Dr Rangituatahi Te Kanawa – Rangi has been appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the 2023 King’s Birthday and Coronation Honours.
The Māori textiles specialist and conservator has been recognised for her services to Māori art and heritage preservation.
Rangi’s journey of knowledge began when she was a child, watching her mother, Diggeress Te Kanawa (CNZM and QSO), practice a range of arts, and spending time with her Nana – renowned weaver Dame Rangimārie Hetet.
“Nana loved weaving and she [had] this old shed at the back of the house. And I do distinctly remember that smell of harakeke being worked.
“Fresh like nothing else, it’s hard to explain.
“Sometimes it would really get up my nose, literally. [While] vacuuming the muka (flax fibre). And smelling it boiling instead of food.
“But now I love the smell of it. And there’s a buzz every time I see muka [fibre] come out of a leaf through the traditional method of extracting with the mussel shell.”
Rangi learned both traditional and new methods with flax.
“There would be piles of harakeke there, and she’d be stripping it … and I just knew, oh Nana loves flax. And that’s all we knew of it as a child.
“But then later on, as we grow up into teenagers, we would then be helping Nana put feathers together using some soap.
“Traditionally they used to use the pia harakeke.
“But we would use Sunlight soap and we would have a mountain of feathers.”
The pia harakeke is a gel at the bottom of the inside of the leaf which must be split open carefully; it forms a film if exposed to the sun.
That is one example of the intergenerational knowledge passed down to the Te Kanawa siblings and the wider weaving whanau.
Rangi was awarded her PhD in 2022, having previously gained a degree in the conservation in cultural materials and a Masters of Chemistry.
She relates to the term, doctor of philosophy, as being connected to the way a candidate explores a personal interpretation of their subject.
“You have to put your tinana (body), your thoughts into, what the subject is.
The PhD process helped Rangi connect with her history and identity.
“I know who I am. I learned the meaning of my name when I was 45 or something crazy like that – it means, ‘of the first heaven.’
“With the PhD, what it’s done is actually prepared me to deliver on the mātauranga of taonga kākahu.
“The title of my PhD is, ‘Exploring an approach of reconnecting taonga kākahu to tangata whenua.’”
Her project linked the individual black pigments to particular whenua around the country, she said.
“My PhD is identifying different hues of black. [They] are procured from different tannins, and different muds from different locations.
“[These are] a way, a means of identifying your whakapapa because your tannins in your paru are typical to your land.”
That was the science part, Rangi said. But not the whole story.
“In the practice of doing all of that, you’re connecting to te ao Māori. What I’d like to give to the next generations is to talk about that as well as [the] conservation work.”
The doctoral process had been “an absolute slog.”
“Kahu will tell you the same – I had times where I felt like a bit of a zombie, totally disconnected from everything else.
Rangi called on father Tana’s teachings for support.
“Dad taught me perseverance. Hang in there, hang in there, and you do it,” she said.
“Sleep deprivation just doesn’t come into the equation. If you’re tired, you just sort of pick yourself up again, and keep going.”
