My uncles wrote to the Queen of England to ask for their grandmother's chair back.
It is still not home.
On Thursday 18 January 1934, at the Serpentine Gardens on the Picton foreshore, a carved chair and a block of pounamu were presented to the Governor General, Lord Bledisloe.
The place was chosen on purpose. Serpentine Gardens looks out over the sparkling waters of a landlocked harbour, and somebody noticed how much it resembled the Bay of Islands, where the Treaty was signed. The whole day was arranged by the Waikawa Progressive League on behalf of all the southern iwi and hapū, as a preliminary to the national gathering that would be held at Waitangi the month after.
The greenstone was a block called Te Waipounamu, standing for the South Island. It came from Poutini Ngāi Tahu, presented by Mr William Webb of Māwhera, Greymouth, son of the chief Tūhuru.
The chair was carved by Mr Thomas Herberley, of Te Ātiawa, Wellington, formerly of Queen Charlotte Sound.
Up the back of it went a tukutuku panel, and that panel was the work of four women.
Ngaia Tete Arthur, née Keepa. Hariata Noti Huntley, née Kere. Tini Pongi Hemi, née Kere. Puhi Huntley, née Tetley.
Hariata is my great grandmother.
And they were sisters. Our own family papers name Ngaia among Hariata's sisters, children of Teone Kere and Pipi Smith. The newspaper says it plainly: being the tuakana, the eldest, sisters were the weavers. The youngest of them was Puhi, and Puhi was the one chosen to hand the chair to Lord Bledisloe.
So the newspaper does not simply list Hariata with the others. It says she was the overseer of the special weaving that goes up the back of the chair.
Four sisters made it. The eldest ran the work. The youngest gave it away.
There was a hangi. A whole bullock, a sheep and two large sacks of potatoes, cooked under Mrs Hinehou Riwaka and Mr Frederick Skipper. Te Ari Pitama of Ngāi Tahu led the welcoming party out from Waikawa Pā and made the presentation address. Mr Peter Makitanara of Rangitāne and Ngāti Kuia stood and endorsed it. The Waikawa Mission House Choir sang and performed poi.
The night before, at the Albert Hall, Mr Teoo Ngapaki, paramount chief of the Queen Charlotte Sound, gave an address in Māori. Mr Peter MacDonald interpreted.
Lord Bledisloe spoke to the people of Picton from the old War Memorial steps, and in that speech he said:
"We still have expert craftsmen and instructors in our midst, noteworthy amongst them being Mr Herberley of Wellington, who executed the carving of the South Island Maori presentation chair."
Then he went home to England.
He did not take the chair with him. It was considered too large to send on the ship.
So it stayed behind. And because it had been given to him in his official capacity and not to him as a man, it did not stay as his. It reverted to the Crown.
It ended up at Waitangi, in the Bay of Islands, on the Treaty grounds, held in the care of Ngā Puhi.
That is where it has been ever since.
Hariata's son was my grandfather, Oswald Te Āhuru Huntley. Everyone called him Ossie. He and my grandmother Doreen had twelve children.
I want to tell you what that one row of brothers and sisters did with what their grandmother left them, because it is not a small thing.
Uncle Bosun, Stephen Oswald Huntley, stood up at a hearing in Blenheim on 4 October 2012 and recited this whakapapa under oath. Seventy two generations, back to Kupe. Eleven iwi of Te Tau Ihu, named one after the other.
My mother Karen, and my Aunty Jane Richardson, wrote it down. Karen hand wrote sixty feet of whakapapa at a wānanga on Waikawa Marae. The two of them later compiled the family reunion book that most of this story comes out of.
And my uncles Leslie and Micky Huntley went and asked for the chair back.
They did not do it by writing a letter and hoping.
Les and Micky, with Jim Sadd, took photographs of the chair up north and put them in front of the Ngā Puhi whānau.
Ngā Puhi told them they had not been aware of the chair's history.
Les reported afterwards that they were quite embarrassed to realise the chair belonged to Waitaha. He said they were willing to return it. But it is in the Crown's possession, so they could not do so.
That is the wall this whole thing runs into, and I want people to see it clearly. The people who hold the chair would give it back tomorrow. They are not allowed to.
So the three of them wrote to the Queen.
They asked whether the Waitaha whānau might hold an audience with her on the Picton foreshore once again, during her visit later that year, in the hope of persuading the Crown to return the chair to where it belongs.
The answer came back. Her Majesty had asked her Private Secretary to pass the letter on to the Governor General of New Zealand, so that the approach to Her Majesty may be known, and consideration given to the points raised in the letter.
That is a courteous answer. It is not a yes.
Les said they were pleased with the response. Then they started thinking about offering a swap.
What they wanted was not complicated. They wanted the chair presented to the people of Picton and put back on the foreshore, in a whare built for it.
Back where it was woven. Back where it was given away.
In 2009, my cousin Margaret Aldridge Holmes was photographed standing beside the chair in the Treaty House at Waitangi. It is a beautiful photograph. It is also the proof that it never came home.
Micky has passed away now. Les is still with us.
It would be easy to tell this as a loss.
Four women wove a panel for a chair that was carried away from them. Two of their grandsons spent years trying to get it back and received a letter from a palace.
But there is one more thing in the record, and it turns the whole story around.
There is a photograph in our family papers of Ratapu Hippolite presenting Ngaro Aldridge with a certificate for tukutuku work, tutored by Auntie Kelly Koroheke.
Two panels are in that picture. The one on the left is called Arapawa, worked by Ngaro and Terihia Stafford. The one on the right is the Bledisloe design, worked by Amo Poki.
And the caption says those weavers are also descendants of the original four. Puhi Huntley, Hariata Noti Huntley, Tini Pongi Hemi and Tete Arthur.
Read that again.
The chair is still sitting at Waitangi. But the pattern that went up the back of it is being woven today, by the granddaughters and great granddaughters of the women who put it there in the first place.
They could not get the chair back.
So they carried the design instead.
A government can give a chair away. It can be left off a ship, ruled to be Crown property, and kept four hundred miles from the hands that made it. Nobody has ever worked out how to do any of that to the knowledge of how to make the thing.
Hariata oversaw that weaving in 1934. It has not stopped moving.
The chair never came home.
The pattern did.
A note on where this comes from. The 1934 presentation, the hangi, the speakers and Lord Bledisloe's own words come from Mike Taylor of the Picton Museum, writing in a printed account of the day. The campaign to bring the chair back, including the letter to the Queen and the reply, comes from an article by Ruth Fergusson. The naming of the four weavers, and the later certificate photograph, come from the same volume. Uncle Bosun's sworn testimony was given at Blenheim on 4 October 2012. All of it is in our family's own records, kept by our own people.
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