Waitangi Treaty Grounds

In the northern part of the north island of New Zealand, called the Hokianga, is a heritage park where the Treaty of Waitangi was signed. Unlike in the United States, where hundreds of treaties were negotiated and signed between Native Nations and European colonies and later the United States itself, in New Zealand there is just this one: signed on February 6, 1840, between the British Crown and representatives of different Māori iwi, stipulating relations between the Māori hosts and European visitors and outlining Māori rights to land and sea resources.1 But here’s the rub: there were two versions of the treaty, one in English and one in Māori, and they didn’t always say the same thing. The English version granted the Crown “sovereignty” over the Māori, while the Māori version ceded some kāwanatanga, or governorship powers, to the English. The century following the treaty’s signing was a period of some fierce resistance to British colonialism but also one of intense Māori life, land, and language loss at the hands of British settlers and governors acting in the spirit of the Crown’s (in the treaty’s English version) assumption of sovereignty, though often in actual breach of the treaty. Some 135 years after its signing, in the midst of a Māori renaissance when activists pledged “not one more acre” of Māori land would be stolen, the treaty—which from a non-Māori European or Pākehā view had been largely gathering dust somewhere (it was declared a legal nullity not long after its signing)—became not only a sign of settler-colonial treachery but also a site of legal redress. In 1975, the Waitangi Tribunal was established to examine contemporary breaches of the treaty’s principles, meaning, and effects. Twenty years later, in 1995, the tribunal’s purview was increased to look at historical breaches of the treaty as well. Since the tribunal’s establishment, iwi members have filed dozens of claims with the Tribunal, and numerous claims have been settled, recognizing various iwi rights to land and fisheries that were stolen and according them settlements of more than NZ$2 billion, as well as return of some land and water rights and custodianships. In many ways, this has led to important recognitions as the return of some resources to Māori. At the same time, there are ways that these settlement cases, and excitement about the treaty as “the path out of grievance mode,” have led to “the assumption that colonization was more of a shonky property transaction than a denial of power,” as renowned Indigenous human rights attorney Moana Jackson writes. “The Treaty of Waitangi has been reconfigured as a testing ground for property rights, rather than the constitutional and political text that all treaties are, and it has attempted to squeeze our innate status as tangata whenua [the hosts of the land] to fit within the global interests of consumerism, or the need to be players in the market.”2 At the same time, as Soren C. Larsen and Jay T. Johnson describe in their compelling and helpful discussion of the treaty and its history, the Waitangi Treaty—which they link to the “power of Waitangi as a place”—has “reasserted an understanding of treaty partnership based upon power sharing among equals.”3

At the Waitangi Treaty Grounds, there is a tropical garden with planked walkways and canopies of bush. Chirps of birds fill the air as you walk around, and out on the wide-open field, with a vista to the ocean, it feels like someone has placed a hand on your heart and is holding it there, grounding you. Warm air brushes in. Down by the water is a carved, open-walled edifice holding a thirty-meter carved waka called Ngatokimatawhaorua, one of the world’s largest ceremonial canoes, launched every February 6 on Waitangi Day.4 Up the hill a ways is the colonial Treaty House, with propped-up, stuffed mannequins sitting and writing and placards describing European life of the day as experienced here. Close by is the Whare Runanga, the gorgeous carved meetinghouse built just before the 1940 centennial of the 1840 treaty signing, with intricately painted rafters, the ancestor’s backbone and ribs, and a glistening wood floor. You take off your shoes to enter, and no eating is allowed, the guides tell us, though yes, of course, come in, one says to me when I ask about nursing my ten-month-old twins, it’s fine to breastfeed inside its cool, calm interior: we feed our babies here.5 Later I will learn (thank you, Jack Gray, who laughs at my early fumbles in Aotearoa with great delight) that breast milk is sacred. It’s not the same as food. Even asking the guard this question—am I allowed to nurse my babies in the Whare?—is apparently pretty amusing. Food is different: it is what separates sacred and ceremonial space from the everyday. This is why there is no food allowed in the Whare Runanga and why ceremonial events end with everyone heading to another space to share food together, as a transition. But breast milk? Breast milk is sacred.

Before you get to these spots, at the Treaty Grounds entrance, near the gift shop, there’s a chance to watch a video about the site and the treaty’s history, and you can pay to see a thirty-minute “live cultural performance” of Māori culture. (“Authentic hakas are part of the experience,” the tourist brochures note.6) The video shows the sweeping vistas and celebrates the grounds as the “birthplace of a Nation,” with a visit “essential to understanding New Zealand today.” It gives a message of bicultural cooperation called into being through the treaty’s signing. The performance, by around eight young Māori dancers and singers, both men and women, features demonstrations of Māori weapons (patu, taiaha, poi) that entrance my (Star Wars light saber–obsessed) six-year-old son. The men show a haka—a dance in which bare-chested men in wide, bent-legged stances, chanting elaborate songs, perform tense, energized, aggressive, synchronized movements, such as slapping their thighs and chests and charging their elbows and heads like energy is rising up through them with a ferocity that carries up their bodies into pūkana eyes, bugged out so the whites around them show, and into tongues that protrude out to their chins. The performers invite the men in the audience up to try it too. Most of them look a little silly—weak and floppy in their attempts to be physically charged. Then the women show us a poi dance, in which they swing two white balls that are attached to braided strings in elaborate rhythmic patterns, while also singing, stepping, and swaying in rhythm with the swirling. They invite the women in the audience to try it too. None of the visitors can even make a basic catch. The performers smile, looking bemused. At the end, the performers take questions and nod vigorously, yes, they perform in lots of nontourist locations, too, like the Te Matatini festival competition that is happening next month. At the Waitangi Treaty Grounds, I can see “authentic hakas are part of the experience” and staged as exotic containers of Māori identity available for visitors to consume. And yet the performers are, in fact, not just learning, practicing, performing this dancing for us visitors to see.

Te Matatini

A few weeks later, I head with some new friends to Tauranga to attend the 2009 Te Matatini competition. We have rented a “bach” to stay in while we’re there, with a couple of bedrooms, airy and breezy and just a few blocks from the sea. At this point, I barely know enough about kapa haka to distinguish the order of the different parts of the dance competition—Waiata Tira, Whakaeke (entry), Moteatea, Poi, Waiata a Ringa (Action Song), Haka, Whakawatea—let alone distinguish what the performers are saying, even if I did understand te reo Māori, which I don’t. Mostly I just let the experience of being there wash over me. On the way in, lugging our mats and snack food for the day, we pass sunscreen stations—large vats of lotion with pump dispensers, mounted on sticks and placed around the field on the way to the stage. It’s free; you can stop and slip slap slather up. We have brought our own—who knew they’d have it out like this?—but my six-year-old son tries it out, enjoying the squirt; he can reapply by himself if needed. Nearby, other people are handing out fans with packets of sunscreen on them. And others with coolers are handing out bottled water and paper sun visors. Just like that, for free. It’s hot; they don’t want anyone to get sunstroke or overheated. There is food and drink for sale, too, but the water is being handed out all over the place. We take a few bottles, sure, thank you: how amazing. It’s not being marketed to make someone a tidy profit? I find myself thinking, huh, probably they could make a lot selling water here.

The grassy area in front of the stage is already teeming with hundreds of people, although we have gotten there early in the day. Luckily the people we’re meeting arrived even earlier and had put down a mat; we squeeze in with them, extending a bit on the edge, spreading one of our mats so it’s abutting theirs. I worry I am encroaching on the blankets around me or am going to sit on someone’s foot if I shift my weight to the side an inch, but people shuffle and make room for us. (Of course they make room for you, Jack teases me later—haven’t I learned? It’s not about your space and their space, all delineated and separated out, so that if you wiggle, you’re encroaching. It’s about us together, he says. We all pile in together.) Then shhhh, shhhh, everyone get settled now, no getting up or down while the dancers are on stage. A crackle ripples through the air as the next performers start coming on, their voices strong and loud, weaving in and out of intricate line formations, bodies taut and strong.

At first it is all kind of a blur to me. I find the movement often really similar in dynamic: high powered, forceful, and even. The timing is exquisite. It is clear there is a group/community aesthetic, that being together in the timing, not standing out but keeping with everyone, is the goal. Whenever someone is off-time, it is jarring. The men are fierce, thrusting forward and attacking the imagined enemy in front of them, very strong and physically forceful. The poi is awesome: I am awed by the dancers’ ability to keep the swirling balls so in time, by the release into gravity and trust it requires. By the last day, I am starting to be able to discern differences and see with a bit more awareness. I am struck by how “traditional” most of the movement seems, how no one is really playing much with the form, or with gender norms in it, or with attire. I do notice some small gender play—when at one point in the Opotiki-Mai-Tawhiti dance with the canoe paddles, wooden with white tips, the women take them from the men and dance, in rows, thrusting forward, forceful, like the men had done—and a wave of excitement lifts up the crowd of women sitting around me, rising from the ground to our knees, arms lifted, cheering, yeaaaaah! Then the men take them back, and we all sit back down, smiling at each other. But for the most part, it is pretty strict in terms of gender roles.

