Maori shrunken head begins journey home

AFP/Rouen

Singing laments and incantations, tribal leaders yesterday reclaimed the tattooed, mummified head of a Maori warrior from France, more than a century after Europeans took the mystic relic away. At the town hall in Rouen, northwest of Paris, Maori elders sang a song of thanks in their own language and rubbed noses in a traditional Maori greeting with local Mayor Valerie Fourneyron, dressed in her tricolour sash. They then signed a restitution agreement for the head, known in Maori as a Toi Moko - the first ever to be returned from France. “This journey is about reuniting this Toi Moko with his homeland,” said Michelle Hippolite, a Maori director of the Te Papa national museum in Wellington. “While Toi Moko have been a curiosity for people to enjoy, they are still our ancestors.” A low double note blown on a conch shell signalled the start of the funeral rite in a town hall chamber usually used for marriages. Rouen Museum director Sebastien Minchin brought the head in a box covered by a black veil and placed it solemnly on a table under the gaze of a bust of Marianne, symbol of the French Republic. Maori elders covered it with a traditional cape as one of them, Te Kanawa Pitiroi, stood with his ceremonial wooden baton and recited incantations in Maori, hailing the fallen warrior. He and three companions sang lamentations as the head was carried out to begin its long voyage home. It was due to land back in New Zealand in the coming days. “It was quite emotional, seeing something from the old world, which we don’t have much of these days, return back to us,” said Moko Smith, 24, a Maori student in Paris who attended with shark’s teeth dangling from his ears. The head, which tribal custom forbids from being photographed or filmed, has been housed in the Museum of Rouen since 1875. Minchin said it was given by a “Mr Drouet” of Paris, but no other details of its journey to Rouen are known. A computerised image of the Rouen head gives a haunting impression of a high cheekboned youth masked with swirling green tattoos, a crooked-toothed grimace and a gruesome gash where one eye should be. Experts will carry out genetic tests on the head to try to identify its tribe of origin so it can be returned to its people, buried and allowed to decompose, at rest at last after years of political quibbling. Rouen authorities decided to return the head in 2007 but were overruled by the French government, which feared setting a precedent for other museum holdings such as Egyptian mummies or relics of Christian martyrs. The French Senate made an exception for the Maori remains last year, voting a law allowing the return to New Zealand of all Maori human heads held in France, estimated to number about 15. Hippolite said the Maori do not seek the return of their more recent warriors who died in France fighting in the World Wars in allied ANZAC units and lie in French war cemeteries. Maori warriors would tattoo their faces with elaborate geometric designs to show their rank. The recovered heads of those killed in battle were displayed and venerated until the soul was judged to have departed. The tattoos made them an object of fascination for European explorers who collected and traded them from the 18th century onwards, prompting the macabre practice of tattooing and then killing slaves just for their heads. “It’s a relief,” said Moko Smith. “I think it will really help calm the spirits of the heads and the tribes involved, whose ancestors they are.”