LeaAnna McConnell is one of those people who’s fascinated by death and human remains, and the more exotic the better. Like a Texas cousin of the Addams Family, the Houston sculptor has assiduously cultivated her morbidity, creating convincing replicas of shrunken heads, witch doctor staffs, “flesh folios” and the tattooed heads preserved by the Maori people of New Zealand. “Each facial feature is hand sculpted, each hair hand plugged to achieve the maximum reality and gross-out effect,” she says on her Web site, Swell Heads.
A film industry veteran who got her first job when she wrangled her way onto the guts-and-gore crew of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, LeaAnna McConnell prides herself on her ability to make things that look real. When a friend challenged her to make a tattooed Maori head, she came up with a new technique using industrial materials. “As far as I know, I am the only person in the world who’s doing this,” she says.
LeaAnna set up a Web sitethat offered a choice of hair length and color for the heads. The Maori, she told her cybervisitors in an oily tour-guide tone, “were seafaring Polynesian folk who took a wrong turn and landed in New Zealand.”
“Making the best of the situation, they set up housekeeping and commenced eating the neighbors,” she adds.
LeaAnna had never been to New Zealand, and she thought the Maori people were a dead culture, like the Vikings. So she was surprised and flattered to get an overseas call this summer from a real, live Maori radio reporter, who wanted to do a story on her heads. But the reporter had some tough questions for LeaAnna. How many was she selling? Why was she making them? And didn’t she realize that the Maori were trying to reclaim the heads from museums and collectors all over the world?
“I didn’t realize I was walking into a trap,” LeaAnna says.
LeaAnna’s heads made the New Zealand papers, including the front page of the Wellington Evening Post. The national magazine Tumai plans to feature LeaAnna on its next cover.
As word spread, LeaAnna’s Web site was besieged by angry e-mails from insulted Maori, who accused her of racism, greed and cultural exploitation, and likened her to “scurvy- and v.d.-ridden” colonial plunderers. A few threatened her; others cursed her in a language she didn’t understand. Most simply articulated their objections to the faux heads or the site’s characterization of the Maori.
“Maori are shocked to see such ignoranceย.It is of the utmost disgust that you have the audacity to step on our mana [soul] like that,” wrote Aroha Te Kanawa.
In Maori culture, the heads (called mokomokai) are considered sacred. The word moko refers to the elaborate facial and body tattoos used in Maori culture to denote tribal rank and lineage. A man’s facial tattoo was unique, and he might use a drawing of its spirals and concentric lines in place of a signature. Preserving the tattooed head of a deceased loved one was a way of honoring him and keeping his “essence” intact; capturing the heads of enemies was a way of insulting them.
Although LeaAnna’s Web site insisted that “diligent research went into discerning the real and varied styles of shrunken head relics,” it frequently betrayed a tenuous understanding of the facts. For one thing, it referred to the Maoris’ “secret recipe” for shrinking heads. The mokomokai are not shrunken, but dried and smoked. LeaAnna (who has studied up a lot since the controversy broke) says she meant the Web site’s text to be tongue-in-cheek but adds she understands why the Maori people would find it culturally insensitive. “I had no idea that a real Maori would ever read this,” she says.
In response to the protests, LeaAnna has removed all mention of the Maori from her description of the heads, but the heads themselves remain. Not that they’re selling like hotcakes. The Web site is slick and well designed, and that, combined with the heads’ steep price tag — $900 — probably convinced many Maoris that LeaAnna was making big bucks off what they see as cultural pirating. But according to LeaAnna, a publicist for the Village Women’s Health Clinic, she has sold only about ten heads in a year.
She refuses to stop making them, pointing out that there’s a big difference between replicas and the real thing. “If there is something spiritual or mystical involved, that is not going to be transferred to plastic.”
“These images are historical and are not owned exclusively by one set of people,” the Web site now reads. “The images have become significant to other groups in ways that may not make sense to a Maori.”
