Mokomokai, more properly called toi moko in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand, are the preserved tattooed heads of Māori ancestors. They are not a tattoo style, a design, or an object to acquire. They are human remains, tūpuna (ancestors), and this page is solemn history and cultural education rather than any kind of design reference. In customary Māori practice the head is the most tapu (sacred) part of the body, and the preserved heads of revered relatives were kept by their families as continuing presences. After European contact, beginning with Joseph Banks's acquisition of a head in 1770 and accelerating through the Musket Wars of the 1820s, the heads were drawn into a commodified trade that exchanged ancestors for firearms. Since 2003 the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, through its Karanga Aotearoa Repatriation Programme, has led an international effort to bring these tūpuna home. The living tattoo tradition that the heads carry, tā moko, is a separate and ongoing practice. This page treats mokomokai as what they are: history, ethics, and the return of the dead.

What is mokomokai?

Mokomokai, called toi moko in contemporary usage, are preserved Māori heads bearing tā moko, the customary Māori facial tattoo. The head is the most tapu (sacred) part of the body in Māori understanding, and a completed facial moko inscribed a person's whakapapa (genealogy), rank, and tribal identity onto the skin. Preserved heads were treated as the continuing presence of the person. They are ancestral remains, tūpuna, and they are not decorative objects, tattoo designs, or anything an outsider can or should "get." This page is historical and ethical education only.

Why is the term "toi moko" preferred over "mokomokai"?

Toi moko is the term used today by Te Papa Tongarewa, by Te Uhi a Mataora (the national tā moko practitioners' collective), and across much of Aotearoa. Mokomokai is the older term still common in international scholarship and museum records. Both refer to the same class of preserved ancestral heads. The Atlas uses mokomokai where historiography requires it, because that is how the trade and the museum holdings were recorded, and toi moko as the appropriate contemporary term. Throughout, the heads are referred to as tūpuna (ancestors), not as specimens or objects.

How were toi moko made and why?

Customary preservation followed a documented sequence: removal of the brain and eyes, sealing of the orifices with muka (flax fibre) and gum, steaming or boiling in an earth oven, smoke-curing over an open fire, and sun-drying, with plant-derived oils and tannins applied to preserve the skin. The heads served two customary functions. The heads of revered relatives, including rangatira (chiefs) and tohunga (experts and priests), were kept by their families in carved boxes and brought out for ceremonial occasions, addressed in oratory so that the ancestor remained present in the life of the hapū (subtribe). The heads of slain enemies were taken in war, displayed as trophies, and frequently returned during peacemaking as part of the settlement that ended a feud.

What was the trade in preserved heads?

After European contact the heads were pulled into a commercial traffic that did not exist before. The naturalist Joseph Banks, on Captain James Cook's first voyage, acquired a preserved head at Queen Charlotte Sound on 20 January 1770, the first documented European acquisition. Commercialisation followed during the Musket Wars of roughly 1818 to 1840, when northern iwi who had obtained firearms overturned the existing balance of power and groups under attack faced urgent pressure to obtain muskets in turn. Heads became one of the high-value goods, exported mainly through Sydney, that could be exchanged for firearms and gunpowder. The trade peaked between about 1820 and 1831. To meet European collector demand, some heads were produced outside any customary frame, with the moko of slaves or captives sometimes applied for the purpose of sale, a practice that Māori commentators and modern scholarship treat as an atrocity produced by the trade rather than a continuation of tikanga.

How did the head trade end?

On 16 April 1831, Sir Ralph Darling, Governor of New South Wales, issued Government Order No. 7 banning the importation of preserved heads into the colony, on the stated grounds that the trade tended "to increase the sacrifice of human life," and imposing a fine of forty pounds. The order curtailed but did not instantly stop the trade. Small-scale acquisitions continued through the 1830s, and by the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 large-scale export had effectively ceased, although private and museum collecting of heads continued through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Who was Horatio Robley?

Major-General Horatio Gordon Robley (1840 to 1930) was a British army officer who served in the New Zealand Wars and is the figure most associated with the late nineteenth-century collecting of mokomokai. From his base in London he assembled a private collection of roughly thirty-five to forty preserved heads and published Moko; or Maori Tattooing (Chapman and Hall, 1896), an illustrated study that, despite its colonial framing, preserved images of moko design that some contemporary practitioners now consult. Robley's collection was acquired by the American Museum of Natural History in New York in the early twentieth century, forming the largest single institutional holding of toi moko outside Aotearoa for most of the century. He had earlier offered the collection to the New Zealand Government and been refused.

What is the Karanga Aotearoa Repatriation Programme?

The Karanga Aotearoa Repatriation Programme is the New Zealand government-mandated programme, based at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and established in 2003, that locates, negotiates, and brings home Māori and Moriori ancestral remains held overseas, including toi moko. Te Papa serves as a transitional wāhi tapu (sacred repository) where provenance research is done, with the goal of returning each ancestor to descendant iwi for reburial rather than retaining remains in the museum. Since 2003 the programme has returned approximately 850 ancestral remains from institutions across many countries. Major returns of toi moko have come from the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, the American Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian Institution, the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford, and several German institutions.

