Māori People in Pacific Spaces

Te Rangihiroa: A Māori Man in the Pacific

Te Rangihiroa, also known as Sir Peter Buck, was a member of the group of Māori scholar–politicians prominent in the early twentieth century.1 His parents, Ngarongo-ki-tua and William Henry Buck, were Ngāti Mutunga and Irish, respectively. His grandmother Kapuakore was an important feature of his childhood whose impact resonated throughout his life. Educated at Te Aute, a significant Māori boys school at the time (his 1897 speech about Parihaka to the Te Aute Students’ Association was his first publication),2 Te Rangihiroa studied medicine in university and then enjoyed careers in public service, parliamentary politics, and the military (World War I), before he eventually moved into the field of anthropology. He spent the last two decades of his life based in Hawai‘i, and although he was engaged in administrative work, heading the Bishop Museum for much of that time, and some teaching at Yale University and the University of Hawai‘i, his long-standing and impressive legacy is his formidable commitment to research (after his 1910 thesis, he published numerous books, chapters, and articles3). Despite his impressive career in Hawai‘i and beyond, in New Zealand, we tend to focus on his domestic exploits. To take a fairly crass example, the Wikipedia entry for Te Rangihiroa describes only his New Zealand–based activities, and the description of his career (and life) peters out after his 1920s public service work in the area of public health.4 Therefore, in at least one version of the popular imaginary, the last thirty years of his life, and indeed his last career, with all its Pacific as well as scholarly dimensions, remain obscured.5 At the same time, his 1949 book The Coming of the Maori6 is often acknowledged as a (or even the) foundational text for the discipline of Māori studies.

Reflecting on Te Rangihiroa’s connection with the Pacific and, in particular, his connection with other Pacific people enables us to imagine both him and the region a little differently. We might notice, for example, his activities in the then-colonies of the Cook Islands and Niue while he was based there as a medical officer.7 This could in turn foreground the occasion of his visit to Sāmoa, during which he was quickly identified as the Tulafale (“talking chief”) of a visiting group of anthropologists. His ability to speak a Polynesian language produced a kind of cultural and social fluency as well. Indeed, his Polynesianness at times trumped his scholarly position from the perspective of the communities he visited. In Sāmoa, he attended an ‘ava ceremony that was intended to welcome the group of visiting foreigners. According to Condliffe, however, on recognizing Te Rangihiroa not merely as a scholar but as a relative, the hosts quickly changed the type of ‘ava they would serve: instead of offering the variety of ‘ava that is used to welcome new visitors, they offered ‘ava uso, which is reserved for reunion between long-lost relatives.8 This act, securely located within Samoan epistemologies and hosting practices, reframed the entire encounter: Te Rangihiroa became the central member of the visiting party, and others were merely peripheral. Finally, we might notice that Te Rangihiroa’s last public outing in 1951 was to chant at the dedication of a restored medicinal heiau.9

As well as being a man of the Pacific, Te Rangihiroa was a scholar of the Pacific, and his scholarly work was both premised and focused on drawing connections between various Polynesian communities. Te Rangihiroa’s work in the Pacific strove at least in part to stitch Polynesians into the broader racial maps that circulated at the time: as well as writing about Pacific peoples and Polynesia, he taught a courses at Yale in 1933 and 1934 called Native Races of the Pacific and later taught a summer course on Polynesia at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. From the perspective of the present, it can be easy to forget that the ethnography and anthropology (and linguistics) in which he worked were considered to be sciences in less social ways than they are today. Working with prevailing theories about race and people, linguists and ethnologists attempted to sketch scientifically rigorous explanations for how different people were connected,10 and many of the methodologies on which Te Rangihiroa depended for his work included the precise physical measurement of human bodies and implements. Though these methodologies and their uses are regarded rather dubiously today, at the core of Te Rangihiroa’s research was the racialization of people of the Pacific. He was extremely well versed in Polynesian languages and material culture and spent a great deal of time concentrating on a small number of specific Polynesian communities: Māori, Sāmoa, Mangaia, Kapingamairangi, and Hawai‘i. He spent years producing detailed sketches, believing strongly in actively participating in research, and was not satisfied that he was able to write about an item until he could construct it himself. This elongated the work, and yet it also meant that he had a deep and clear understanding of how things were constructed in their layers. His academic work was highly recognized: he received honorary doctorates from Rochester (1939), New Zealand (1939), Hawai‘i (1948), and Yale (1951), and he received British and Swedish knighthoods in 1946. In 1952 he posthumously received the Huxley Memorial Medal, the highest award from the Royal Anthropological Institute. Because Te Rangihiroa is both an object of study and a scholar in this field of research, his own contributions to scientific literature about Polynesians (and, more broadly, the Pacific) ultimately shaped the ways in which he himself is understood.