I can’t understand the words, but I get the official festival book with profiles and the lyrics and explanations for some of the terms. A range of things are propelling the texts of the songs. One that Te Puu Ao sang was in response to a car accident the writer’s daughter and granddaughter were in. “When the Universe calls / Your precious treasure may be taken / Don’t waste time feuding / Over things that aren’t important.”7 Others are more political, addressing Māori people and leaders, particularly those currently in positions of power, challenging “‘self proclaimed leaders’ to learn from the lessons of the past,” as Ngaa Pou o Roto’s haka does. In a similar vein, the Waihirere Māori Club’s haka criticizes the Crown’s military “Rules of Engagement.” “To win at all costs the Pākeha broke their own rules of war,” implicitly linking this to contemporary treaty negotiators and urging them “do not sell us or our ancestors out” by agreeing to monetary compensation for stolen land. They chant, “To the settlement negotiators, be careful. Do not belittle or trample the sacrifice of our ancestors. . . . Don’t appease the Pākeha, Money is a Pākeha treasure. . . . Land was taken and land should be returned.”8 Other haka link environmental issues and global warming to treaty negotiation issues, such as Tu te Manawa Maurea’s haka, which links “signs from the land” to the treaty and the animosities the document has led to. “Tis the treaty / Because of this document / Leaders have perished / Obligations in pursuit of welfare / Implications entangled with research,” they chant. “In order to retain our customs / Maybe we should foster manageable foundations. / These are our observations / Revealed by the signs of the land / . . . Let us plant the seeds of life together / Settle our differences / Build on a new law / So the treaty will serve its purpose!”9 Others address the politics of previous competitions. I get the feeling that there is a whole range of family, historical, and political impetuses propelling the songs and dances, that they are a way of addressing the forty thousand or so mostly Māori people there about issues that are important: treaty negotiations, festival politics, family, beauty, land.

But it’s a lot of energy, and a lot to take in, and I need to take breaks. We make our way to a side area, where there are dozens of booths as well as jumpy houses, which my son has already scampered off to. I turn the corner to see what’s there, and before me, right in front, I see a tent, shaded, cool, with big, potted, leafy plants around the edges and squishy, soft armchairs and couches. What could this be? Tentatively, incredulous, hopeful, I push my twin babies’ stroller forward to see better. There’s a rug on the ground, and a tray of fresh fruit, and cold bottled water for the taking. The women in the tent look out at me, hovering on the edges. Is it OK to come in? Yes, yes, they wave me in. There are tables with booklets of information on breastfeeding and its benefits. There are mothers in the armchairs, feeding babies. I stop and stare: this is a breastfeeding tent? This whole tent, it’s just a place to take a break from the heat and the festival intensity and feed your babies? I blink and look around. Is this real? My girls’ impatient squawks snap me out of my twilight zone state, and I squeeze in to join the group on the couches. There are free samples of baby products in bags on the tables, so some marketing, yes, but mostly it seems like this space is here just to make breastfeeding easier, so breastfeeding will be more prevalent in the Māori community. While I nurse my girls, someone comes to ask me questions for a survey. I’m not Māori, I say, which is fairly obvious, but they say it’s still helpful for me to do the survey. Then I nestle in, feeding my girls, listening while others answer the survey questions too, feeling so thankful for the cool, sweet arcs of melon they are passing around.

It turns out that all around the kapa haka festival, with its forty thousand visitors, mostly Māori, each day, many tents are designed just to be helpful. There are booths with information about Māori land claims and how to instigate them, and on Kokiri Whakamua, Māori Land Court, and Māori reservations, printed by the Ministry of Justice. There are Te Puni Kokiri (Realizing Māori Potential) handouts on “chairing a board” and other leadership resources. One booth has business cards from the librarian specializing in “services to Māori” at the national library. There are booths on te reo Māori, with government booklets on The Health of the Māori Language, and on Māori language in the home, and language handbooks you can take and keep. Several university booths have stacks of information for potential students and their parents, along with leaflets on Māori Education Trust Undergraduate Scholarships. There are booths on positive sexual health and family planning, with free condoms. There are handouts on and for Takatāpui, a traditional word used “to mean intimate companion of the same sex” and now “a reclaimed word for all Māori who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex, whakawahine, fa’afafine, same-sex attracted, asexual, queer and questioning.” There are handouts on “ko ia, he or she,” with pictures and stories of transgender Māori, including Selena, a young Māori leader pictured in kapa haka dress, with her poi, who was “pushed to the front, to the front row in her kapa haka group,” and discussion of how “in the language of our ancestors there was no pronoun distinguishing gender such as he or she, there was ia, which was used to distinguish that person regardless of their gender. . . . Were our ancestors aware that for some, gender is not defined at birth?”

Slowly, like a rise up my skin, taking this all in, my excitement starts to soar. The strict gender roles I’ve been seeing—or presuming I’d been seeing—on stage? I realize they aren’t all that’s actually here. And regardless, what’s happening on that vibrant, energized stage around the corner is only a fraction of the caretaking inscribed in what this kapa haka festival is calling into being. I start to get the sense that the protest words in the haka are only part of the political commentary this practice speaks. And that the ways of being the haka is enveloped in include a lot more than I’ve been able to make out on stage, including one in which experiences of gender, sexuality, and intimate attachment extend far beyond the patriarchal heterosexual binary that colonizers have long been attempting to impose. It’s not even a big deal, really; it’s woven throughout. There is a place for everyone, and everyone is taken care of, because everyone has value and something to contribute. I am startled by how startling this feels to me.

As we head back to the stage to watch some more, we run into Māori dance producer Tanemahuta Gray, whom I’d met in Wellington and spent a day with at the ceremonial handover of Shelly Bay, on the Miramar peninsula near Wellington, to local iwi Taranaki Whanui ki te Upoko o te Ika.10 Wow, there are forty thousand people here, and I run into someone I know? I hadn’t yet figured out how usual this is, in Aotearoa, to run into people you know everywhere. We are all piled in together, right? We talk about the dancing, and he stands wide-legged, talking animatedly about the performers, the scene this year. He’s excited but looking a bit bedraggled. Oh, yeah, he explains, he drove out and slept in his car last night. “Do you need a place to stay?”

That night, he sleeps on the couch in our bach, and our Fulbright friends and their friends come too, and we have a makeshift barbecue, with mussels and salad and crisp New Zealand white.

Kapa Haka 1: Still No Milk?

Back in Auckland, I sign up for the Kapa Haka 1 course at the university, which, it turns out, is being taught by Ngapo Wehi, who is one of the leaders of Te Waka Huia, the winners of that year’s (2009) Te Matatini kapa haka festival. So, quite literally, I am learning haka from the best kapa haka teachers in the world.11 I am feeling starstruck and giddy as I head to class. We are told to gather for the first meeting at the gate of the marae on campus, and we mill about nervously while one of the tutors organizes us, shouting over the giant pack of us, more than ninety students, and, as it turns out, mostly Americans (the education abroad people encourage their charges to take it), to get us to move close together, with women in front. Then we are welcomed onto the marae with a pōwhiri (my second at the university, as all new faculty, staff, and fellows were welcomed at an official University of Auckland pōwhiri earlier on). A karanga rings out from a woman standing on the porch, and we walk slowly, en masse, into the grassy courtyard, the karanga leading us, haere mai, haere mai, haere mai. We all pause partway to recall our ancestors, who come with us as well.

Once the pōwhiri is finished and the tutors explain about it, Ngapo’s daughter-in-law, Angie, who is elegant and knowledgeable and commands our attention, talks to us about organizing our evening tea breaks. We elect class representatives, and Angie announces that they are to organize the rest of us to bring milk for the tea, along with biscuits, chips—whatever we want to eat—and to set up and clean up after ourselves. This is not optional, or ancillary to what this paper is about, Angie stresses. It is part of the class: we are to take care of each other, to feed each other, to look after one another.

The next week, we do a good job with our tea break. There are heaps of food, fresh milk, hot tea, all prepared right on time; it goes off without a hitch. When we’ve cleaned up and gathered again for the second half of the class, Angie commends us. “You’ve done a really good job with the tea, good work,” she says. A couple of weeks later, though, it’s tea time, and no one has brought milk. The students in charge of setup that week are scrambling about in the kitchen. Someone runs out to the dairy to pick up milk. We mill about, waiting. It’s a bit annoying. We Americans chat with each other about the poi we are making by hand, snipping foam into balls and braiding yarn, and act like it’s no big deal, this missing milk, who needs milk, we didn’t even start drinking tea with milk until we came here, we’ll make do, it’s just a snack break, right? We hardly mention it. But I fret about Ngapo, our teacher, an elder, not getting his tea on time, which feels disrespectful—I watch out of the corner of my eye as he walks up to the kitchen window with his mug and returns without tea. As I’m talking to one of the other Americans, I bob my head in his direction, with concern. “Still no milk?” I say, and “Yeah, they went to get milk,” she replies, our exchange a static blip in our discussion of Other Matters, like it’s peripheral.

At last the milk arrives, and we have our tea, and all seems to be well. But at the end of the day before we say the prayers that close our time together, Angie gathers us. We get a talking to about the tea. What happened today, she lets us know, was not OK. We need to organize ourselves a bit better than that, to make sure there’s milk for tea, at the start of tea.