Is it appropriation to get a mokomokai tattoo?

There is no such thing as a "mokomokai tattoo," and the framing should be rejected. Mokomokai are preserved human heads, not a design. The tattoo they carry, tā moko, is a closed customary practice of the Māori people that encodes a specific person's genealogy. For a non-Māori person, tā moko is not available to wear, and Māori practitioners themselves draw the line through the distinction between tā moko (customary, genealogy-bearing work within the Māori register) and kirituhi (Māori-style work for people outside the tradition, understood as a different and non-genealogical thing). Reproducing or displaying imagery of preserved heads, or treating them as aesthetic source material, is a separate and graver harm, because it makes a curiosity of ancestral remains. The respectful response to mokomokai is to learn the history, to support the return of the tūpuna, and not to treat any part of this subject as a design.

The sacred head and the meaning of moko

To understand why mokomokai matter, and why their trade was such a profound violation, requires beginning with two ideas in te ao Māori, the Māori world. The first is tapu. The head is the most tapu part of the body, the seat of a person's being, and what is tapu is set apart, protected by restriction, and dangerous to handle without the right care and karakia (ritual speech). The second is tā moko itself. A completed facial moko was not decoration. It was a legible record of who a person was: their whakapapa, their iwi and hapū, their standing, and their deeds. Because the moko sat on the most sacred part of the body and carried the person's identity, the preserved head of a relative was, in a real sense, the relative, still present and still owed obligation.

This is why revered tūpuna were preserved at all. A rangatira's head, kept by the hapū and brought out on ceremonial occasions, allowed the community to keep addressing him, to keep him in the life of his people. The preservation was an act of love and continuity, the opposite of a trophy. The enemy heads displayed on palisades carried the opposite charge, and yet even those were enmeshed in tikanga, frequently returned when peace was made, because the head of an enemy could become an instrument of reconciliation. In both cases the head was never an object. It was a person or the sign of a relationship between peoples.

The Atlas treats the distinction between the preserved heads and the living tattoo practice as fundamental. Mokomokai and toi moko are a class of ancestral remains. Tā moko is the living art and tradition. The two are inseparable, because every toi moko bears tā moko, and because contemporary practitioners reading the moko on returned ancestors recover design vocabularies that the colonial collecting regime had cut off from living memory. But they are categorically different things, with different stewards and different ethical frames, and conflating them, as popular writing sometimes does, is an error this page refuses.

A customary practice turned into a trade

The transformation of preserved heads into trade goods is one of the clearest case studies in Pacific history of how a sacred customary practice can be weaponised by an external market under conditions of coercion. The seam between the two worlds is Joseph Banks's acquisition of a head at Queen Charlotte Sound on 20 January 1770. Banks's own journal records the seller as reluctant, and several modern accounts describe the transaction as taking place under pressure. The detail of exactly how much coercion was involved varies between sources and should be quoted with care, but the broad reading, that a European pressured an unwilling Māori man into parting with a head, is well supported.

What Banks began as an isolated curiosity became a market during the Musket Wars. The introduction of European firearms destabilised the existing balance among iwi. Northern groups, particularly Ngāpuhi under leaders such as Hongi Hika, used muskets to devastating effect, and groups facing them had to obtain firearms or be destroyed. Preserved heads, alongside flax, dressed pork, and potatoes, were among the goods that could be sold through Sydney for muskets and powder. Demand from European collectors outpaced the supply of heads produced by customary means, and the result was the most disturbing chapter of the whole history: the production of heads for sale, including the tattooing of slaves or captives whose heads were then taken. This is documented by nineteenth-century European observers and accepted by most scholarship in outline, although the scale on which it occurred is not securely established.

A figure that recurs in popular and even some academic accounts is an exchange rate of "two heads for one musket." This rate appears in respected secondary sources, including the University of Glasgow's Trafficking Culture case study, but it has not been traced to a specific primary nineteenth-century document and is best treated as an illustrative and contested figure rather than a fixed market price. The Atlas tiers it as folklore in its specific numeric form, while treating the underlying fact, that heads were exchanged for firearms, as verified.

Robley, the museums, and the long alienation

The trade was curtailed by Governor Darling's 1831 order, but the alienation of toi moko from their people continued in a quieter institutional form for more than a century. Preserved heads entered private collections and museums across Europe and North America, accessioned as ethnographic specimens. The most prominent collector was Horatio Robley, whose collection of roughly thirty-five to forty heads passed to the American Museum of Natural History in the early twentieth century. The exact figures of the Robley sale are genuinely contested across sources, with the head count given as thirty-five, thirty-nine, or about forty, the year given as 1907 or 1908, and the price given as 1,250 or 1,500 pounds. The Atlas reports these as a disputed cluster pending primary accession records, rather than asserting a single set of numbers. What is not disputed is the outcome: ancestral remains marked with the genealogies of specific Māori people sat in foreign museum drawers, cut off from their descendants, for generations.