In the late 1930s, Te Rangihiroa applied for U.S. citizenship as a gesture of gratitude for the professional opportunities that country had extended to him, and the outcome of that application emphasizes the limits but also the traces of individual agency when it comes to Māori identification with the Pacific. Although Te Rangihiroa did not apply for citizenship to depart from his identification as Māori, his being Māori, and therefore Polynesian, rendered him ineligible for U.S. citizenship. His application was not therefore an intentional articulation of being Pacific, but his Pacificness was produced for him by the U.S. government, and he responded by recognizing the implications of becoming Pacific in this context. Despite his unsuccessful appeals, which he later abandoned, Te Rangihiroa recognized that if he was Pacific on the basis of being Māori, then he needed to consider his experience in relation to other people also understood as Pacific.

The connection between his scholarly work and location in Hawai‘i was not disconnected from broader relations between Hawai‘i, then a territory of the United States, and the U.S. nation-state. He was in Hawai‘i in an in-between phase, having arrived in 1927, a mere twenty-nine years since the formal U.S. annexation and a full twenty-two years before statehood, when Hawai‘i would be fully incorporated into the Union. The Bishop Museum was the Pacific branch of Yale University,11 serving as an important outpost for the vibrant field of Pacific-related research that occupied many of the disciplines in the early twentieth century, when U.S. scholarly interest in the Pacific was tied to U.S. economic and political extension into the same region. Indeed, the Bishop Museum, and Te Rangihiroa, who was its director throughout World War II, provided cultural training for U.S. military preparing to participate in the Pacific War. His role in this training has since been questioned as people have grappled with his complicity with U.S. imperialism and militarism in the Pacific, for which the activities during World War II laid an additional foundation. On May 5, 1948, Te Rangihiroa wrote a letter from Hawai‘i, where he lived, to his good friend Eric Ramsden,12 in which he explained how this bid for naturalization has failed:

With regard to the matter of American citizenship you have my authority to say that it is definitely abandoned by me and that any rumors to the contrary are incorrect. To recapitulate, I could not become an American citizen under the . . . law for an applicant has to be over 50% Caucasian. The Polynesians are classed as Orientals in spite of anthropological evidence of their Caucasian origin so I could only show 50%.13

When his application for U.S. citizenship was declined, Te Rangihiroa occupied a position that was dramatically contradictory: he applied because he occupied an elevated educational and occupational position; he was rejected because he occupied a subjugated racial position. The story of his application for citizenship became rather exciting after his rejection. His many friends in high places started to agitate for the United States to reconsider.

Specifically, in 1943, the two houses in the Hawai‘i territorial government issued a joint resolution about Te Rangihiroa’s declined application for citizenship, calling on the United States to grant Te Rangihiroa citizenship and for the resolution itself to be forwarded to the president, Congress, and Senate:

Whereas, Peter Henry Buck, for many years an honored resident of Honolulu, Territory of Hawaii, a British subject, part white and part Polynesian, in every way qualified for American citizenship except that he is ineligible for naturalization under presently existing law; and

Whereas, said Peter Henry Buck is thoroughly imbued with the principles of democracy, is attached to the Constitution of the United States, and is desirous and ambitious to become a citizen of the United States . . .14

Echoing Te Rangihiroa’s own commentary about U.S. citizenship law (“either an individual is good enough personally or he isn’t”), the resolution describes his personal contributions to Hawaiian society, to the United States, and to the academy. The idea of color-blind citizenship, in which his achievements trump the racial limits placed on that citizenship, is summed up in the final phrase of the resolution, which argues that citizenship is “fitting” because of “his outstanding services to the country of his adoption and the high esteem in which he is held by all who know him throughout the scientific and educational world.”15 Despite his individual merit, however, Te Rangihiroa was marked by a racial category that compulsorily threw his lot in with all other Polynesians. Near its end, the resolution engages with the problem of racialization:

Doctor Buck is the son of a distinguished Irish citizen of New Zealand and a Maori chiefess and is therefore half Irish. He is of Caucasian and Polynesian blood. Polynesians themselves have Caucasian origin.16

No further elaboration of this point is supplied, and given the detailed treatment of the rest of the information provided in the resolution, this seems particularly blunt.

