Reframing Transcultural Encounters: Indigenous Agency, Cartes-des-Visites, and the Colonial Gaze in Gottfried Lindauer’s Portrait of Pare Watene

Abstract

This essay re examines Gottfried Lindauer’s 1878 Portrait of Pare Watene as a dynamic site of transcultural encounter rather than a passive artifact of colonial ethnography. Through decolonial frameworks—Mary Louise Pratt’s “contact zone” and Ariella Azoulay’s “watching”—it argues that Pare Watana’s image, though rooted in colonial photographic traditions such as the cartes-de-visites, embodies Māori agency and autoethnographic resistance. By analysing the interplay between Lindauer’s painting, its photographic source, and possible iwi collaboration, the essay reveals how Indigenous presence and mana persist within and against colonial visual systems, reframing the work as a living taonga that demands continued critical and institutional reconsideration.