We need to provide for each other.

I realize this is what I’ve been hearing since I arrived here and began noticing what the dance practiced in these spaces enacts and requires: respect and humility; how we are all involved with, and responsible for, these systems of caring; the responsibilities and reciprocities and relational exchanges of hosting and visiting, feeding and being fed; what is vital in these embodied back-and-forth rhythms of tending to one another, from babies to elders, offering the sacred sustenance of our kindness and care.

Licking Blood: Finding Mitimiti

Mitimiti is based on Jack’s research into part of his family/whakapapa history and land, which he has been cut off from contact with through the effects of generations of British colonization of Aotearoa. Before we started writing this piece together about Mitimiti (the dance), we discussed Jack’s connection to Mitimiti (the place), including his attentive connection to this land and its ancestral history and ways of engaging this connectivity as a force for his dancers and for the piece’s witnesses, including us both. Sitting on a bench high on a hill in the cemetery near Jacqueline’s home in California, looking out across the San Francisco Bay on the day of Qingming Festival, when hundreds of people from the Bay Area’s Chinese community had come to honor and tend the graves of their ancestors (and shared cookies with us as well), we talked about the particular Te Rarawa context of Gray’s engagements with the Mitimiti side of his whakapapa. We talked about Gray’s travel to his mother’s family’s Mitimiti land, way up north in the Hokianga, about the people he talked with there and what he found and didn’t find, and how he found and didn’t find it. We talked about the ancestral teachings and connections that, for him, were starting to unfold.

I had always known that my father’s people (Ngati Porou) came from the east coast of the North Island: the Pacific Ocean. Tokomaru Bay (Toka-a-Namu) is an endlessly warm, sunny, and now sleepy place (it used to have a bustling meatworks for the Gisborne region—until its closure sometime in the 1950s led to an enforced movement into larger cities to find work). Dad first took me there when I was twenty-one for a summer camping trip. It felt a lot like stepping back into a faded (but much loved) sepia family photograph from long ago.

My mother’s family, however, descended from Mitimiti, in the North Hokianga, tucked up alongside the rugged, windswept west coast, on the Tasman Sea. It is on the way to Te Rerenga Wairua (our belief is that Māori spirits fly across these ancestral pathways before leaping off the tip of the North Island, plunging into the ocean on their journey back to Hawaiiki). Typically the Far North—as Te Tai Tokerau is known—has always been untapped and secluded, with poorer (mostly Māori) communities, giving people less reason to head up those ways.

Perhaps its isolation helps maintain its sacredness?

For many reasons (unknown to me at the time), there was always an uncomfortable silence and embarrassed nonknowingness whenever I broached the topic of Mitimiti. I would often ask my grandmother, but she would feign tiredness and change the subject with the distraction of preparing a pot of hot tea. My mother had little patience for my carefully timed questioning—until I simply just gave up asking.

Mitimiti remained completely unknown to me. Psychically, it was unfindable and unmapped (I could have just found it and driven there, but it was almost like proposing to go to Narnia). I felt I didn’t have the permission of my family, and so our whakapapa lay murky, left alone and untouched.

In 2010, my grandmother Agnes Morunga (née Bryers) passed on after a long battle with cancer. Not long after, my mother passed on to me a photocopied paper (given by my nan’s sister Great Aunt Peggy) listing my maternal whakapapa. This was like the holy grail, as it named for the first time in my life our genealogical links and spiritual ties to Mitimiti. I felt like I was finally from somewhere.

Physically and spiritually heading to Mitimiti was a huge deal. It is not only a crossing of waters and land but also boundaries of landscape that are transformed from spirit animals and guides from stories handed down (to the few). The first delight was a sensorial one—feeling the golden dappled light, white sand dunes, otherworldly blue-colored ocean and moving through the tucking and folding in of hillsides and ravines, skies dotted with flying hawks, the most sacred-looking cow, and other unseen shape-shifters.

My first personal encounter with the land came to me in the form of a vision. I went into the warm Te Akau (Reef) and was literally called to the ocean side, where my unfocused eyes saw a whale beached in the distant dusk (the name “Mitimiti” comes from the word “to lick,” referring to an origin story of a beached whale and a bloody fight between two tribes over its ownership). Of course, it was a rock formation. And yet again, of course, it was the whale.

My next memory was seeing an enormous rushing of the tide to my feet (in a manner that I can say now reminded me of Space Mountain at Disneyland!). Inside a vortex, darkness and light shifted at warp speeds. The conclusion of this “first vision” was running along the edges of the reef, as the darkness of my first night at Mitimiti set in. Unfamiliar land, high mountain peaks, no city lights, made me a wee bit anxious to make it back to the small lit cabin in the distance. Suddenly, I saw a horse, a white horse, mane waving in slow motion. As it slipped into the night in about a millisecond, or a hundredth of a millisecond, I was left with the distinct feeling that there was magic here and that I should tread carefully, but also knowing that everything was being revealed to me on purpose.

The first thing I was ever told about Mitimiti was from a stranger, who told me there was a ghost white horse of a chief roaming the plains.

One evening, in the midst of seminar discussions we are taking part in at the University of Hawai‘i, Jack gives a public lecture. Before he starts his talk—which is about Mitimiti and Mitimiti—he introduces his rock.

When Jack’s presentation is over and the lights came on, a hand shoots up in the corner. Yes? It is a young woman, kind of freckled and blonde. She starts talking—all excited—in Māori, and Jack’s face lights up. It turns out she is from Mitimiti. She grew up there, or right near there, in Panguru. She is just here in Honolulu for a few months, on an academic program, and had just, on a whim almost, decided to come to the talk that night. She said her jaw dropped when she saw the word “MITIMITI” come up on the PowerPoint screen. She was beaming, and laughing, and incredulous. “That piece, your dance, could have been a scene at the bar in Panguru!”

Accessing Connectivity: Making Mitimiti

The Atamira dancers Jack worked with in developing Mitimiti are all from different backgrounds, with different relations to Māori identity (including the blond haka dancer, who isn’t Māori at all). Each of the dancers brought some of their own complex, chaotic, and revealing engagements to the piece as they were led, guided, and opened to something each desired in its making and remaking. The dance-making process enabled the dancers not only to open up to their own desires but also to connect to their own relation to Māori-ness and its relation to colonization, as well as to build and guide the piece in connection to relation with Mitimiti as land and as the location of Jack’s ancestry.

In making Mitimiti, Jack asked each dancer to embody one of his spirit totems—including the whale, hawk, owl, lizard, horse, and bird—and to build movements and characteristics of knowing for each. He then had the dancers explore traditional stories he had been taught by Robyn Kamira, his mentor, Te Rarawa relation, and the kaitiaki (caretaker) of her great-grandfather’s historic manuscripts. The process that the dancers worked with in the dance studio was inspired by different forms and techniques, like Body Weather and interstate methodologies,22 but the main inspiration always came back to everyone’s own experience and sense of truth. Sometimes the dancers cried from sheer frustration or were too afraid to go someplace. Jack taught karakia (the old, traditional kind, not Catholic, colonized prayers that are commonplace), spending time helping the dancers with their reo stumbles and using waiata (song) as a way of incorporating Māori cultural values of whanaungatanga, or family making. This spilled into basic tikanga (protocol) used to emphasize Māori-ness with families and friends. He sought to enable a spiritually and ancestrally connected working environment.

The main thing Jack wanted the dancers to confront and explore was their immediate relationship to their whakapapa (genealogy) through the recitation of their pepeha (a form of orated genealogical ancestral links). They did this on a noho marae, which is a sleepover at a Māori marae.23 During these recitations, each dancer’s display of generational knowledge and comfortability clearly showed their perception of connectedness or ownership of their essential Māori tanga, or Māori way of life. Some dancers could speak Māori fluently; others had desired to speak it and, as they were not in their homeland, had learned off the internet; others had newly acquired language skills and read off bits of paper; others gave silent (traumatic?) refusals. This formed the foundation of the piece’s mahi, its central work.24

We talk about how, in a way, all dance practice creates these things—activating us, creating community, accessing, researching, and enacting cultural historical spiritual meaning and understanding; it’s “not isolated Indigeneity,” he says. But we also talk about how, with Indigenous dance, including Māori dance, we can see these things more clearly. Koroneho explains that in a Māori context, “some of the physical practices are very, very old or connected to specific functions.” He talks about mauri, the life force, life principle, essence, sentience, what is alive, both animate and inanimate, and about wā, which means time and space together, like vaa in Samoan, ma in Japanese (“It’s a Polynesian concept,” he says), and about wā’s connection to hau, “the wind, ignition, spark of life,” like charisma, and how recognition of the hau of the person is what ignites the mauri. He talks about whakapapa not just as genealogy but as “how you relate to things” and “all the interrelationships that live in this earth,” how whaka means “connect” and Papatūānuku is Earth, the temporal, physical world. He talks about whaka puaki, “the revealing of the wonders of that thing—the undiscovered aspects of that thing.” He talks about how dance has “other portals, where you can go into other realms.”

