The involvement of tangata whenua and iwi throughout the exhibition process had an impact on the development of museum practices in New Zealand and globally in regard to Indigenous and source community authority.
[4] Tamaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum holds a large collection of Māori taonga which historically followed an ethnographic framework to catalogue and display material culture.
[5] Until the late twentieth century museum visitors and staff were unlikely to be Māori, and taonga were interpreted in the light of Western intellectual frameworks.
[10] The idea of a major exhibition of Māori artworks that would tour the United States was first raised in 1973 by Douglas Newton, Evelyn A. J.
Hall and John A Friede from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, alongside Paul Cotton, the New Zealand Consul General in New York.
[11] In 1979 Douglas Newton and Wilder Green of the American Federation of Arts raised the idea again, and in 1981 the New Zealand Cabinet approved the exhibition in principle.
[1] Committee members included Māori anthropologist, historian and artist Sidney 'Hirini' Moko Mead, Mina McKenzie and Piri Sciascia.
Mobil's sponsorship posed a potential barrier to the exhibition, when Taranaki decided to withdraw consent for the inclusion of their taonga in 1983, due to coastal pollution coming from the partly Mobil-owned Motonui synthetic petrol plant.
In 1983, the National Museum trialled this method of display, exhibiting taonga from their collections that would be shown in Te Maori at the Academy of Fine Arts.
[22] This included dawn ceremonies, traditional karakia, speeches in Māori, waiata and kapa haka, during which some warriors had moko on their faces.
[23] Carvers and weavers were invited to travel from New Zealand to demonstrate their craft at each US venue, including James Rickard, Taparoto Nicholson, Rangi Hetet and Erenora Puketapu-Hetet.
[31][32] Judy Lessing suggested the Te Māori gave Americans a more nuanced view of New Zealand, otherwise widely known in the United States for banning of nuclear-powered vessels.
[34] In 1998 Amiria Salmond acknowledged the success of the exhibition for: the beauty of the pieces on display, and for the way in which indigenous and Euro-American traditions were woven together in fertile co-operation between Maori scholar Sidney Moko Mead and curators from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The objects were treated at once as pieces of fine art, aesthetically refined and masterly in their execution, and as ancestors, material embodiments of relationships between people and the land.
[35]The exhibition faced some critique, with commentary pointing out its exclusion of Māori fibre art and weaving, toi raranga.
[36] American Anthropologist James Clifford suggested this was a deliberate decision by Māori to raise the international prestige of their culture and push for global recognition of New Zealand.
[27] In 1984 a Television New Zealand programme Koha – Te Māori, a Cloak of Words by Ray Waru and Ernie Leonard covered the exhibition and featured the kapa haka at the pōwhiri (opening ceremony) lead by Pita Sharples.
[48][49] The exhibition prompted Mobil to focus on Māori authors and in 1984 a panel of New Zealand judges was set up to select a work to be put forward for the Prize.