Te Kooti Wahawaha

This extract originally appeared in Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga: The New Zealand Wars Collections of Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2024).
This extract was authored by Megan Tamati-Quennell.

With its strong red, black and white palette and the distinctive symbols that have become signature for senior contemporary Māori artist Paratene Matchitt, Te Kooti Wahawaha is an innovative painting – a fusion of abstracted motifs drawn from kōwhaiwhai, whakairo and modernism. The painting is one of an early series of works Matchitt made about Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Tūruki, a potent figure in the story of Māori resistance, a key innovator in Māori art and the founder of the Ringatū faith.

A courageous and determined leader at a time of intense change, Te Kooti’s vision of Māori sovereignty included the development of a new Māori art which adopted and used symbolism from Western art. His commitment to creating new art forms for a new world, along with his actions, political exploits and spiritual beliefs, has long resonated with Matchitt.

This painting, composed in blocks, can be read as a sequence of condensed historical moments drawn from stories Matchitt grew up with about the conflict between Rāpata Wahawaha (on the side of the Crown) and Te Kooti at Matawhero, on the outskirts of Gisborne, between 1868 and 1872. A key image featured on the upper right of the painting is Pōkai Whenua (meaning ‘walk the land’), Te Kooti’s white horse. Te Kooti believed Pōkai Whenua – like the white horse in the biblical Book of Revelations – had supernatural powers. In Te Kooti Wahawaha, both Te Kooti and Pōkai Whenua are cast as heroic figures, offering up powerful personifications of the ideals of belief, strength and defiance in the face of adversity.