Piecing together the past: reflections on replicating an ancestral tiputa with contemporary fabrics

In the 1820s visitors to Pitcairn Island collected a significant amount of tiputa (ponchos or tunics made from barkcloth) produced by the first generation of women born on the island. Their mothers were the Polynesian (Mā'ohi) women taken from the shores of Tahiti in 1789 by the Bounty mutineers, who arrived at Pitcairn in 1790. Their names were Mauatua, Teraura, Vahineatua, Toofaiti, Tevarua, Teio, Opuarai (or Puarai), Faahotu, Teatuahitia, Teehuteatuaonoa, Tinafanea (or Tinafonea), and Mareva. These women originated from Tahiti, Huahine, and Tubuai, where each island had different techniques and specialties in tapa making. While only six of the women bore children on Pitcairn, in such a small community they all had a significant impact on the new evolving culture, including the art of making, dyeing and decorating barkcloth. The women's breadth of knowledge and masterful technical skill is demonstrated through the wide range of cloths they produced. The daughters' arrangement of these components together into works of wearable art show their ingenuity - despite extreme isolation from their mother's homelands - and an assertion of identity. Today, museum collections hold known examples of the tiputa in Aberdeen, Munich, Scotland, Oxford, London and Chicago. These museums are the holders of these tao'a (treasures), which are significant for descendants of the makers, like myself, as markers of papara'a tupuna (genealogy). This essay discusses some of these tao'a used as inspiration in creating my interpretation of a Pitcairn tiputa made from modern textiles for the Pacific Presences project.