This paper was presented to the 'Architecture of Oceania' symposium at Unitec Institute of Technology, Auckland Aotearoa in July 2022.
The first churches of the Cook Islands were constructed in the early 19th century following the mission endeavours of the London Missionary Society (LMS). The LMS was able to effect rapid change in the Cook Islands through the pioneering work of Tahitian and Cook Islands converts. Christianity was swiftly adopted through the island group, arriving in Rarotonga in 1823. Over the next three decades five Christian villages were established there, each with church, graveyard, mission house and school. Church places became the central hub of a reshaped community.
Through a close reading of architecture as process, this paper argues that the historic coral churches on Rarotonga were, and are, an expression of Indigenous autonomy in a changing world. It examines the LMS’s deep entanglement in European imperialism and its simultaneous imbrication in local agency in the Pacific, unpicking the ways in which Indigenous leadership profoundly mediated understandings and built expressions of the gospel message. It explores the ways in which assertions of tribal mana and land claims, previously grounded in marae and bound by the ancient Ara Metua road, were re-articulated in a new spiritual and spatial order.
Using the Matavera district in Eastern Rarotonga as a case study, it argues that the island’s second phase of church-building was critical to this process, as coral stone edifices usurped both early wooden churches and the marae that preceded them. This material change demonstrates the conflation of mission and Indigenous aspirations in the para-colonial period and the creative control of tribal leaders as Christian architecture were selectively reconstituted and enwoven into local worldviews. The paper concludes by outlining how these historic church places remain an intrinsic part of contemporary Rarotongans’ identities and lived experience, with heritage challenges for an increasingly diasporic and heterogenous population.
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