Imagining our own approaches

Abstract

I spent some formative years of my life either in the back of museums or their basements helping my father, a scholar of Māori Studies, and keeping myself out of trouble. In the late 1960s I had one small job in the library basement of the Peabody Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, typing new labels for the captains’ log books of ships that were sailing during the American Revolution. I read most of those journals that consisted of pages and pages of wind directions with the rare glimpse of an encounter with another ship or a list of supplies. Why were we there in Salem when we came from Aotearoa, New Zealand? We were there because Salem was the home base for ships that sailed into the Pacific and returned home with collections of materials from the various Pacific Islands countries they visited. My father was studying elaborately carved items from the Marquesa Islands that looked very much like Māori designs.