Whereas one might focus on the category of “Polynesian” as the primary racial configuration when Te Rangihiroa’s application for citizenship is refused, actually, this refusal was about whiteness. To be clear, the place of race in U.S. citizenship law was rather complex in this period. In 1790 Congress restricted U.S. citizenship to “white persons,” and this general rule remained in place until 1952.17 In the meantime, several individuals attempted to access citizenship by arguing that they were, in fact, white and therefore satisfied that race requirement. Haney Lopez notes that fifty-two “racial prerequisite” cases were heard between 1878 and 1952, including two by the Supreme Court:

Seen as a taxonomy of Whiteness, these cases are instructive because they reveal the imprecisions and contradictions inherent in the establishment of racial lines between Whites and non-Whites.18

Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese, Burmese, and Filipino attempts were declined, whereas Mexican and Armenian cases were successful. The courts were unsure what to do with Syrian, Arab, and Indian applicants. Over the course of these cases, the boundaries of citizenship, allied as they were to whiteness, were interrogated: “Whites [were] a category of people subject to a double negative: they are those who are not non-White.”19 To gain U.S. citizenship, Te Rangihiroa needed to gain recognition of whiteness or, to follow the logic as Haney Lopez puts it, recognition that he wasn’t “non-White.”

Two distinct approaches developed to determine whether a particular group was white: common knowledge and scientific evidence. The scientific approach drew most heavily on ethnological work, such as that by Keane, which stated that

the Maori of New Zealand, the Tongans, Tahitians, Samoans, Marquesans and Ellice Islanders, and Hawaiians . . . are an Oceanic branch of the Caucasic division.20

Te Rangihiroa’s own scholarly work is implicated here; extending various discussions of race around the British Empire,21 much of his research concurred that Polynesians are racially Caucasian. However, in 1923, United States v. Thind had marked a movement away from the slippage between white and Caucasian.22 Despite this uncoupling of the whiteness required for citizenship from Caucasian in Thind, Te Rangihiroa’s own case—at least in the words of the territory of Hawai‘i—depended on his being Caucasian.23 The resolution attempts to clarify that: “He is of Caucasian and Polynesian blood. Polynesians themselves have Caucasian origin,” suggesting that Te Rangihiroa does in fact satisfy the race requirements of U.S. citizenship by being “Caucasian and [Polynesian-which-is-Caucasian].”24 In some ways, then, the resolution puts a dollar each way on Te Rangihiroa’s relationship to U.S. citizenship: on one hand, citizenship should be attached to deeds rather than race; on the other, he can be understood as white for the purpose of satisfying a racist citizenship requirement.

While an argument for citizenship on the basis of merit is an individual matter, an argument about race is prescriptively and unavoidably about the collective. Te Rangihiroa was refused citizenship because Māori once were—and still were—Pacific. There is a sharp distinction between Te Rangihiroa’s relationship with the United States as a result of his own personal transnational mobility and the position of other Polynesians in American Sāmoa (and Hawai‘i) for whom the United States was an invading power that had “moved to them.” Te Rangihiroa’s is not a singular case in which an individual is categorized through the racial logics of a single nation but rather is caught in the much larger racial crossfire between the United States and its colonies in the Pacific:25

I agreed with Roosevelt and held that a more comprehensive act should be passed to admit Samoans and other Polynesians to American citizenship. Under the present act, the Samoans in American Samoa cannot become American citizens. A bill is being brought before Congress now to allow people of the Pacific to qualify.26

U.S. imperialism is the backdrop for his application for U.S. citizenship, and Te Rangihiroa recognized the link between his situation and unsuccessful American Samoan attempts to gain U.S. citizenship.27 That Polynesians were understood by the United States as “Oriental” at the time (the official reason that his individual application was declined) is not easily extricated from the production of the Pacific as an “American lake” in the U.S. imperial imaginary at the time, which squished together “Orient” and “Pacific.”28 Ultimately, Te Rangihiroa withdrew his application when he was offered a knighthood from the British Empire instead, but this episode in applying for citizenship still illuminates the ways in which imperialism can shape Māori articulation of connections with the Pacific.

