Cook Islands

Art Historical Description

The traditional manufacture of tapa in the Cook Islands was technically complex and more diverse than several other parts of Polynesia. In particular, there were important differences in fabric style and usage between the archipelago’s different islands – reflecting the group’s particularly complex history of multiple settlement episodes from several different ancestral homelands, including Tahiti, Samoa and Tonga. That diversity reflects the fact that the Cooks have long been in continuous contact with not only one another, but also the Society and Austral Islands, and there are several basic similarities between tapa manufactured in this region: The harvested bast was given a prolonged retting soak prior to fermentation in a moist clamp, then fully fused into a single layer, and generally finished with a delicate linear beater mark. In the Cooks, however, the finished fabric was in general slightly thicker and more robust than many Tahitian cloths, and the beater mark commensurately more widely spaced.

The Hunterian and Kew collections both contain important examples of Cook Islands tapa acquired in the mid-19th century by missionaries of the London Missionary Society, which ultimately became the Cook Islands Christian Church (CICC) of today – including the Reverends George Turner and William Wyatt Gill. That said, early photographs show that tapa was little worn in the Cooks by the 1880s, having been replaced by imported textiles and domestically-grown cotton from the 1830s onwards. It was still being made for dance costumes and chiefly ceremony on Mangaia, and the anthropologist Te Rangi Hiroa was still able to ethnographically document its manufacture on Mangaia and Aitutaki in the late 1920s, although it seems to have disappeared entirely by the mid-20th century. Around the millennium, interest in the heritage of tapa seems to have revived, and at the present time people on both Aitutaki and Mangaia are renewing the art.

References

• Hiroa, T.R. (Buck, P.H.) (1944). Arts and crafts of the Cook Islands. Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press

Images

Making Barkcloth

Characteristic Materials

Characteristic Techniques

dry-pulled cortex stripping; long retting bast soak; fermentation; initial beating – wooden anvil and square beater; fusing composition; linear beater marking; crossed linear beater marking; immersion dyeing; serrated edging; hand painting

Characteristic Fabric Types

Barkcloth within Cook Islands – Rarotonga

Although the Maori lexicographer Stephen Savage recorded a number of traditional fabric types in his dictionary of Rarotongan Maori, it is not always easy to recognise them in museum collections, as objects rarely have a provenance which ties them to specific islands (or, in many cases, even the correct nation). One of the primary ways in which we can be more-or-less certain that a fabric is Rarotongan in origin is if it conforms to those fabrics on the very few remaining complete ki‘iki‘i (‘staff gods’). These fabrics include a small range of hand-painted monochrome motifs: Rows of small squares with borders staggered brickwork-fashion; borders infilled with chevrons; broad columns of zigzags (either white on black or vice versa); or broad columns of white diamonds interspersed with cross-hatched hourglass-shapes (or again, vice versa). The protestant missionary Charles Pitman introduced both cotton plants and looms to Rarotonga during the late 1830s, while his wife began teaching Maori women the skills of spinning, weaving and European needlework.

Characteristic Materials

Characteristic Techniques

Characteristic Fabric Types

autea; pakoko (pakakū); pakoko-iri; ‘apa‘ā; piri; kaka‘u-aoa; kaka‘u-mati

References

• Chapman-Mason, J.T. (2017). The tutunga is silent now: the lost art of tapa making in the Cook Islands. In: M. Charleux, ed. Tapa: from tree bark to cloth: an ancient art of Oceania: from Southeast Asia to Eastern Polynesia. Paris: Somogy, 330-337
• Pitman, C. (1836). The Rarotongan journal of the Reverend Charles Pitman, 1830-1836. London Missionary Society Archive. London: School of Oriental and African Studies

Barkcloth within Cook Islands – Mangaia

Thanks to the anthropological fieldwork of Te Rangi Hiroa during the late-1920s, we have a good understanding of Mangaian tapa manufacture, and a useful catalogue of named fabric types for the second-largest of the Cook Islands. One of the most distinctive features of Mangaian tapa was the production of elaborately cut-out and pinking-shear fringed fabrics – notably tiputa ponchos – during the mid-19th century.

Characteristic Materials

Characteristic Techniques

Characteristic Fabric Types

pa‘oa-tea; ‘upa‘a; tukutoa; tuku‘anga; pakoko (pakakū); parai mangu; tikoru (tikoru mata‘iapo)

References

• Hiroa, T.R. (Buck, P.H.) (1944). Arts and crafts of the Cook Islands. Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press
• Scothorn, H.L. (2015.) Tapa: cloth of our ancestors. In: R. Dixon, L. Crowl and M.J. Crocombe, eds. Cook Islands art and architecture. Avarua: USP Cook Islands, 132-149

Barkcloth within Cook Islands – Aitutaki

Aitutaki barkcloth was traditionally among the most colourful produced in the Cook Islands – the combination of orange turmeric-based and pinkish-red mati-based colourants being particularly magnificent together. Numerous dark fabric types were also produced by a broad range of different methods.

Characteristic Materials

Characteristic Techniques

aitutaki frame printing

Characteristic Fabric Types

‘apa‘ā (hapahā); pungavere; rarua; pa‘oa verevere ki te repo; piri; pareu; inaina; pokuru

References

• Scothorn, H.L. (2015.) Tapa: cloth of our ancestors. In: R. Dixon, L. Crowl and M.J. Crocombe, eds. Cook Islands art and architecture. Avarua: USP Cook Islands, 132-149

Version

Entry created on 28 August 2020