PILAT 2014 145 me that the people there did not have any belief in a being that a Westerner would call a “god.” They recognized other beings that we would call supernatural, such as ges, and lifeforces such as tadar, tanua, marumarua, and virua. So when I started to read more about Polynesia, I realized that the term “gods” was far too simplistic a notion and that the reality that existed in Polynesia 200 or 300 years ago would have been much more complex and developed than what was portrayed by Western missionaries. Much of my work involved sifting through mounds of information to find a description that matched the context in which atua were used. In writing the exhibition catalog, I had access to six types of information: • Documents written by early Western navigators and their crews • Drawings, sketches, and paintings recorded by Western artists • Documents written by early Christian missionaries • Linguistic evidence recorded in nineteenth-century dictionaries • Archaeologists’ reports • What the people living on the Polynesian islands today chose to tell me The latter was the most important source of information for me because, although what the people told me varied considerably, they showed or demonstrated to me connections with the supernatural and made me understand that their pre-Christian perspective and understanding were a “live nerve.” FIG. 10 (left): View of the exhibition Atua: Sacred Gods from Polynesia, which the publication was created to accompany. FIG. 11 (above): Portrait head. Maori, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Discussed on p. 212. FIG. 12 (below): Ancestral figure known as A’a. Rurutu, Austral Islands. Discussed on p. 76. T. A. M.: Although you are its main author, the book includes short texts by other specialists as well. That is important to mention because most recently published works on tribal art have multiple contributors. Did the subject make this approach necessary, and what do you think it brings the reader? M. G.: When I started to work on this project, I wanted to work with Polynesian people, artists in particular, who were interested in their traditional culture and beliefs. This is because the subject of the exhibition was pre-Christian art objects that were associated with pre-Christian belief systems. I thought it best to avoid working with other Western-trained academics, although of course I read their work. As the project developed I met four Polynesian women and three Polynesian men with whom I could work and who understood what I was trying to do. For a number of reasons, all four Polynesian women dropped out of the project, but the three Polynesian men remained in and wrote about their understanding of atua through their own experiences as artists or as people who worked with the art objects associated with atua. As the outsider, and the one who was able to spend more time writing, I wrote most of the catalog. I was quite happy with this because I did not want the central question—what are atua and how are the art objects associated with them?—to become diluted or lost.
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