Manaakitanga in Motion: Reciprocal Energies

What does it mean to care for each other, in reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation, in our writing and our dancing, in our homes and our travels, actual and virtual? There is no one answer to this. It requires noticing and shifting, again and again, in relation to what’s needed, by you and by others, with increasing awareness. This involves accessing a space of openness, and open-heartedness, viscerally and experientially. It involves exposing our vulnerability through cultural mistakes or ugliness. It simultaneously puts the spotlight on you, and lets you off the hook, as what you put out (however unpalatable) gets subsumed by the collective.

We chafe at continuing to filter Indigenous ways of knowing through a relation to colonization and to ongoing coloniality. Yet we also both are working from within coloniality, and, in various (and differing) ways, connected with and benefiting from it. As we acknowledge and engage with coloniality, in this chapter and in our lives, we also dream, hope, desire, and strengthen ways of being beyond what Nelson Maldonado-Torres describes as coloniality’s “logic, metaphysics, ontology, and matrix of power created by the massive processes of colonization and decolonization,” including its dominations and subordinations.26 We acknowledge the complexities of this all as we seek vibrant lives and a better world, in the face of the challenges that face Indigenous people, as well as non-Indigenous people, at a time of both global crisis and prophetic shifts.

Even as we continue to recognize the ways we are still writing this dance in relation to massive ongoing coloniality.

Turning the Lens, Absorbing Fear, Becoming Radiance

Mitimiti is situated smack bang on the pulse of 2013, with all the effects of coloniality in full and juicy display. It recognizes the chaos that colonization continues to wreak, being in the midst of it, and yet also—and ultimately—accesses and strengthens ways of being and knowing and relating that have continued within and outside of coloniality’s inroads. These include acknowledging the vibrant force of our baleful parts (our anger, our outbursts, our intensities, our inability to relax and trust that it’ll all work out, even if we don’t coordinate it), as well as our strengths and joys in connecting with and attending to and caring for one another.

This enacting of manaakitanga—attentivity to others, connectivity, hospitality—we discuss together is what “Indigenous dance” is about, wherever it happens, at a kapa haka festival or on a Pueblo feast day or on a theatrical stage. In the “doing” of contemporary Indigenous dance, the performance is not just extracted from these ways: the spaces for connection that the dance provides are integral to the dancing.

This is what Mitimiti’s process and performances engage, what fuels “the empowerment and ihi that actions and absorbs fear and turns it into pure energy that can transform,” as Jack has described it—the sense of accessing each dancer’s (and audience member’s) particular life story in its telling-through-dancing and also the sense of collective connectivity and caretaking between Jack and his parents and grandparents and ancestors and rock, and the dancers’ and theirs, and between them and one another, and between the dance and its various witnesses: audience members, costume weavers, baleful postcolonial scholars, rocks and stars and the Tasman sea, and between us, Jack and Jacqueline.

Welcoming Structures

Mitimiti, a small village in the Hokianga in the far north of Aotearoa, where some of choreographer Jack Gray’s ancestors are from, is known as a remote and deeply spiritual place, a resting spot near to the departure point for wairua, or spirits.34 The Mitimiti dance project has involved years of Gray’s engagement with Mitimiti, starting with his first trips there in 2011, shortly after being given access to knowledge about his ancestral connection there. It included finding his way into more connection to the land on a second trip in 2012. It included cowriting a piece in 2013 about this process, excerpted in the previous section of this chapter. It included Gray’s travels in Hawai‘i, northern and southern California, Chicago, and New York City, which included seeking out and connecting with Indigenous peoples in and from those places, many of whom have since become friends. In 2015, when Gray was back in Auckland beginning to build Mitimiti (the dance piece) into an evening-length production that would premiere the Auckland-based dance company Atamira’s season that October, it involved getting the Atamira dancers connected with a DIY program on national television channel TV3. Atamira dancers and crew from the Mitimiti dance project traveled the seven hours up to the village of Mitimiti, and there they helped rebuild the wharenui on the Matihetihe marae, alongside around two hundred locals and other sponsors. During this project, Gray came into closer connection with his relatives from Mitimiti and “friended” many, on Facebook and off. He also instigated a Mitimiti Where-You-At campaign in which, before the Auckland season premiere, through Facebook and Twitter, people were asked to post photos of themselves holding signs with “#MITIMITI in,” stating their various locations, in a contest that was later judged by colleagues Gray selected for the task.

This 2015 DIY project involved rebuilding the Mitimiti wharenui, named Tūmoana, that had been built hurriedly on the marae in 1953, in time for the burial of tohunga (respected leader and esoteric knowledge holder) Takou Kamira, who was dying at the time. In the decades since, the marae has been an active site for numerous sports contests, fishing competitions, food festivals, weddings, twenty-first birthdays, meetings, and tangi (funerals). Yet, over time, the marae community, with a depleted and aging population, struggled with minimal resources to maintain the marae buildings—including Tūmoana—integral to carrying out cultural duties. Gray writes how “over the years, constant exposure to the elements (salty sea air) meant the building was in desperate need of some tender loving care. As several generations left for urban areas, the marae was used only for funerals and had a sad depressed energy. The idea to rebuild the wharenui was a goal to encourage people back to the marae.”35 Kamira, the kaitiaki or caretaker of guarded knowledge and history from Mitimiti (and the singer referenced earlier), explained that upgrading the wharenui puts the Mitimiti community in a stronger position to provide for others: to host, to look after visitors, to practice manaakitanga (hospitality), and thus to build mana (authority, vital essence).36

However, the 1953 Tūmoana wharenui had not been in that same spot forever. Kamira writes, “Originally, before the road was built, the wharenui . . . stood in front of the church facing out to sea—the main highway in those days was the beach.”38 After a storm blew that wharenui down, the new one “was relocated to its current site and turned to face the road.”39 In other words, the Mitimiti wharenui came down, for a period. And when it went back up, its direction changed. And when it was again worn and in need of some care, the community took it down and, together with others, put it up again.

Mitimiti enacts a way of being akin to these wharenui whose stability is grounded in the movement and change that happen as needed to best support practices of hospitality in ways that build mana. Like this story of the wharenui, Mitimiti is infused with straight-on attentive awareness of change, which includes intense loss. It is not a turning away or turning inward from grief but a seeing and facing what has been taken or buried or cemented over. It is simultaneously an addressing of this in communal connection with one another and with a commensurate tuned-in attention to the frequencies pulsing that signal recurrence, return, and joy, and which transport beyond that grief.

In all of his voyages across the Pacific during the period between when he first returned to Mitimiti and when the dance work Mitimiti premiered, Gray insisted on and organized welcomings for himself and for other Indigenous visitors: gatherings that acknowledged and enacted a relationship between the Indigenous home peoples of the land he was visiting (in Māori terms, the tangata whenua) and those peoples (manuhiri) visiting that land (including himself). As a visiting choreographer at the University of California, Berkeley in spring 2014, he insisted that before starting work with students, he be welcomed by local Ohlone people, throwing the theater, dance, and performance studies department into a bit of a conundrum, as, at that time, they had no established or personal relations with Ohlone or the many other Indigenous peoples from the area who could do such a welcoming.40 At the University of California, Riverside in spring 2014, where Gray was working as a visiting assistant professor, he insisted that Winnimum Wintu chief Caleen Sisk—who was coming to campus for a screening of the documentary film Dancing Salmon Home—be welcomed into the university screening room with song and oratory.41 In New York in 2015, where he was a visitor to the Asia/Pacific/America program at New York University, Gray sought out connection with Lenape (Indigenous peoples of the region that includes New York City) and a leader from a recently formed Lenape Center, Hadrian Coumans. In collaboration with Chamorro performance artist Dakota Camacho, Gray conducted a weeklong Lenapehoking Transformance Lab that included a welcoming by Coumans at New York University and a series of activations in Indigenous-significant places in New York City, including the National Museum of the American Indian, the apartment of a Cheyenne and Algonquian artist/Elder, the rock where the Lenape first met the Dutch, and the Oceania and Plains Indians exhibits at the Met.42 Each of these events (and these are only a few of many, many such activating relation with land and peoples projects and ceremonies Gray sparked, organized, and/or ran during this time on his voyages) brought people together in attentive ways that insisted on the sharing of breath (sometimes with hongi, a Māori practice of pressing noses in greeting; sometimes with the sharing of songs, words, or the air and space around us) and of movement. These practices enacted Indigenous peoples’ recognition of local Indigenous land and peoples—not as absent, distant, exotic, or disappeared but as present physically, historically, and right here, right now. They called out each place’s Indigeneity, through Indigenous-to-Indigenous practices of welcoming and acknowledging, insistently enacting reciprocal relationality.

