Whatua te Muka Tāngata: Indigenous cloak-making as a site of healing and resistance
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Other Title
Authors
Penetito, K.
Smith, Hinekura
Smith, Hinekura
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Grantor
Date
2025-10-01
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Type
Journal Article
Ngā Upoko Tukutuku (Māori subject headings)
Keyword
Aotearoa
New Zealand
Māori women
Australia
Aboriginal Australian women
cloaks
cloak-making
cultural identity
art and therapy
indigenous art
kaupapa Māori
New Zealand
Māori women
Australia
Aboriginal Australian women
cloaks
cloak-making
cultural identity
art and therapy
indigenous art
kaupapa Māori
Citation
Penetito, K. & Smith, H. (2025). Whatua te Muka Tāngata: Indigenous cloak-making as a site of healing and resistance. Occasional and discussion paper series, 2025(1). ISSN 2324-3635
https://doi.org/10.34074/ocds.112
Abstract
This article explores a collaborative arts-research exchange between Māori and Aboriginal women cloak-makers, positioning traditional cloaking practices as powerful sites of healing, resistance and cultural regeneration. Grounded in Kaupapa Māori and Whatuora (H. Smith, 2017; 2019) methodologies, the article weaves together the experiences of Māori weavers and Aboriginal possum-skin cloak-makers who came together on each other’s lands to share, learn and co-create. Through reciprocal exchange and community-engaged practice, three Aboriginal women came to wānanga in Aotearoa in April 2024, with two Māori women travelling to Victoria in Australia in the following month to experience their learning circles. The women revitalised intergenerational knowledge systems, language and creative pedagogies grounded in Indigenous maternities. Cloak-making processes serve not only as a tangible act of creation but as a metaphor for the binding of generations, reconnection to whenua (land), and reclamation of identity. The culminating collaborative cloak, Kahu–Kooramookyan, embodies the cultural narratives, relational ethics and artistic expressions that resonate across Māori and Aboriginal epistemologies. This article forwards cloaking as an artivism – activist arts practice – that nurtures Indigenous wellbeing and acts as a decolonising intervention, reconnecting communities through shared values of aroha, reciprocity and resistance. As ancestral knowledge is reactivated through hands, fibres and ceremony, cloak-making emerges as an educational, spiritual and political act of Indigenous sovereignty and resurgence.
Hinekura Smith acknowledges the Australian Research Council for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Indigenous Futures (Project ID: CE230100027).
Publisher
Unitec ePress
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DOI
https://doi.org/10.34074/ocds.112
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CC BY-NC Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International