The repatriation movement and the return home

The movement to bring the tūpuna home gathered force in the 1980s, alongside the wider Māori Renaissance. Through the late twentieth century a series of returns were negotiated case by case between iwi, New Zealand institutions, and overseas museums. The decisive institutional step came in 2003, when the New Zealand Cabinet mandated Te Papa Tongarewa to act on behalf of the Crown for the return of kōiwi tangata (skeletal remains) and toi moko held overseas, and the Karanga Aotearoa Repatriation Programme was established. Te Papa's published account is explicit that the goal is not to hold remains in the museum but to return them to descendant iwi, with the museum serving as a transitional sacred repository while provenance is researched.

The programme's method draws on museum accession records, collector diaries, early travellers' accounts, tribal oral history, and consultation with senior tā moko practitioners who can sometimes read a moko as an index of iwi origin. The major returns are now a documented record. France passed a dedicated law in 2010 deconsecrating toi moko from its national patrimony, and twenty heads were returned from the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris in January 2012. The American Museum of Natural History returned the bulk of the Robley collection in December 2014, the largest single repatriation in the programme's history at the time. The Smithsonian Institution returned four toi moko in 2016, the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford returned seven in 2017, and German institutions returned further toi moko in 2020 and 2023. By Te Papa's published figure of May 2024, approximately 850 Māori and Moriori ancestral remains in total had been brought home since 2003, with several hundred more still awaiting return. The British Museum's seven toi moko remained unreturned as of the most recent research, after the Trustees declined a 2007 request, and they continue to be a focus of Māori advocacy.

The repatriation movement is not only an ethical correction. It is bound up with the living revival of tā moko. When ancestors marked with historic moko come home, contemporary practitioners can study surviving design vocabularies that the colonial regime had alienated. In late 2025, Te Papa and the practitioners' collective Te Uhi a Mataora marked this connection publicly with a multi-day event at the national museum, grounded in a year of practitioner research into more than two hundred returned toi moko. The returned dead, in this sense, teach the living.

Why this is not a tattoo to get

The Atlas exists to explain tattoo history, and most pages in this Pocket Guide discuss motifs that a reader might reasonably consider wearing. This page is different, and the difference is the point. Mokomokai are human remains. There is no respectful way to "get a mokomokai tattoo," because mokomokai are not a tattoo. The facial moko they carry belongs to a closed customary practice of the Māori people, and the heads themselves are ancestors in the middle of a decades-long effort to bring them home.

The honest things an outsider can do are to learn this history accurately, to understand why the heads are tūpuna and not artifacts, to support the work of repatriation, and to refuse to treat any of it as aesthetic source material. That includes not seeking out or circulating photographs of preserved heads, which is why this page carries no such image and never will. For the living tradition that the heads carry, the respectful and accurate reference point is the Māori tā moko tradition page and the wider Polynesian tatau family, where the question of what is and is not available to people outside the culture is addressed directly through the tā moko and kirituhi distinction.

  • Māori Tā Moko. The living customary tattoo tradition that toi moko carry, including the colonial suppression, the post-1970s revival, and the tā moko versus kirituhi distinction.
  • Polynesian Tatau. The wider Pacific tattoo family within which Māori tā moko sits.

Sources

  • Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. "Karanga Aotearoa Repatriation Programme" and related repatriation pages. Primary institutional record of the programme's 2003 establishment, mandate, methodology, and approximate 850-remains return figure (May 2024). https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/about/repatriation/karanga-aotearoa-repatriation-programme
  • Trafficking Culture (University of Glasgow). "Toi moko" case study. Independent scholarly summary of the customary practice, the Banks 1770 acquisition, the Musket Wars trade, Governor Darling's 1831 ban, the Robley collection and its sale to the American Museum of Natural History, and the repatriation movement. https://traffickingculture.org/encyclopedia/case-studies/toimoko/
  • Cambridge University Press, International Journal of Cultural Property. "The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa) and the Repatriation of Kōiwi Tangata (Māori and Moriori Skeletal Remains) and Toi Moko." Peer-reviewed account of the repatriation programme.
  • American Museum of Natural History. "Repatriation to Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa." Institutional record of the December 2014 return of the Robley-sourced toi moko.
  • Robley, Horatio Gordon. Moko; or Maori Tattooing. London: Chapman and Hall, 1896. The colonial-era illustrated study; used here for historical documentation only.
  • Te Awekotuku, Ngahuia, and Linda Waimarie Nikora. Mau Moko: The World of Māori Tattoo. Penguin Books NZ, 2007. Principal contemporary Māori academic reference on tā moko and the distinction between the living practice and the preserved heads.
  • NZ History (Manatū Taonga, Ministry for Culture and Heritage). "Musket Wars." Context on the firearms-driven conflict that drove the commodified head trade.

Editorial

Researched and written by John J. Mayo III, Editor, Tattoo History Atlas, built on Tattoo Archive (Winston-Salem) holdings on mokomokai and repatriation and on Māori tā moko, cross-checked against Te Papa Tongarewa's published record and the University of Glasgow Trafficking Culture case study. This page treats ancestral remains as history and ethics, not as design, and defers to the Māori people, the iwi, and the tradition-bearers on all matters of authority. It reflects current canon as of the Last reviewed date above and is refreshed on a quarterly cycle.

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