kites to symbolically connect heaven and earth.

As I looked through all this new information and new (to me) stories, there was something at the back of my mind that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I looked up, trying to make the thought crystallise, and instinctively touched my belly button – that was it. Strings and lines as umbilical cords of sorts, connecting heaven and earth, mooring us. What a beautifully delicate image.