Forgotten Women: A New Bounty-Pitcairn Narrative

Abstract

<p>‘Forgotten women: a new <i>Bounty</i>-Pitcairn narrative’ is a PhD by Creative Practice comprised of the novel <i>Hina’s Daughters</i>, the exegesis ‘Writing our own Histories’, and two appendices: the Tapa Table and Tapa Glossary. The project as a whole aims to illuminate the lives of the twelve Polynesian women (from Tahiti, Huahine and Tupua’i) who left Tahiti in 1789 with nine of the infamous <i>Bounty</i> mutineers to found an Anglo-Polynesian settlement on Pitcairn Island. The objective of this thesis is to bring the women’s stories to the fore because they have remained obscured in the many <i>Bounty</i>-Pitcairn narratives—predominantly by nonIndigenous male historians, novelists, poets and scholars—that focus on the mutineers. The novel <i>Hina’s Daughters</i> challenges these accounts by centring the women’s experience through a three-strand narrative told in different timeframes. The women’s strand is historical and depicts their life journeys between 1789 and 1850. Hina, the Polynesian goddess of tapa makers, exists in mythological time, for which I use a mythic narrative. The third strand is a present-day narrative of my own journey through the museum and private collections of barkcloths (also known as tapa or ’ahu) made by the women. The exegesis ‘Writing our own Histories’ presents a critical analysis of the strategies employed to extract information about the women by going beyond documentary sources to examine the material culture created by the women which provide evidence of the women’s origins, traditions, and innovations. The ’Ahu Methodology that I have adapted to my creative process is based upon the actual methods that the women used to make tapa and embodies the epistemology of their creative practice. The theoretical underpinning of the project as a whole (the Mana Vahine Theoretical Framework) is a combination of Indigenous and feminist principles, which I use to generate the women’s voices. The final components are the Appendices. Appendix One: Tapa Table, is a comprehensive and systematic list of the tapa cloths gifted by the women to maritime visitors to the Pitcairn community and of their location in museum collections worldwide. It shows the women’s vast knowledge of tapa-making: the range of textures they achieved and the decorative techniques they used and passed onto their daughters and granddaughters. Appendix Two: Tapa Glossary is a collation of nineteenth-century words likely used by the <i>Bounty</i> women themselves when processing tapa. The Appendices are foundational elements of this project employed as decoding devices used to understand the layers of history and the women’s worlds.</p>