New Zealand’s Maori rediscover themselves in tattoos
Paul Watson / Los Angeles Times
Oriana McLeod endured the stinging pain of Mark Kopua’s tattoo gun for an hour and a half, and felt the better for it when she saw the design, which depicts the sea and the tossed net of Te Hukiad, a venerated ancestor and tribal leader. “I’ve just found a calling with my Maori-tanga, my Maoriness. It’s a reawakening,” she said.
Ta moko, an art form that once seemed destined for oblivion, is again a solemn declaration of the native people’s identity and dignity.
NEW PLYMOUTH, NEW ZEALAND — With a little ink, some stinging pain and a helping hand from the ancestors, Mark Kopua can heal a wounded soul.
He is a modern master of an ancient art called ta moko, one of the world’s oldest forms of tattooing and a renewed source of pride for New Zealand’s indigenous Maori people.
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To those who know how to read the twists, turns and spirals of the ink lines, they tell a rich history of a person’s accomplishments and ancestry. The centuries-old designs turn the faces and bodies of women and men into testaments to their identity, and offer spiritual healing.
“I learned very quickly that moko was therapy for people,” Kopua said. “If you ail inside, and you get taken to a grandparent for advice, the elders are involved in your healing. This is very similar to that.”
The designs have both fascinated and frightened outsiders for generations. In the 19th century, curiosity seekers traded gunpowder with the Maori for the tattooed heads of their dead warriors. Dozens of the dried heads are in a macabre collection hidden away in New York’s American Museum of Natural History.
The tattoos also brought scorn on the Maori from missionaries and other foreigners who saw them as primitive. Even today, some Maori adorned with moko complain that they suffer discrimination when looking for work, or just a drink at a bar.
But in recent years, as Maori stand up to safeguard their culture, an art that once seemed doomed by the onslaught of Western culture is again a solemn declaration of Maori identity and dignity. Their sacred, serpentine designs now adorn foreign celebrities such as British pop star Robbie Williams and boxer Mike Tyson, and Maori are vigorously defending their claim over motifs that many feel are being exploited by outsiders.