Te Rangihiroa’s Māori-ness was understood as Polynesianness not only in the context of U.S. citizenship law; he was understood primarily as Polynesian in scholarly spheres as well. In 1951 Te Rangihiroa accepted an honorary degree from Yale University during its 250th anniversary celebrations. In the citation from the Yale ceremony, he is described in glowing terms:

First among those who know the peoples and cultures of the Polynesian world, medical doctor, warrior, ethnologist, author and poet, you have brought many races of people to greater understanding and peace.

He was given the honor of being the invited respondent to address the ceremony on behalf of himself and the other twenty-four doctoral recipients and did so according to his own terms and in the Māori language. More specifically, Te Rangihiroa responded with a traditional navigation chant. This unique individual, who navigated several racial, national, and regional designations, ultimately drew on his Polynesian—his Pacific—lineage and all of the cross-Pacific migration that entailed at the moment he articulated his position in the academy as a Māori scholar and as a scholar of the Pacific.29

first draft of a waiata tangi (for Te Rangihiroa)

Alice Te Punga Somerville

it’s hot here:

without electric fan, open window, bare legs

i’d be lying in the dark, heavy limbed and drowsy

as it is, i can feel an ache of warmth at the back of my neck

where hair falls in a tight curtain around an already moist little nook

i’m lying on my tummy, skin pressing into a warm patch of blanket

working on the first draft of something i’ll never finish

although warmed milk and sheets are supplied at nighttime

to wide-awake children in the islands of our births

warmth has the opposite effect here:

it’s too hot to fall quickly to sleep tonite

i visited your whare “Te Pātaka o Pīhopa” today

before heading to the archive in the back of the building

i walked through front doors, up stairs, over carpet

to greet the small Māori display at the end of the mezzanine

laid a handful of leaves beside the whakairo there

quietly sang to them under my breath,

a small one-sided karanga

surprising the other occupants more than the other visitors

wondered if you used to visit these cabinets too

if you looked across the carpet as i did and felt them looking back, appraising,

gluing feet to floor and tumbling body into air,

all at the same time

walked along corridors you paced for years,

a precise producer of catalogues:

a scientist working with the test-tubes and bunsen burners of culture

before it was embarrassing to treat people like lab rats,

to steal things and ideas for safekeeping on airconditioned shelves

the relief it must have been to return here after your last trip home,

but also the grief:

did you visit the whakairo more or less after your final wrenching?

does spending time with those things of our own provide solace or discomfort?

do things behind glass feel enclosed, cut off, pristine, or do they keep you company?

e te rangihīroa

still hot, still sticky:

was it like this the night you died?

i wonder if you felt more at home as your body turned cold after last breaths

i wonder if your wairua found a path to follow to hawaiki,

departing as it did from this wrong end of our marvellous watery hemisphere

“All Those Islanders of the Sea!”: Māori at the Polynesian Cultural Centre

The PCC is the state of Hawai‘i’s most popular paid visitor attraction: at present, about a million people visit the PCC each year. A kind of “theme park”30 located on the opposite side of O‘ahu from Waikiki, the PCC provides visitors with the opportunity to spend a day circulating around cultural villages, shopping, eating, watching films, participating in various cultural activities, listening to talks in each village, partaking of a luau for dinner, and finally, attending the “night show” song and dance extravaganza. The PCC is run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) and is a twin institution to the regional religious undergraduate college Brigham Young University–Hawai‘i (BYU-H), which was opened in 1955 as Church College. According to the PCC Web site,

the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints opened the Polynesian Cultural Center, considered one of the world’s most successful cultural theme attractions, on October 12, 1963, to help preserve and perpetuate the more ideal aspects of Polynesian culture, and to provide work opportunities for students at the adjoining Brigham Young University–Hawaii.31

Although the PCC is managed and partly staffed by full-time employees, most of the performers, guides, and service workers are students of BYU-H, who in turn come from all around the Pacific region as well as from Asia, Africa, Europe, and the continental United States.

