Maori carving students seek sacred knowledge

Rotorua, New Zealand -- Young men bent over their work, carving spirals and fearsome faces into massive slabs of wood. Their instructor circled the room, offering encouragement and occasionally taking up hammer and chisel himself. Outside, just steps up the path from the carving school, the earth spewed geysers and mudpots and clouds of steam, all testaments to New Zealand’s place on the Pacific Ring of Fire.

Master carver Clive Fugill took a break from working with his students to talk with us. He explained that woodcarving is a sacred skill and one that’s central to Maori culture.

“The Maori never had a written language, so they told their history through carvings and stories and songs,” he said.

Last June my two children and I spent a day's layover in Rotorua, a North Island city known for its unique interplay of vibrant Maori culture and the earth’s persistent inner heat. The area's geysers, mineral pools, and other geothermal features, along with its thriving Maori culture, have attracted tourists since the 1840s.

Rotorua lies on a volcanic lake about three hours southeast of Auckland, in an area of intense geothermal activity. Imagine a modern city of 50,000 people set down in Yellowstone National Park: Mud pools erupt in suburban backyards. Steam billows from storm drains. A lake boils in the city park.

The Maori people have thrived in this environment for hundreds of years. Their Polynesian ancestors first migrated to New Zealand relatively recently, arriving on the North Island's coast about 1000 years ago. Some of these ancestral settlers eventually moved inland from the coast, drawn to the Rotorua area by the lake’s bountiful fisheries and the obvious benefits of geothermal energy. They used the hot waters for cooking, bathing, and heating their homes.

Their modern-day descendants – as well as more recent arrivals from other parts of the world – carry on these traditions. Tourists can sample foods cooked in naturally boiling “cooking pools” or try a hangi, a luau-style meal cooked in an earthen oven, at a number of commercial thermal areas around town. The Polynesian Spa, a downtown public pool and spa, offers soothing mineral baths, and even the most humble hotels have geothermally heated swimming pools. Many of the city’s homes and businesses use geothermal heat, a fact we appreciated since June is mid-winter in the Southern Hemisphere.

The highlight of our trip was our visit to Te Puia, a thermal area just south of the historic downtown. Once the site of a Maori fortress, Te Puia is now a thriving cultural center offering access to the Pohutu geyser and other thermal features, cultural performances at a traditional-style meeting house, and the weaving and wood carving schools that comprise the New Zealand Maori Arts and Crafts Institute. Established in 1967, the institute welcomes visitors and has revived traditions that were nearly lost earlier in the century.

During our visit to the carving school, master carver Fugill told us we were watching students in their third and final year there, and that they were carving panels for a new Maori meeting house. Meeting houses, he explained, serve as family decision-making centers, celebration sites, and, perhaps most importantly, as genealogical archives.

The meeting house itself represents the body of one of the family’s ancestors, with a carving of his head atop the front gable and his bargeboard “arms” sloping down on either side. The ridgepole represents his backbone, the rafters his ribs, and the space inside the meeting house recalls the ancestor’s chest, or bosom. Walking into a meeting house is like walking into an ancestor’s embrace.

The interiors of Rotorua-area meeting houses are usually adorned with carved panels, each depicting a different ancestor. An ancestor is sometimes shown with an object – such as a tool, animal, or weapon – that provides clues to his personality or accomplishments. Spirals carved on ancestors’ legs, chests, arms and jaws symbolize strength and movement.

The highly stylized carvings depict large-eyed, fierce-looking figures, often with short, wide bodies and tongues extended in a challenging gesture. Traditional Maori carvers do not attempt realistic portraits, Fugill said. “Creating the human form in all its perfection – that's the work of the gods, or, as we call them, the guardians of the elements,” he said.

The students we met were passionate about their emerging skills. “I dream about carving,” said Charles Paringatai, one of the third-year students. “Sometimes when I'm going to sleep a vision comes into my head and it inspires me; it looks good and I can't wait to get up and go do it.”

Fugill said that, thanks in large part to such enthusiasm, Maori culture is currently enjoying a renaissance. “A lot of our young people are getting interested in finding out about their roots and who they are,” he said. “I like to think the Institute was an instigator of that. We initially were able to bring that around, through arts and crafts.”

The school admits only five students a year, selected from about 70 applicants from all over New Zealand. Graduates of the three-year program find work restoring traditional meeting houses or making panels for new ones; some open their own galleries or go into the souvenir trade.

I stared at the spirals until they seemed to move before my eyes, and one of the of the students encouraged the kids to make pencil rubbings of some sample carvings. We watched the carvers for more than an hour.

Later that night we slipped into our beds, our bodies soothed by a swim in our hotel’s hot pool and our bellies full from an earth-oven feast. As soon as I closed my eyes, a mirage of moving spirals appeared before them, curling and unfurling in honey-colored swirls. The kids, amazed, said they could see them, too. We had watched the carvers for so long that their work was etched in our minds.

Outside our room, moon-bright steam swirled up from Rotorua’s streets and parks and suburban lawns. The restless earth bubbled and breathed. My children and I, snug in our place in this magical landscape, rode the spirals around and out of awareness and into sleep.

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