Kākahu kura/kahu kura (kākā feather cloak)

This kahu kura (kaka-feather cloak) was woven by Makurata Paitini, a highly skilled weaver of Ngāi Tuhoe iwi (tribe).

Commissioned cloak
Letters between the Colonial Museum director, Augustus Hamilton, and ethnologist Elsdon Best dating from 1905 and 1906 show various orders for specific Māori items that Best was to source for Hamilton. At the time, Best was living in the Rūātoki region of the Tuhoe iwi (tribe) and had been recording Tuhoe traditions since 1896. At one time Best had camped next to Paitini Wī Tāpeka and his wife Makurata when he had previously lived at Heipipi, near Ruatāhuna, and they contributed greatly to his later publications.

Makurata took more than a year to complete the kākahu kura, finishing it in 1906, when Best sent it to Hamilton.


Unique designs
Te Papa has two kahu kura, which are cloaks woven solely with the feathers of kākā (Nestor meridionalis). This cloak has rusty-brown belly feathers on all four borders and the middle is decorated with the orange underwing covert feathers. It also bears Makurata’s unique designs, consisting of two small mirror-image triangles, each is formed from four white lines that stand out against a black background at the right proper corner of the lower tāniko border.


Tāniko border
The border of tāniko (geometric patterning) is of black-dyed and natural muka (New Zealand flax fibre), with ten whenu (warp threads) per centimetre. The pattern of the wider lower border incorporates whakarua kōpito (diamond-shaped pattern) and aronui (triangle-shaped pattern) designs and a central haehae (repetitive linear pattern) of parallel lines. Between the tāniko commencement and the kaupapa (foundation) is a decorative spiral of alternating black and natural muka, visible only from the inside.


Construction
The kaupapa (foundation) of the kākahu kura is muka (flax fibre) twined in the whatu aho rua (double-pair weft twining) technique, measuring six whenu per centimetre with a 4 mm spacing between each aho (horizontal, or weft) row. Two feathers are attached at approximately every third whatu stroke, on every third aho row. The shoulder aho poka (shaping rows) are ten rows of simple elliptical inserts, 290 mm from the top of the cloak; the lower aho poka are four rows of simple elliptical inserts, 90 mm from the bottom. The tāniko measures ten whenu per centimetre. The rolled ua, or neck, at the top of the cloak has a spiral finish in pairs, followed by a decorative two-element twist.

This text is based on an excerpt from Whatu Kakahu|Maori Cloaks (second edition), edited by Awhina Tamarapa, © Te Papa Press 2019.