Gray conceptualized and actualized these welcoming and being-welcomed practices as DIY creative projects between Indigenous peoples and places—not directed by tourist, military, or arts foundation agendas for the betterment of settlers, tourists, or theatergoing audiences. As such, these reframe commodified “mili-touristic” practices of what scholar Adria Imada, writing about the history of what tourism and the military have termed the “luau” and its representation in military films, has termed “imperial hospitality.”43 The practices Gray insists on enact not only relationship between Indigenous peoples as present, connected, and different from one another, and between Indigenous peoples and land/place (a familiar, and accurate, trope). They also enact this relationship to the land/place in what Dene scholar Glen Coulthard calls a “place-based ethics of reciprocity” as an “ontological framework for understanding relationships.”44 Gray and other Indigenous dance artists traveling to the territories of others (for Gray is hardly alone in this practice) engage in reciprocal relationship to the land/place/entities in/on which connection and performance happen. Coulthard writes how this “not only anchors many Indigenous peoples’ critique of colonial relations of force and command, but also our visions of what a truly post-colonial relationship of peaceful co-existence might look like.”45 This understanding forwards as crucial the ways that Indigenous peoples negotiate and enact a (critical and visionary) “way of knowing, experiencing, and relating with the world” anchored in mutually interdependent relationality.46 This is strikingly different from colonization practices where Indigenous people are either positioned as small and distant (far away, strange, and other) or merged (seen as alluring and enticingly exotic, but scarce or absent in this place and time)—and thus as OK to incorporate/absorb/purchase/wear/tattoo or pluck like a strand of hair from a hairbrush and interweave into one’s own attire. It is different as well from staged enactments and depictions of hospitality, like the “luau,” that project an image of Native hospitality but evacuate the coercion underwriting that enactment and ignore the responsibilities and relations that it cements.47

Reciprocity emerges repeatedly in Native studies—and in the Indigenous dance events I have engaged with—as at the base of what constitutes Indigenous ontologies, or ways of being. Coulthard identifies reciprocity as what is centrally missing from the “recognition paradigm” in Canada.48 Maldonado-Torres likewise sees a lack/denial of reciprocity as at the core of coloniality and its infusions.49 As Coulthard notes, reciprocity is an ethical practice of giving and getting, grounded in social practice between beings—where those beings include the human as well as the nonhuman: people as well as animals and what scholar María Regina Firmino-Castillo has called “telluric” beings of place/of the earth, as well as those in spirit or ancestral realms.50 These beings are all understood as valid “human” partners (in ways implicated in the English word human but extending beyond), able to give and get.

This “reciprocity” is not about exchange or possession, involving giving or being given something and then taking it away from the one who gave it, in a way that separates it from them and uses it for one’s own benefit, without some return. Rather, it establishes a cyclical, ongoing, mutually dependent connection. To follow critical anthropologist Annette Weiner, who is drawing on French writings about Māori and Samoan practice, what is reciprocally given and taken is not separable from who/whatever has given it. It is a giving away of something (that will return to you, having perhaps shifted) as a process for retaining one’s mana and way of being, within an environment of relationship and change.51 This underscores the force in the practice of exchange itself—including welcoming and being welcomed and the exchanges (of breath and energy, as starters) these acts require. It includes recognition of the mana not only in people but also in taonga (translated as objects or treasures)—including the structure of wharenui and their carvings, other parts of a marae, and particular cloaks, tools, rocks, or parts of land—and the responsibilities they activate throughout their travels and exchanges. It is about giving and getting in a relationship where offering and receiving something (a treasured object, a dance, a story, a song, a speech, a favor, a visitor, a welcome meal, breath, a blessing) entails respect and responsibility. In this economy, there is understanding that (1) what one receives was given (not coerced or taken without permission or protocol) and (2) through this giving, a mutual relationship is being forged and negotiated. Down the road, in some form, you will give something (similar, lesser or more) back. This reciprocity thus establishes not separation but cyclical, relational connection. “When an object embedded with the hau is given to others, the ‘spirit’ of the thing given seeks to find its place of origin, thereby creating a return,” Weiner writes, echoing the understandings of many Indigenous artists and scholars while paraphrasing—and supporting anew—writing by Marcel Mauss long critiqued by the anthropological establishment.52

The welcoming practices Gray insists on in his travels, and enacts in Mitimiti’s choreography, in other words, direct and enact reciprocal practices of visiting and hosting, in relation to particular land and place and in relation to Indigenous voyaging from place to place. These practices are enacted throughout the entire process of the dance work’s creation, production, performances, photographic enactments, and ongoing reverberations. They frame and activate “generous hospitality” on its own terrain. This, in the context of Mitimiti, includes the places Gray visits on his transpacific voyages and the mutually beneficial relationships he negotiates with those Indigenous places and peoples, and their ancestors, who (he insists) welcome him (and thus themselves) along the way.

Mitimiti is infused with unerased traces of instances, and continuing practices, of these reciprocal exchanges that constituted it. In multiple ways, Mitimiti welcomes (in ways that also assert visitors’ roles as visitors) those encountering the dance work, approaching from sea or from land, into loving connection with the experiences of place that infuse it and that it performs. These practices are not about being welcomed somewhere as a path to own it or to take it over but rather about recognizing your role as a visitor and affirming your mana, as well as the mana or import of those whose land you are on; it activates practices that are not about receiving something to have it for oneself, to absorb it into oneself or one’s collection, or art, or scholarship, without ongoing relation—appropriating it—but rather about receiving something within a system where its giving establishes, strategizes, and negotiates a relationship of spiritual/political/energetic return to the giver and recognizes and supports the ways giving something that will come back to you supports and requires change.

Reciprocity, in this context, is about establishing and negotiating differences through the ongoing, sensorially enacted, back-and-forth lines of connection forged in the giving and receiving between places and their peoples, in relation to other places and peoples. It is about engaging with others to understand and negotiate and hold on to your ever-changing self in ever-changing relationship to one another in sometimes vexed, tension-filled, difficult, loving, joyful, fun, and, crucially, ongoing ways—and that doesn’t alienate what was given from those who gave it but instead reinforces their import and mana. It is about being in relationship through this balanced back-and-forthness, with mutual dependency. Though a colonizing political economy predicated on ongoing colonizing domination of peoples or land, dis/possession, or “museumification” may continue to structure European modernity, these reciprocities recalibrate those structures and background their relevance.

Mitimiti

Mitimiti as an evening-length theater piece “premiered” in October 2015 around Q Theatre in Auckland.53 It involved participants from all over the world: a sound designer from France, François Richomme; Aotearoa-based Kiowa round dancers from the United States; spoken-word artist Camacho; and caretakers, leaders, and children from Mitimiti—thirty of whom had been driven seven hours down to Auckland to see the show. The kids were in school uniform, and the adults wore matching black “#MITIMITI” T-shirts they had made; they came to see, support, and enact their relation to Mitimiti in Auckland.

The piece’s deep rumblings began when the theater lights went down, the stage floor and balcony seats began to shake with sound, the space throbbed, a voice called out in karanga, “Haere mai, haere mai” (come here/welcome), and legendary Aotearoa dancer Taiaroa Royal drew creation onto the stage, having come to form as a “trans tupuna,” or ancestor (Royal described himself as a “trans tupuna” at an earlier discussion forum about the work, registering the fluidity around the gender of this creation process and its centrality in Indigenous resilience), dragging pods of dancers onto the floor under a regal white train. Behind Royal’s powerful, controlled grace, beings writhed out from their pod coatings. They emerged, moving at first in unison. Then they explored patterns with their bodies, finding increasingly expanded movement, shifting in and out of sync with one other. Moving throughout the stage space, which we circled three sides of, they tried out grouping, flocking together, disbanding, splitting off. Finding partners, they circled, lifted, fought, supported. Short ropes extended from their wrists, becoming taut between them as they moved apart from each other. They were thus birthed and connected, linked and trapped.

The piece here thus begins with Papatūānuku’s creation, in which the dance piece and its dancers, and the earth and its people, are birthed into being.

Actually, though, the piece had started just before that, when dancer Te Arahi Easton cajoled the audience sitting around the edges of the theater floor and welcomed us there. One night, he says, “Well, what do you know? I was so happy you all could make it here tonight, to Mitimiti. Kia ora! I’m Arahi”; shakes some hands; shares a hongi with someone; and asks one audience member, “Where you from, bro?” Another night, he exclaims, “Kia ora! Thank you for coming to the theater! You’ve all come out to see Mitimiti, eh? What’s your name? Nice to meet you. I just have to say one thing: you all look absolutely stunning this evening.” There is a recognition, in this opening welcome, that we have come from elsewhere (though maybe have relations there—“Where you from, bro?”), in a good way (we are looking stunning), to engage respectfully here, the way one would in a place where one has come with intention, having prepared oneself with care. There is, in this welcoming, a connection and relation being established through which Te Arahi invites us to have a place of belonging in relationship to Mitimiti, as respectful visitors to its space. This welcoming recognizes the theater space we have entered as itself a kind of wharenui, the focal point of a marae and the threshold across which one would be ceremonially welcomed onto it upon arrival on Māori territory.

