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The exhibition Maori: leurs trésors sont une âme opened at the Musée du quai Branly, Paris, on 4 October 2011. This exhibition was initially staged as E Tu Ake: Maori Standing Strong at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa) in Wellington, New Zealand, in 2010- 2011. It then travelled to France for three and a half months, before going on tour to Mexico City and Quebec.
E Tu Ake was the first Maori exhibition in a French museum created in New Zealand and developed with the input of the tribal descendants of the taonga (treasures). It was also the first international collaboration between these two important national museums. This partnership was not only concerned with the display of Maori taonga, but also coincided with the repatriation of toi moko (Maori preserved heads) from French institutions, a lengthy and contested repatriation process beginning with the Natural History Museum in Rouen which in 2011 returned the only toi moko from their collection. Since a law change in 2009, the French government has allowed institutions such as museums, hospitals, and universities to return toi moko, but not human remains in general, to their land of origin. This controversial event led the staff of the museum in Rouen to initiate wider discussions with Maori staff from Te Papa about the care and management of their Maori collection and, in particular, assistance with building a new permanent exhibition around their Pacific collection.
However, with the quai Branly it seems that initially the staff were not in favour of repatriating the seven toi moko in their collection, but they were interested in working with Te Papa on an innovative exhibition project. At first their objectives appear to have been primarily museological through collaboration with Maori curators, but over time we can see a developing awareness of the background political dimension of these topical issues. Because of the ambiguous place of human remains in French national collections and the discussions that ensued, the Musée du quai Branly wanted to take the opportunity afforded by this repatriation to work with the national museum of New Zealand and eventually reached an agreement to collaborate on this significant exhibition project.
Located halfway around the world from New Zealand, and housed...