Terri Te Tau is a multidisciplinary visual artist and author of The Valley of Unlikely Acquaintances. (Photo: Rebecca McMillan)
Visual artist Terri Te Tau (Ngāti Kahungunu, Rangitāne ki Wairarapa) has opened a new chapter in an extensive creative career with her debut novel The Valley of Unlikely Acquaintances, a saga that casts a sharp eye over the ethics of de-extinction.
She talks to Atakohu Middleton.
Terri Te Tau, 45, is best known as one of the four Māori women in the Mataaho Collective, which has been producing large-scale woven installations since 2012.
As a multidisciplinary visual artist with a PhD in the field, her art spans video, performance, installations, weaving and embroidery.
Now she’s adding another string to her bow, with the release of her first novel, The Valley of Unlikely Acquaintances, a saga that casts a sharp eye over the ethics of the gene-mashing process known as “de-extinction”.
She isn’t new to writing. A fiction work, Kōhuia, was published in Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy, Volume III in 2021. Another short story, Hīkoi Whetū, based on a true story about her own grandmother’s premonition when her husband failed to come home one night, won the emerging Māori writer category of the 2023 Sunday Star-Times Short Story Awards.
And earlier this year, she spent three months as the writer-in-residence at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University.
This installation, Takapau, by the Mataaho Collective’s Terri Te Tau, Bridget Reweti, Sarah Hudson, and Erena Arapere-Baker, gained international attention in 2024 after winning a top award at the Venice Biennale. Inspired by whāriki techniques and patterns, it’s made of reflective polyester truck strops.
Terri was born in Sydney and describes her parents Sam Te Tau and Leanne Garnett as “full-blown hippies who drove around in a house bus”. Sam was a painter studying at a Sydney art school, and Leanne was a leadlighter who sewed, embroidered, and wrote poetry. Her parents were also big fantasy readers who introduced her to the genre early on. It was an artistic and imaginative childhood.
The whānau returned to Masterton when Terri was five. Her Nan taught her to sew and embroider, and she remembers spending many holidays “just sitting at her house embroidering”.
Terri is married to Green Party MP Teanau Tuiono. They met on the 2004 foreshore and seabed hīkoi, and have four children between them, aged 27 to 15 — Te Hinemoa, Uiterangi, Matauri, and Kiimai. The whānau live in the rural Pohangina Valley, a 30-minute drive north of Palmerston North.
Terri’s first foray into creative writing came as part of her PhD work at Massey University — and the catalyst was a terrifying event in October 2007 when police raided their Palmerston North house in the early hours of the morning, searching for weapons under the Terrorism Suppression Act 2002. The couple had been under surveillance because of their friendships with other activists.
Their children were small then, and Terri was questioned as she sat in bed feeding three-week-old Uiterangi while police turned their house upside down. They found nothing, and no charges were brought. But Terri says the impact of that unwarranted state intrusion into their lives lasted for years.
The raid was one of many carried out across the country as part of the infamous Operation 8, and included the so-called “terrorist” raid in Te Urewera that police later formally apologised for. The Independent Police Conduct Authority also found many deficiencies in the police action.
Terri responded by making state surveillance the focus of her doctorate at Massey University (she graduated in 2015). Her work included a multimedia installation that takes audiences through the streets of each of the four Palmerston North houses raided in Operation 8, and a 40,000-word novella titled Beyond the corners of our whare, where a narrator documents the creep of state surveillance into everyday life.
Terri and her husband, Teanau Tuiono, met at the 2004 foreshore and seabed hīkoi. (Photo supplied)
The Valley of Unlikely Acquaintances is a book that’s alert to the issues of our time, but also reflects how Māori move into the future with eyes fixed firmly on the lessons of the past.
It’s set in the near future in a close-knit Māori community where scientists use innovative techniques to restore the forest in their Wairarapa valley.
The unruly central character is Tīria, who sees herself as a “revolutionary scientist”, but not everyone is convinced that her innovations are the way forward.
That includes implanting the DNA of the extinct huia into kōkako to create a new bird — the kōhuia, a bird with the blue-grey feathers of the huia and the bright blue wattles of the kōkako — and gene-editing cats so they’re repelled by creatures with scales or feathers, such as threatened lizards and birds.
