From 1919 to 1923, at Sir Apirana Ngata's initiative, a team from the Dominion Museum travelled to tribal areas across Te Ika-a-Māui/the North Island to record tikanga Māori (ancestral practices) that Ngata feared might be disappearing.

These ethnographic expeditions, the first in the world to be inspired and guided by indigenous leaders, used cutting-edge technologies that included cinematic film and wax cylinders to record fishing techniques, art forms (weaving, kōwhaiwhai, kapa haka and mōteatea), ancestral rituals and everyday life in the communities they visited.