Or maybe Mitimiti began just before that, when dancers and children and other audience members filled the perimeters of the stage floor with chalk drawings: images, words, colors, contributing to the space, event, artwork, with their lines and energies. A toddler in a sparkly “love” shirt explores the circle; people run across to greet each other, leaving chalk footprints on the Marley floor. It feels like the start of a festive party at a gathering place where we all know each other, filled with laughing, excitement, gladness, at what is about to come. The second night, after acknowledging us all (“Kia ora, what’s your name? I want to say kia ora to each one of you, but there’s too many of you!”), Easton continues, “I’m Māori, obviously. But I consider myself an artist too. You can be an artist. Just pick up a chalk. Thanks for coming.” The invitation to contribute something to the decor and design of the space—to draw or write or color in, around the edges, even if it sometimes rubbed off on us and mussed our clothes—offered an opportunity to theater guests not to impose structure but to add into the structure that surrounds the piece and perhaps even let it mark us. In the viewers’ stretched-out, relaxed, playful readiness, calmly drawing for a while, kids running about, laughing, warm and lively chatter filling the space with an air of joy and anticipation, those arriving mingling their designs with those of the dancers (who had been drawing already, before the audience entered), lay the acceptance of that invitation to contribute to the work.

Mitimiti’s welcoming also enacted a shift in sensory experience and perception, registering ways that “decolonial aesthetics” require the contribution of different notions of what a society should “feel, smell, and look like.”55 As we entered and found a place to sit or stand, and started to settle, ushers offered us bowls of Universal Taonga perfume oil to dip our fingers into and dab on our skin—a salve created as a collaboration between Gray and his friend Yvette Sitten as the “scent of Mitimiti” and designed to contribute—to give in to—“the groundbreaking immersive multi sensory performance of dance, story, art produced by the Atamira Dance Company.”56 This invitation into a theater space, these intentional ways of entering and acknowledging and connecting, the multisensory environment created through scent and sound and creative contribution, established a tangible collective resonance and air of excitement before the “dance” per se even started.

Although, of course, it already had, just before that, on Queen Street in front of the theater, when Camacho led a smoking ceremony to prepare for the performance, calling the four directions with prayer, sound, and smoke. The excited buzz of those entering the venue, greeting friends, partaking of drinks and nibbles at the theater bar, meant that few registered what Camacho was doing, though a few glanced curiously at the conch shell he raised and was blowing as they scurried past to get inside to their tickets. (One night, a young boy shouted out anxiously from the door to those of us gathered, “They are about to start! The show is about to start!” as Camacho continued.) Yet regardless of who did or didn’t register it, in a sense, that ceremony, preparing the space, is what began the performance each night.

But in another, more expansive sense of time and ceremony, perhaps the piece really began in the Mitimiti crew’s preparations for the four performances (which Gray suggested be thought more like a four-night ceremony than a four-night theater run).57 Ruth Woodbury and Rosanna Raymond, discussing the adornments (not costumes, something more) they created, noted how every design and all the materials they used have specific meanings that relate to the story that Mitimiti tells. “They misbehave,” they said of how they had to work to get what they called the hei “thingies,” the neck reeds that tied around the dancers’ faces and necks and hanged down their torsos, to stay straight. In making the adornments, “we continue to remember this idea that everything has an essence, everything has a mauri,” they explained.58 These preparations included the DIY work the dancers undertook up at Mitimiti toward the start of their rehearsals, lending their energies to rebuilding the wharenui there, listening to stories about it (including how the wharenui was turned around), watching with wonder as Tumoana carvings were brought into it anew. “We wouldn’t have known any of those things if we hadn’t gone up there,” Gray said.59 They included the sound score Richomme created after driving up to Mitimiti to record the sounds of its birds, animals, water, wind rustling on land, and then mixed and engineered in responsive attention such that the sound waves each night built the space, manifesting Mitimiti on stage in a physical way through its pulses, vibrations, owl sounds. They included the video footage of Mitimiti that Lisa Reihana readied for projection, in layers, onto panels hanging from above, flashing images familiar (I have heard) to many there, including beach, birds, light. They included the round pillar portals covered with photos of Mitimiti—including the company’s DIY travels there—that stood, like ancestral carvings in a wharenui (and like tourist information pillars), on each side where the audience entered. These place-based physical and sensory connections to Mitimiti—offered to the performance by the many people who had come into relation to it during Gray’s travels and, sensing the import of what it was enacting, were drawn to be there and take part—along with the refiguring of the seating into a theater in the round, served to shift the theater space, one undoubtedly familiar to many attending this opening of Tempo Dance Festival NZ, into a multisensory scent–sound–sight–sensed activation not just of Mitimiti and of a marae, right there in an Auckland theater, but, in a massive flash, an experience of the ways of seeing and knowing and connecting (with the space, with one another, with ancestral realms). This shifting started weeks before, with Mitimiti’s ceremonial preparations and with the intention and understanding and desire brought to these preparations by all compelled to contribute.

Really, though, Mitimiti started globally well before the four nights of performance or even rehearsals or these sound and light designs, in the dozens of #mitimiti Twitter and Facebook spatial tags posted online from all over the world during the previous months. Or maybe its opening was five or so years before that, when Gray first learned about and was starting to reconnect with his whanau (family) from Mitimiti (facing some resistance and suspicion at first, because he did not grow up there but was born and raised around Auckland). Or did it begin in the stories and travels and discussions and writings and earlier staged renditions that Gray developed since then, with an ever-growing group of collaborators (including me, as Gray and I have been talking and listening and writing and reflecting on Mitimiti and on Mitimiti for years, while traveling together and on our own across oceans and continents)—and in the compelling sense of necessity many of us received, calling and requiring us to be there? Or did it begin before Gray even knew about his connection to Mitimiti, through his desires for connection and the practices that its intention compelled?

Mitimiti, choreographed by Jack Gray with Atamira Dance Company, happened over four nights in October 2015 at Q Theatre in Auckland, New Zealand, to responsive audiences, with palpable energy and excitement, in packed rows on opening and closing nights, with love and joy. But that was just one instance of the expansive-in-space-and-time manifestations of the work, one heightened instance of a way of being, knowing, and connecting it showed to be emerging anew, and also here still now as always. Mitimiti closed with the Atamira dancers framing each other at the back of the theater space in the striking final, dancer-built DIY marae pose. That bodily wharenui was made with mops the dancers had brandished as rākau and taiaha. It registered the everyday work of clearing, cleaning, and cooking for each other: how mopping up your space after you have gathered in it is part of the ceremonial structure.60 Though really, too, that was just one of its endings, one echo of its callout. After the round of cheers and applause that marked that final pose, Kamira came out onstage and sang us a song of hers, in the dark, on her guitar, to ground us all together again, as a waiata (song) is called upon to do at the end of an intense ceremonial happening (as she sang, some of her relations from Mitimiti called out their recognition to her, in Māori, as the situation called upon them to do; in between breaths, Kamira whispered a quick “kia ora” back to them, completing the exchange). And then most nights, Camacho returned to lead a social, communal, hip-hop spoken-word #mitimiti version of the round dance (which Jordan Cocker, a Kiowa friend Gray connected with after his time in the United States, had led on opening night), lifting and opening the energy out to us all, and Gray joined in, wearing a stunning korowai (ceremonial cape) that his auntie made for him for the occasion, which they designed together based on shapes from Hawaiian cloaks and made short, so Jack could dance in it.61 And then the audience joined too, two-stepping around the circle of water that had (in the midst of the dance) streamed down from the portal above into a reflecting pool center stage that flashed and shimmered with each step and splash and sound, getting our socks soaking wet, stepping forward to be part in our messy, awkward ways, but joining, until the round dance came to a close and it was time to cheer and applaud.

Standing around that water portal, facing inward, some of those who had come to watch began to sing and offer speeches to Gray and the company for all the piece had offered. On the first night, three women began with loud and powerful karanga, their voices rising high above the applause. They were followed by other speakers, including some of Gray’s Mitimiti whanau, who spoke out, in Māori, their appreciation of him.62 On the last night, when the largest group from Mitimiti was there, a dozen kids, all in blue school uniforms, and thirty adults wearing the “#MITIMITI” T-shirts they had had made (including Andrew and Diane Kendall), gave a mihi (a speech of acknowledgment and thanks; a tribute) to Gray with their recognition and love of him, as their relation, gifting him framed and signed photographs of Mitimiti in reciprocal response to what he had offered them, affirming the land and water as well as their own stake, on their terms, in this work called and manifesting Mitimiti, ensuring these connections and exchanges between Gray and them would continue. And each night, the piece went on in the mingling and laughing and hugging and online posting: Camacho, with an Instagram poster cutout, photographed Gray and many friends and artists who came to be a part. Things continued in the theater lobby, with its celebratory drinks and discussions, plus an Atamira company haka that shut the lobby music down. Along the way, some of those in the “#MITIMITI” T-shirts told me that they could not wait for Gray to bring Mitimiti up to Mitimiti.

In a forum after the first night’s show, Kamira noted how the piece brought in all the cultural elements—welcoming, calls, songs, speeches, response—that would be part of a Māori gathering. “They were all there,” she said. “They didn’t necessarily happen in the order in which they would happen on the marae—but they were all there.”

