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Jeffrey Sissons: The Forgotten Prophet and the Taranaki Iconoclasm
The Taranaki iconoclasm has received very little attention from New Zealand historians. Yet, it was an event of enormous political significance, involving most Taranaki Māori leaders for almost twenty years as they sought to expel from their land the dangerous presence of malicious atua. In this talk, I will revisit some of the material from my book, The Forgotten Prophet: Tāmati Te Ito and His Kaingārara Movement, to sketch a new trajectory for this iconoclasm. My rethinking has been prompted by current research on the fate of whakapakoko, Māori ‘godsticks’, most of which were concealed or destroyed at the time of Christian conversion in the late 1830s and early 1840s. It now appears that their concealment and destruction, along with the destruction of stone images, constituted the first phase of the Taranaki iconoclasm. Subsequent phases were the desecration of sacred sites (1851-3), the unearthing and reburial of sacred mauri stones (1853-6) and the destruction of taonga in large bonfires (1857). While playing a central role in these latter phases, the prophet, Tamati Te Ito, was also extending an incomplete iconoclasm that had begun with the arrival of Christianity.
Jeffrey Sissons is an anthropologist and writer recently retired as an Associate Professor in the Cultural Anthropology Programme, Te Herenga Waka/Victoria University of Wellington. Sissons’s extensive research encompasses colonialism, Maori tribal history and Christian conversion within Polynesia and Māori society. He has authored six books, most recently The Polynesian Iconoclasm: Religious Revolution and the Seasonality of Power (Berghahn) and The Forgotten Prophet: Tāmati Te Ito and His Kaingārara Movement (Bridget Williams Books).