Ko wai te waka e kau mai nei (What is this canoe that swims my way)

Land, and Maori ancestral and spiritual connections to it, is the central concern of Buck Nin’s paintings. Of Ngati Raukawa and Ngati Toa descent, Nin expressed these connections in symbolic landscape paintings in which a horizontal band of motifs abstracted from the carved tauihu (prow), taurapa (sternpost) and side strake of the waka taua or war canoe serves as a protective screen through which Nin invites the viewer to gaze ‘into the soul of the land’.(1) He painted increasingly elaborate variations on this theme from 1965, depicting land overlaid and mapped out with roads and buildings as a consequence of European settlement and urban development.

Ten years later Nin replaced the latticework screen motif with dynamic fields of flat patterns based on traditional kowhaiwhai (rafter patterns) and moko designs. These were sources from which artists such as Para Matchitt, Cliff Whiting, Arnold Wilson and Sandy Adsett were creating a contemporary Maori abstract art. They were also the motifs with which the Maori land marchers who converged on Wellington in 1975 to demand from Parliament an end to the alienation of Maori land had emblazoned their flags and banners. Of his politically responsive ‘Maori land’ series of paintings produced in 1975–76, Nin explained: ‘The banner, symbol of protest, has been used to portray the present unease over land and other problems associated with urbanization.’ (2)

Although the enigmatically titled Ko wai te waka e kau mai nei (What is this canoe that swims my way) belongs, with its flag-like aspect, to the ‘Maori land’ series, the lower zone of the composition represents a broad, dark expanse of water, the upper zone the sky. A ‘waka’ of stump-like silhouettes glides across the horizon. Immediately above the waka a red-coloured form, evoking simultaneously an arm from a carved ancestral figure, a hoe (paddle) with kowhaiwhai designs, and a tiheru (canoe bailer) conveys the impression of movement at high speed across the water. It is linked to a gathering cloud of kowhaiwhai motifs, which hovers like a gigantic speech balloon as if to pose the anxious question: ‘What is this canoe that swims my way?’

Jonathan Mane-Wheoki

This essay originally appeared in Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2009).

1. Buck Nin, quoted in Katerina Mataira, Maori artists of the South Pacific, Nga Puna Waihanga New Zealand Maori Artists and Writers Society, Raglan, 1984, p. 52.
2. Ibid.