Portals

In each performance of Mitimiti, after the umbilical birthing, on a mostly dark stage, two streams of water pour down, from a portal above, into a small pool that fills and ripples with sounds and reflections. For a long and difficult period, full of sounds—the water streaming, loud and frenzied slams, a pounding, a propeller pulsing—the Atamira dancers dance their all, each in their own way: Nancy Wijohn with stunning strength; Bianca Hyslop with undulations of abandon; slithery Matiu Hamuera, full of allure; Jasmin Canuel in conscious connection; Gabrielle Thomas in sculptural precision; Easton propelled by open-hearted energy. They are on their own, together in the same flashing, dark, immersive space, focused inward, frenzied, strong, hardly seeing. Though once or twice they collide, or hug, or in some way interact, they are mostly all doing their own thing. Their energy is spilling out. No one is connecting. It goes on and on. Finally, Hamuera steps into the portal, arms out into the water streams, and Thomas lets out an anguished scream that calls on the ancestors (Royal, as well as Frances Rings, of Bangarra Dance Theatre, in town from Australia, who was only going to dance one night but was compelled to stay and dance all four). Connected, often in synchrony, they dance together, stunning, holding the space as it shifts from frenzy and disconnect into clarity, strength, and calm.

First the four women return, stained in blood, approaching the pool and dipping their fingers in the water circle, its dark currents a place of still-and-always-was-there-for-connection. They enter the source, and the quiet tinkle of its ripples as they move calms the space; they move alongside each other, lying in the water, not touching but in symmetrical balance, standing, swooping, sitting, turning, splashing. Their gentle, loving, sensual dancing with each other soothes the space and readies it, lifting its burdens.

When they are through, Easton enters the water, kicking the surface so it splashes, brandishing something. (“Oh! I made that patu!” gasps the woman standing next to me on opening night.) Easton starts to haka, voice fierce and loud and strong, feet flashing drops of water as he slices space with the glistening, polished, clear glass weapon I’ve come to know well, through Gray’s travels through U.S. airport security and other ceremonial spaces. (In the postshow mingling, the woman tells me how she made the patu, which refracts light into beams, and gifted it to Jack. I smile. So nice to meet you. I know that story, that patu, its import, its gifting, the voyages through airport security it has taken.) Then Easton leaves and Hamuera enters with fluid undulations, clapping the water to make it spray, letting it trickle, singing gently. I make out “rangi” (sky, sky father) and “aroha” (love) in his words. (Later, Kamira tells me the waiata he is singing “is one sung by a visitor expressing the deeper meaning of the encounter. It talks of the symbolic vessel [waka = canoe] that brings them in peace, that the chief ‘paddle’ represents the symbolic spring from which aroha emerges, and finally that their arrival is to strengthen their relational connections lest they become cold.”63) Outside the circle, Easton and Royal (back on stage, this time not to usher in creation, or calm it after a time of turmoil, but to help with its practical upkeep) start their mopping. Turns out the tupuna’s “trans” crosses not just gender but realm and manifestation, depending on what’s needed. Right now, they need to mop the Marley so the dancers do not slip.

As ritual, performance, happening, Mitimiti, in the temporal space of a week in Q Theatre, gives presence to relationality as a way of being, in each two-hour theater event, and in ongoing ripples and pauses and flashes that started who knows when and are still happening. The show faces the pain, turmoil, disconnection, and loss that ongoing, still-defining structures of coloniality impose. At the same time, by way of its ongoing, generous, reciprocal relationship building, through the place-based ethics of reciprocity infusing these activations of space—the traces of understanding, awareness, and connectivity that the coloniality of Being has not succeeded in obliterating—it powerfully brings into form, and strengthens, ways of being, acting, knowing, and perceiving that supersede those histories. In other words, it recognizes pain, disconnect, death, decay, not only as deep loss and rupture, to be covered over or moved on from, but also as eruption: as a source of light and joy and love and generation. These reciprocities include those with the people from Mitimiti who came (after Gray ventured up, several times, to find his way into connection with the land and with his whanau there; after the Atamira company had traveled up and lent a hand with rebuilding the Mitimiti wharenui; after Gray instigated the global #mitimiti campaign) to witness, and respond with words and gifts, and, through the response to those responses, strengthen the responsibilities that come with connection. It includes the contributions to the performance of Indigenous peoples with whom Gray had come into relationship as an aspect of his travels, including those with ancestry from all over the globe: what is today called the United States (the Kiowa dancers), Guåhan (aka Guam) (Camacho), and Australia (Rings). It includes the gifting and welcoming of breath, energy, and voice into the project: Kamira’s song, the oil, the gifting of “objects” and other “materials” to the production: the patu, the korowai. It includes the generous exchange of reciprocity in the perceptions and energies contributed by the many who spoke, wrote, sang, and offered response to the piece, including those who did karanga and made speeches to him after the performance “ended”—including I, and many others, in a panel on the work Jack organized, and in this and other writing, and in the attention of everyone who showed up and stayed present. In these and myriad other ways, Mitimiti actives the reciprocal back-and-forths of giving and getting and energy that constitute and are constituted by a vibrant contemporary (as well as ancient and ongoing and future) Indigeneity that exists in the relations and connections between humans and between other entities. It is not so much a practice of imagining Indigenous futurities as a practice of enacting them, now.

Mitimiti is, in these and other ways, an opening to come and be included in its ways of being and to find one’s connection to it. It is not a welcoming focused on accommodating viewers or driven by a need to explain itself to them, which some viewers found unsettling and off-putting (at least one review griped about the speeches at the end, which were all in a language, i.e., Māori, she could not understand). The piece’s Māori core, while deeply present, clearly wasn’t clear to all. Given the energies put into coloniality’s narratives of Indigenous erasure and attempts at obliteration, this is hardly surprising. But instead of taking as primary a need to explain its presence or to address the needs of its Pākeha viewers to fully understand, the piece is instead grounded in restoring and creating Māori space for those who want to spend time in it as guests, bringing something to the table themselves, to share in that horizontal exchange. All are welcome to come and watch, and listen, and sense, until (perhaps) it starts to become clear—but it is not about a need for clarity, nor for precise beginnings or endings that would delineate it as a contained “event” that could be experienced and consumed. It invites its visitors in with an understanding that this is an opening not to come and take, or to own/possess/incorporate into, but to experience a way of belonging and connecting in relation. The reciprocity is about keeping while giving away—and about giving away in order to keep. This piece offers Mitimiti to us all, as a way of keeping it as a vibrantly active Māori location and touchstone.

Radical Rupture and Indeterminacy

One of these ways of being and knowing that Mitimiti brings forward is a way of experiencing one’s immediate relation to where one is—to place—which requires intense focus, as well as trust in what you are not able to focus on right then. The show happens on so many levels at once, including spatially: upper levels with multiple rippled projections of shifting light; blue neon horizon lines marking the liminal space between upper and lower and the light at the Mitimiti horizon; the balcony, where one can sit and watch with a bit of distance, and the ground floor, with its liveliness, humor, crowds, and chaos, its activities and portals, its own liminal spaces between ground and water, so alluring and attractive. Then there are the sensory levels, the visual projections and flickers, the immersive, invocative soundscape that permeates and envelops and penetrates, the kinesthetic energies of the dancers connecting them to each other and to us, the words that give us word-meaning to connect with and recognize as evocative. On the last evening, during the closing song, Kamira’s mic completely cut out, and the audience became more aurally attentive to the soft sound, and the theater became even more veiled in silence, so she could be heard. Kamira later explained, “That was in itself an expression of reciprocity where an audience—who pays money and may feel they are ‘owed’ an evening of effortless entertainment—then demonstrates aroha towards the singer who needed to be heard right after a raucous ending by the dancers.” And that’s just the obvious stuff: there are the levels of play, work, sweat, sweeping; there are children and Elders and ancestors; there are levels of spirit brought in and acknowledged and engaged. However many times you see it (and many audience members came more than once, or attended a preshow forum or a VIP backstage walk through, or watched the podcasts that had been appearing online leading up to the run and are available still64), from wherever you are sitting or standing, whatever physical, emotional, spiritual space you’re in, you can really only take in a part of it.

Embracing these fleeting perceptions and momentary connections across space is part of the Indigenous “place-based ethics of reciprocity” the work elicits. Being in reciprocal relation to place, the piece asserts, isn’t about constant, continuous contact with it in unchanging ways. Its ongoingness happens in goings and returnings and rebuildings, across breaks, what Cree scholar Karyn Recollet theorizes as “rupture”: in pauses, visits to and away from one’s land and place and people through voyages (be they seven hours in a van, or across oceans, or other ethereal realms), as well as in staying put.65 It is the act of connection, and the reciprocal returns it necessitates, that constitute its force, whatever the temporal or physical spaces in between. These connections-across-rupture refute the roles colonizers assign to Indigenous people: “Indigenous” as either staying put in one small place in the same way, until shrinking into statistical insignificance and fading away, or venturing out to be assimilated, until not identifiable and fading away.66 My experience of Mitimiti, across years and oceans and at the Q Theatre in Auckland, underscored the import and force of pauses and flickers and instances and traces: how there is always stuff happening all around us, on other levels that we can only catch glimpses of, how there are always things going back into the earth that get rebuilt—and how vital these flickers and (at times) buried fragments are. Sometimes I couldn’t see Reihana’s evocative layered video projections at all, and even when I could, they were just fragments on the set’s hanging strips of translucent screen. But I caught slivers of them. It felt like that sense of power and potential, where there is so much swirling, always, everywhere, and you have to find your way into it, because it’s (still) there, even when it has (perhaps even for generations) been muted or obstructed from view or when you’ve been raised far away and ruptured from it.