It’s Tiria who discovers that an ancient tūpāpaku found in a cave in the forest is not what it seems (an X-ray shows that it has a tooth with a 21st-century composite filling).
The book jumps back and forth in time, and we discover the body belongs to young Oreo, catapulted from the 21st century to the early 1800s, fully aware of where she’s from and the ecological devastation colonisation will cause. Is she in a position to influence history and reduce the damage?
It’s a fascinating what-if read and also full of acute observations of communal Māori life. “It’s such a reflection on the communities that I get to be a part of and the way they organise,” Terri says. “I’m constantly blown away at how generous people are with their time — they’re working full-time jobs and still manage to work on this kaupapa or that kaupapa.”
Writing the book took around four years, and the process was “very hard, very joyful, really emotional. I got really invested in the characters. It feels almost crazy to say, but it’s like they’re quite real to me.”
The book also reflects a couple of issues close to Terri’s heart. One is de-extinction, which is the process of taking the DNA of extinct animals and tinkering with the DNA of a living relative to produce a new organism with the traits of the extinct species.
That’s become a particularly hot topic in Māori circles since Ngāi Tahu announced last year that it was working with US-based Colossal Biosciences and filmmaker Sir Peter Jackson to resurrect the South Island moa and other taonga species.
“I’m fascinated by the science of it, but I’m particularly interested in the nature of the discussion,” Terri says. Reading Beth Shapiro’s book How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-extinction gave her valuable food for thought.
For Māori, she says, the issues around gene editing are numerous, including “off-target effects” — the technical term for unintended genetic modifications — and whether there’d be adequate habitats for new organisms.
Māori communities, Terri says, must be “central to the kōrero around whether or when we could or should pursue a project like huia de-extinction.”
There are particular concerns around the ethics of interspecies gene editing and the risk that conservation funding will be diverted from on-the-ground work to the laboratory.
Terri at the launch of her book, at Unity Books in Wellington earlier this month. (Photo: Kristine Zipfel)
Another issue the book touches on is the loss of Wairarapa’s forest. The bushland at the centre of the book is Te Taperenui o Whātonga, a massive forest that used to stretch from the Ruahine Range to Masterton, and was once a home, a medicine chest, and a food source for Terri’s people.
The forest was carved up after Premier Julius Vogel brought in Scandinavian settlers in the 1870s to clear it. The largest remnant, 900 hectares called Pūkaha, which is home to the Pūkaha National Wildlife Centre, was returned to Rangitāne o Wairarapa in 2020 as part of the iwi’s Tiriti settlement.
As a child, Terri was taken to a pā site in one of the cleared areas and remembers being devastated to learn how much had been lost. “That was a story I wanted to explore in the book.”
She loves spending time in the forest, and in the book, a regenerating Te Tapere-Nui-o-Whatonga is just as much a character as the people.
Another influence is Terri’s curiosity about a colonial mystery, which you encounter when you open the book. It’s a letter from 1820, written by Bay of Islands missionary John King to his masters at the Church Missionary Society in London.
The letter discusses a young Māori woman called Oreo, “who has lived with us upwards of three years”, and mentions a piece of her embroidery that had been included in the letter. Oreo has never been identified, and her sampler was lost.
Artists were asked to respond to that mystery, and their works became part of a 2018 exhibition titled called “X-Marks: Conversations in Cloth”, which examined domestic interactions between Māori and Pākehā women in the early missionary era in Te Tai Tokerau.
“I was fascinated by Oreo and the mystery surrounding who she was and where she was from,” says Terri. At the time, she was also thinking about de-extinction. “I imagined what an Oreo from the future may have stitched into her sampler.”
In an example of what she calls “speculative embroidery”, she imagined what the kōhuia would look like if she embroidered a pair of them. Thus, the kōhuia was born on cloth.
This embroidery artwork is Terri’s vision of “kōhuia” — a genetic cross between a kōkako and the extinct huia — that appears in The Valley of Unlikely Acquaintances. (Photo supplied)
The South Island launch of The Valley of Unlikely Acquaintances (Spoor Books, $38) is on Tuesday, September 29 at 5.30pm at The Physics Room, 301 Montreal St, Christchurch, in association with Scorpio Books. Book free tickets here.
See Terri’s work on her website here.
An extract from Terri’s book is here.
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