After the return: exploring the life of maro kura through collaboration

Amongst the temporarily returned objects exhibited in the newly reopened Te Fare Iamanaha – Musée de Tahiti et des Îles (Tahiti, French Polynesia) was a maro kura. Ganā/Anaa (Tuāmotu) is the home island of this six-meter-long sacred chiefly girdle. As part of my PhD – for which I look at the aftermath of the returned objects to Tahiti from French and British museums – I went to Ganā to see if people still had memories of maro kura. Unfortunately, they were forgotten and everybody was in disbelief that such objects could have once been made by their ancestors.
This paper suggests that the return of objects is an enriching means for collaboratively unpacking their life stories and to support knowledge recovery. Fieldwork research has allowed my collaborators and I to share our perspectives on maro kura and reconstitute their past, present and future. I will discuss the various methods used to work with these objects: looking at pictures of them taken in museum storage; translating, studying and sharing the journal of Hugh Cuming – who collected the returned maro kura in Ganā amongst others – as well as Kenneth Emory’s writings on weaving; and doing experiments with plants, dye and weaving techniques. Finally, as a PhD researcher, I will reflect on the advantages and disadvantages of my position in such collaborative work. While I can navigate between museums and communities, financial, technical and geographical limits sometimes hinder an even access to information and objects.