Mitimiti, as I see it from where I sit and write, offers a radical re-Indigenized67 contemporary dance experience of Indigenous peoples connecting, in loving, responsible, reciprocal ways, with each other—with family; with land and place; with others’ lands and places; with ancestors; with lovers expansively gendered; with parts of oneself, including parts infused with coloniality’s ongoing violence and impositions of shame; and with those left aside, or buried, or (for now) unseen. It asks and answers: how does one understand coloniality and its constitutive death, loss, trauma, and grief—the colonization, destruction, period of disconnection, the wharenui built but then taken down, for now, this night, or this generation—as cyclical, not final, so that the work becomes, not denying, resisting, or moving beyond that loss and grief, nor staying paralyzed by it, but rather tracing and tracking its story as a way of restoring and creating anew, again? And again? And practicing joy and love when what has come down is, with anticipation and excitement, through love and connection, building up (once) again?

Mitimiti, as a performance in Q Theatre, comes toward an end (and continues) with a round dance. By closing this iteration of this event with this Native North American intertribal dance, not of incorporation (you don’t become Indian/First Nations/Indigenous by dancing a round dance), but of relation and belonging through giving your energies into a dance circle where others have given theirs—in a way that in fact affirms that you are actually from somewhere else (“Where you from, bro?”)—the piece enacts a keeping (of culture and being-ness) for one’s community through invitation to others to join.

#MITIMITI #WHEREYOUAT

Both Mitimiti (the place) and Mitimiti (the dance) were, as I’ve noted, framed by another practice of relational exchange: the #mitimiti #whereyouat and Instagram photographs that are circulating before, after, and throughout the process of the Mitimiti project. This photographing provides another powerful example of how the work activates Indigenized reciprocal exchanges in ways that enact outside of the coloniality in which these relationships have been steeped. As Imada has discussed at length, the photograph has long contributed to numerous colonizing regimes’ disciplinary technology; the camera, her (and many others’) research underscores, was “a technology that disciplined racialized bodies in colonial sites.”68 The #mitimiti #whereyouat and Instagram photographing practices, through their Indigenous-to-Indigenous reciprocal structures and the ways they enable those involved to affirm, assert, contest, a place within their terms, enact a relation to photographic engagement and representation on its own terrain.

The #mitimiti #whereyouat photo competition served as a way for those Gray had met throughout his voyages, and built relationships with, to give energy and focus—mana—to the Mitimiti project in a way that emphasized the place and project’s import and centrality. “This friendly viral campaign/photo competition was to spread the love from the home community of Mitimiti around the world, through shared story, memories and connections,” Gray wrote on his Facebook page.69 It invited global connection with, rather than distance from, the “remote” area in the Hokianga called Mitimiti.

In response to the campaign’s invitation, more than 125 of us, from fifteen countries, posted #mitimiti pictures to Twitter and Facebook, using social media tools as a way of recognizing, activating, and strengthening our energetic connections with the Mitimiti project across geographies and as a way of giving support to the project. In that sense, it did not enable (our) exotification of Mitimiti as a faraway, sparsely peopled, mystical, abject place but instead invited and welcomed those of us physically at a distance from it and its people, but connected with it and with Gray through active, vibrant, online realms, to be lovingly connected with it, from #wherever we were at.

As Maldonado-Torres writes, “decoloniality involves an aesthetic, erotic, and spiritual decolonial turn.”70

As a material mode of support and response to this massive cyber shout-out, leaders from Mitimiti, as I’ve noted, had black T-shirts made with “#MITIMITI” printed across them. At the Auckland premiere, the dozens of people who had come down from Mitimiti wore these T-shirts—making them easy to spot in their abundance in the audience and in postshow festivities. These T-shirts and the wearing of them also served as a reciprocal response to our #mitimiti #whereyouat offerings, a way of giving a mihi back to Gray, all of us, and the #mitimiti campaign. It activated both support of the campaign and a receiving of the global energies it offered, and it also responded back to its online offering through a making and putting on of #MITIMITI onto their physical bodies.

The economy of this reciprocal exchange was not one in which, to cite Rosemary Coombe, “the meaning of a text is produced exclusively at a mythic point of origin,”71 as in capitalist frameworks in which “those who ‘own’ the signature or proper name” hold rights to it “without regard to the contributions or interest of those others in whose lives it figures.”72 Here #MITIMITI circulated on T-shirts outside of its originating #online context, with those from Mitimiti claiming authorial rights to its # and circulating its meaning back, on their own terms, formats, and bodies. As with radical decolonial Indigenous-to-Indigenous love functioning beyond a colonial order that would require recognition from a state to be seen as real,73 those from Mitimiti, wearing #MITIMITI T-shirts they themselves designed and had made, offered back to the global internet campaign an articulation of #MITIMITI on their own torsos, showing what it is to be, in one’s body, physically connected to Mitimiti’s fabric. Articulating back to the cyber campaign in the form of the self-produced T-shirt (that staple tourist travel souvenir),74 not for sale but created for and worn on themselves, inserts Indigenous practices of reciprocity in the place of capitalist categories of ownership, property, commodification, and appropriation. In an intellectual property system steeped in coloniality, “the possessive individual property holder,” Coombe writes, holds all the power.75 Response (as, for example, in parody) is by a weaker consumer. Here the back-and-forth #MITIMITIs assert meaning and connection within a system of exchange between visitors and guests negotiating (and contesting) their terms of connection to one another, in relation to the place being visited and its tangata whenua, people of that land. This T-shirt response positions both the cyber #mitimiti callouts and the T-shirt assertions within a back-and-forth system of Indigenized reciprocity and exchange. #mitimiti has gone out and returned, transformed, on the bodies of those from Mitimiti. Through this act of negotiation, Mitimiti’s solidity as a specifically Māori, specifically Te Rarawa, place is affirmed.76

In a similar way, the Instagram picture taking that circulated in the theater space toward the end of each evening, when Camacho carried an Instagram frame through the people’s gathering for us to take pictures with, reframes colonizing practices in histories of photography, with its focus on and circulations of exotic photographs taken by outsiders of near-naked Natives in faraway places—or of “imperial hospitality” as enacted in military photography in Hawai‘i. The Mitimiti Instagram photos are not pictures of exotified “others,” or posings and framings of one’s Indigenous self, exotified for others, but rather up close and personal Indigenous-to-Indigenous radical decolonial depictions and enactions of love for oneself, one’s friends, one’s partner(s), and one’s Indigenous community, performed and circulated in playful, joyful, loving, shared acknowledgment of one another. Indeed, though they circulate after the event and record it beyond its specific moment, they are not really about preserving for the future. Rather, they are about acknowledging presence and enacting a (familiar, these days) ceremonial act of being asked to be pictured, acknowledged as included, as a way of taking leave: before you go, let’s get a picture together, for us to keep, sure, but also to perform that we want to be pictured together. The pictures that result are fun, and shared, with laughs and chiding. The commodification (this is Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, after all) is framed through this focus on mutual Indigenous-to-Indigenous self-photographing practices, on the act of taking and sharing them, more than in the images themselves. Just as the “#MITIMITI” T-shirts are not souvenirs being bought and worn as fashion, these images are not part of an unequal exchange between object and subject, alienated from those depicted and circulating outside of economies that return authority to them. Instead, more like the ceremonial cape Gray’s auntie made to recognize her relative’s significant accomplishment, they participate actively, with their own energies, in an exchange of support. Their value lies in the exchange.

Mitimiti is about a place in the Hokianga—Mitimiti—with a specific Te Rarawa history. It is also about the Te Rarawa/Māori practice of negotiating connection—for example, between host locations and visitors—in multiple iterations, times, and places. Gray’s insistent, creative recognizing, as an Ngati Porou/Ngati Kahungunu/Te Rarawa/Nga Puhi–Māori–Pacific Islander–Indigenous person himself, of the peoples and practices indigenous to the lands where he travels along his transpacific voyages strengthens those he encounters as Indigenous too. It thus asserts, in keeping with Pacific voyaging practices, an Indigeneity constituted in and through back-and-forth movement and change, through building and rebuilding (sometimes with changes of direction, as needed). Mitimiti thus flips a colonizing definition of Indigenous mutability-as-absorbability by defiantly practicing a loving, responsive, horizontal, shifting-as-needed, Māori-based Indigeneity, in relation to Mitimiti (the place) in Aotearoa and in relation to multiple places across the oceans and airwaves. It asserts an Indigeneity in which nowhere is out of place.

In actively asserting its relation to place, in Mitimiti and elsewhere, and in actively insisting upon practices of reciprocal exchange and “generous interaction” in them,77 Mitimiti further promotes and asserts “the significance of givenness, generosity, hospitality, and justice” in “a world oriented by the ideals of human generosity and receptivity,”78 which, as Maldonado-Torres argues, is at the core of what coloniality tries to remove.

Mitimiti, in these multiple ways, enacts Indigenized exchange as a sustaining act of history, futurity, and reality. This is perhaps why those of us called to be part of the work, urgently wanting and needing what it is doing and showing, are responding to it with such passion, love, and joy.