The Cosmopolitan Lyceum: Lecture Culture and the Globe in Nineteenth-Century America

9. The Peripatetic Career of Wherahiko Rawei: Maori Culture on the Global Chautauqua Circuit, 1893–1927

203 9 The Peripatetic Career of Wherahiko Rawei Māori Culture on the Global Chautauqua Circuit, 1893–1927 Evan Roberts Historians of cultural pathways in the nineteenth-century “Englishspeaking world” have mostly examined the separate connections between Britain and its colonies and Britain and the United States. Within the British Empire strong cultural ties—seen by many historians as being exported from the metropole to the colony—went hand in hand with formal political ties. Despite the severance of those ties, cultural interchange between Britain and the United States remained strong through the nineteenth century. Telling historiographical evidence of a transatlantic culture may be seen in the use of the term Victorian era to describe late-nineteenth -century culture in both Great Britain and the United States. Only in the past thirty years have scholars begun to document the web of cultural connections across the Pacific between New Zealand and Australia and the United States.1 One consequence of this study has been a renewed emphasis on a broader English-speaking world that transcended the divisions of empire.2 Much of the scholarship has focused on the export of American ideas and culture to Australasia.3 After the establishment in the 1870s of regular shipping service connecting Sydney and Auckland with Honolulu and San Francisco, Americans increasingly interacted with Australasia. Indeed, Australia and New Zealand became part of a southern grand tour.4 Likewise, the United States e f 204 Evan Roberts became more accessible to Australasians, who found that returning to Britain via a boat to San Francisco, a train to New York, and another boat to London carved two weeks off an eight-week journey.5 The increase in trade and cultural exchange across the English-speaking Pacific confirmed opinions in both New Zealand and the United States that despite differences of size and empire, the two countries had much in common.6 The recognition of a shared colonial encounter with indigenous peoples prompted comparative discussion of the culture and capacity of Native Americans and New Zealand Māori.7 Like Europeans and Australians, many Americans saw Māori as “the very first of uncivilized races” and the most “capable of improvement and Christian civilization.”8 Although around the turn of the twentieth century there was significant transpacific discussion about social problems and progressive politics, there was little interchange about the practice and politics of Euro-American interactions.9 Nevertheless, in America there was substantial intellectual and wider public interest in the spectacle of other indigenous races, including New Zealand Māori. Māori art and performance were on display at both the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, in 1876, and the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, in 1893.10 In addition, historians of Chautauqua of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have noted the twenty-eight-year presence on the circuit of a Māori performer named Wherahiko Rawei.11 Rawei traveled on the United States’ lecture and Chautauqua circuits from 1900 until shortly before his death, in 1928, and illustrates important themes in the history of the lecture, lyceum, and Chautauqua movement. After he first arrived in the United States in 1900, Rawei traveled mostly to large cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York, lecturing in churches and professing to educate more than entertain.12 His wife, who went by the name Hine Rawei while on the circuit, lectured and performed with him; the educational address she gave in Chicago was published by the Art Institute in 1906 under the title New Zealand Past and Present.13 Thus, the first eight years of the Raweis’ appearances in the United States are consistent with the dual origins of Chautauqua in the educational ambitions of the nineteenth-century lyceum and the religious character of the Chautauqua that emerged after the Civil War. The last twenty years of Rawei’s life and career were entwined with the rise and decline of the Redpath Chautauqua agency, with which he contracted after 1908. Rawei traveled with the Redpath circuit through small-town America for nearly twenty years, performing largely in the Midwest and the South. For fifteen years Rawei, often assisted by his wife and children, performed and displayed recent Māori history in a performance called “Cannibalism to 205 The Peripatetic Career of Wherahiko Rawei Culture.” Then in 1922, at the request of the Redpath agency, he switched his stage biography significantly to perform “Uncle Sam’s...