Gottfried Lindauer's Kuinioroa, Daughter of Rangi Kopinga - Te Rangi Pikinga commemorates an important moment in the history of a place that you can call either Aotearoa, to take the indigenous Maōri perspective, or New Zealand, to take the colonial, or Pākehā, perspective.

It might strike you as a " tomayto, I say tomahto" situation, but the stakes have always been high in NZ in terms of rights to land, resources, and governing authority. As with many places, the colonial history of Aotearoa is a tug-of-war over language, and, as with any society, you have to study the Maōri language to understand the people. The Maōri, at the time of first contact with white Europeans, lived in small nations or iwi, many of which are still functioning today, despite high rates of intermarriage with Europeans, and the existence of 110,000 people, according to the New Zealand census, who do not know their iwi. 

Te Rangi Kopinga, of the Ngāti Apa iwi of the Maōri, gave birth to Te Rangi Pikinga around 220 years ago. As a young woman, Te Rangi Pikinga was captured by a taua, a Maōri war party led by Te Rauparaha of the Ngāti Toa iwi. According to one colonialist source which compares Te Rauparaha to Napoleon, Te Rangi Pikinga was the sister of Arapata Hiria, the Ngāti Apa leader who was protecting the iwi from Te Rauparaha's forces. 

We like to think that war operates according to dispassionate laws of numbers, and marriage operates by the less-rational rules of Cupid, but, throughout history, sex and marriage have been tools of warfare and diplomacy in quite destructive and harmful ways. Historians can debate as to whether Te Rangihaeta, nephew of Te Rauparaha, was captured by the charms of Te Rangi Pikinga, and softened his attitude toward the prisoner of war, or whether his decision to marry his prisoner was a chess move of sorts, to broker a diplomatic agreement between his iwi and hers. 

One Maōri descendant of Te Rangi Pikinga, who calls her by the name kuia, meaning female elder or grandmother, says, "When I first looked into those sorrowful eyes" of this painting, "I wept. I wept for her life; I wept for our loss; I wept that in the midst of Auckland I would finally gaze upon the sight of our tupuna [ancestors]." The narrator's mother attests that the Lindauer paintings are important because "These whakaahua are who we are; we are who they are." Whakaahua translates as performance, story, pronunciation, or expression, and it is connected to the famous haka performance, a traditional Maōri ceremonial dance that is performed to welcome important guests, display tribal pride, acknowledge achievements, or at funerals. 

On at least one occasion, Te Rangi Pikinga agreed to act as a pou, or boundary post, to protect her ancestral iwi, the Ngāti Apa. Nowadays, we have electrified fences and drones to police borders, but in those days, she herself was the border to create peace among the people. Te Rangi Kopinga survived her husband and onetime captor, Te Rangihaeata, living her last years in his region of Poroutawhao. They call her a peace bride, or a woman whose captivity and marriage became a means to create peace, like Eunice Kanenstenhawi Williams, who preferred her husband and onetime captor's Mohawk family to her parents' Puritan one in Deerfield, Massachusetts.

The artist of this work was born a Bohemian, not in the sense that he loved coffee shops and scarves (although he probably was a Bohemian in that sense too), but in the sense that he was born in Bohemia. Lindauer attended the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Wien, which also produced Egon Schiele, before moving to New Zealand where he worked for an Auckland businessman, Henry Partridge, producing images of Maōri people over a few decades.