Cultures always borrow from each other, LeaAnna argues, and the Maori should assume some responsibility for disseminating mokomokai in the first place. In the late 18th century, European traders began to covet “baked heads” as curiosities. Museums drove up demand, and a finely tattooed head became more valuable than the living person to whom it belonged, causing increased bloodshed and fighting among the Maori tribes. While some mokomokai were undoubtedly looted by whites, the Maori traded others for guns or tobacco. Some Maoris tattooed slaves for the express purpose of killing them and trading their heads. “The thing is, the Maoris are no pussies,” LeaAnna says.
In fact, LeaAnna considers her heads a tribute to the Maoris’ “passionate” culture. She doesn’t seem to acknowledge that the Maori no longer practice the ritual eating of human flesh (“Do you realize what a prize it is to say, ‘Oh yeah, the cannibals are chasing me?’ ” she asks with glee). And she doesn’t understand why Maoris don’t share her zest for their bloody past. Says LeaAnna, “They ate the Christian missionaries. I say, ‘Bully, bully!’ “
In order to make amends for her “obnoxious” ethnic characterization, LeaAnna offered to let the Maori (who already have several Web sites devoted to their culture and history), use Swell Heads as a way to get their message across. She felt she was being generous, and it angered her when Maoris responded by sending death threats.
After some consideration, LeaAnna decided not to let threats deter her from “helping” the Maori. As a Jew and a person whose childhood classmates thought she was a witch, LeaAnna knows what it’s like to be persecuted. She understands that the Maori just need “to heal.”
“I would like to see them, as a society, grow a little bit,” she says sweetly.
As “anthropological jewels,” the mokomokai are a great way to promote Maori culture, LeaAnna thinks. “This is the flashy bit of information that put Maoris on the map. I was 36 years old before I even heard the word Maori ย and the exotic is right up my alley.”
But among the Maori, the subject of mokomokai has been taboo, even embarrassing. In the 1860s a British moko enthusiast collected some 35 heads from British collections in order to return them to New Zealand. But the government refused his offer to sell them at cost because, according to a New Zealand newspaper account, they “were part of New Zealand’s savage past best forgotten.”
Today the 500,000 Maori people, relegated to second-class status when their lands were confiscated by British colonists, are in a situation akin to that of Native Americans. Although the Maoris have won more than $450 million in restitution from the New Zealand government, unemployment, poverty, substance abuse and other problems are still disproportionately high among their people. But as with Native Americans, cultural pride is strengthening, and efforts to repatriate sacred objects are gaining momentum. Over the past decade or so, some 40 mokomokai have been returned to Te Papa, the national museum in New Zealand, where, out of respect for the dead, they are not placed on display.
Early repatriation efforts were kept very quiet. But a couple of years ago popular singer and Maori chieftain Dalvanius Prime made repatriation of the mokomokai his soapbox issue. Prime’s a natural showman. When the Museum of Natural History in New York asked him not to discuss negotiations for the return of its mokomokai collection, Prime decided to sing about them instead.
Yet Prime has not convinced everyone that reclaiming the mokomokai is a good idea. When a government official retrieved 11 heads from British collections last year, people complained that the money spent on the trip could have been used to provide social services to Maoris in need. Furthermore, Maoris do not agree on the final fate of the mokomokai. Some Christian Maoris believe the heads should be buried.
In Prime, LeaAnna McConnell has found an unlikely ally and a kindred spirit. Prime, an adept media manipulator, is the person who initially complained to reporters about LeaAnna’s Web site, calling her text “culturally insensitive.” But, he told LeaAnna privately, he loved the heads themselves. Exchanging a steady stream of e-mails, the two found that they shared a long-standing obsession with the macabre. Prime first became interested in mokomokai while writing a horror movie script involving one of the tattooed heads.
Like “the missionary converting the heathen or the savage,” Prime says, he has converted LeaAnna to his cause.
He sees LeaAnna’s heads and her Web site as a way to get the “hushed-up story” of the mokomokai out, primarily to other Maori. In fact, Prime has ordered four of LeaAnna’s heads to use during lectures.
LeaAnna and Prime believe her replicas can be made for museums who return their mokomokai to New Zealand. Furthermore, if the mokomokai are eventually laid to rest in ancestral graves, Prime says, “LeaAnna’s heads will be all we will have left.”
This article appears in Aug 26 โ Sep 1, 1999.