Keeping track of Māori taonga in the world's museums

Ngarino Ellis (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Porou) has a dream that one day the approximately 18,000 Māori artefacts held in international museums will be documented for the people of Aotearoa, even if they're not returned.

"I'd love to have a project with a whole team that could go around the world with great photographers and start to register all of these, to bring these taonga home if only in photographic form."

This year the University of Auckland historian travelled to Italy, Britain and the United States to visit some of them.

Many international museums welcome indigenous researchers and are keen to observe cultural protocols, she says.

In Rome, she was shown a collection of 41 taonga amassed by a young Italian government worker who came to New Zealand on a Royal Navy trip in the 1860s.

Very unusually – and a surprise to Ngarino – the man carefully recorded the tribal origin for all but three of the pieces.

As a self-described "carving buff" who's very interested in moko, Ngarino was amazed at the abundant, highly detailed moko of women depicted in some small tekoteko (wooden figure carvings) she was shown.

"[The women had moko] all over their arms and on their faces, their backs and their legs. It's much more extensive than many people understand ... The intricacy, the complexity, the creativity is just astonishing."

Māori artists and historians working today could learn a lot from the creativity and originality of treasures such as the finely woven late-19th century flag that Ngarino saw on an earlier trip to the British Museum in 2014, she says.

Even though taonga such as the unusual flag won't be coming home from international museums any time soon, the two Gottfried Lindauer paintings stolen from a Parnell art gallery last year will resurface, Ngarino predicts.

"People do know where they are – as far as I'm aware. And it's about the process to bring them home.

"The ancestors will get them and they will come home. It's just a matter of when."