The relationship between performance, Indigenous bodies, money, and the tourist (read colonial) gaze at the PCC is certainly complex. Critical work on the PCC has often focused on exploitative, romantic, inauthentic, neocolonial, and inappropriate aspects of cultural performance and cultural representation at the site. Certainly it is possible to argue that the PCC represents the conspicuous cultural consumption of the European-imagined Pacific in which stylized and decontextualized cultural performance is offered as a commodity to tourists who seek to interact with a Pacific—and specifically, a Polynesia—that never existed in the first place. Webb has gone to some length to explore the PCC as a simultaneously tourist and Mormon space:

Onto the tourists’ expectations of Polynesian simplicity of which the villages, the tohua, and the night show are variations, the PCC grafts a Mormon allegory. Fundamentally, then, the PCC is Mormon art, but it is also undeniably tourist art.32

However, this analysis fails to account for uses of the PCC by people who are not tourists: the same physical venue that offers the night show to paying guests each evening, for example, is used during the day for cultural performances of different kinds. Polynesian community groups and local schools use the venue for performances to their own families and group members. The venue is also used for Whakataetae, a kapa haka competition at which Māori from around Hawai‘i and the continental United States gather each year;33 the Samoan community enjoys an annual knife dance performance and competition there; and so on.

Though it would be simplistic to characterize the various approaches to the PCC as either attacking or defending the site, in this context, I position my own consideration of the PCC within the company of scholars such as Wineera, Aikau, and Kester,34 who are interested in teasing out the complexities—including the contradictions and sometimes surprising possibilities—of the site. Vernice Wineera, for example, focuses on the affective ties of PCC employees to their workplace, and despite her own strong personal links with the PCC, she concluded her doctoral dissertation with an expression of surprise at the extent of employees’ agency in negotiating various roles at the site.35 Similarly, Hokulani Aikau explores the roots of the PCC’s linking of cultural performance and fund-raising when she considers the early efforts of the La‘ie community to achieve financial independence and fund their own building and community objectives.36 Furthermore, though it is possible to cynically decry, for example, the “prostitution” of Māori culture at the PCC and the exploitation of Māori student labor in a Mormon-owned business venture, it seems important to recognize that hundreds of Māori students (both from Aotearoa and beyond) have the opportunity to afford and achieve university degrees at BYU-H because of that income source. The difference between Māori students working at the PCC to support their studies at BYU-H and Māori students working at McDonald’s to support their studies at my home institution would seem, at least on some levels, to be somewhat negligible.

What is a Māori village doing at an LDS–Polynesian tourist site in Hawai‘i anyway? At this point, it is helpful to backtrack a little to the specific connection between Māori and the LDS Church. Māori are included in the Mormon Church in particular ways through LDS cosmological understandings of the Pacific and specifically of Polynesia. These views are well described in a number of treatments elsewhere, including in Hokulani Aikau’s doctoral dissertation and forthcoming book and in R. Lanier Britsch’s Moramona.37 Aikau points out that there have been Pacific Mormons as long as there have been Mormons in Utah. The LDS mission to Hawai‘i began in 1850 (around the time the Church was settling into Utah) and was originally directed toward white people. Soon after arriving, however, the missionary George Cannon had a prophetic dream “in which the Lord spoke to him telling him that the Hawaiians were of the House of Israel.”38 Cannon’s dream suggested that Hawaiians—and, by extension, Polynesians—are lost descendents of the original pre-Indian communities based in the United States that are at the core of LDS teachings.39 One does not have to believe the dream on its own terms to recognize its historical impact: it shifted the gears for Mormon theology but also for the LDS mission to Hawai‘i and the Pacific. Hawai‘i occupies a unique place in the LDS Church, and in 1919, the first temple outside the United States was dedicated in O‘ahu at La‘ie (Hawai‘i was a twenty-one-year-old territory, not a state, of the United States at the time). Religious migrations from around the Pacific began shortly after, particularly as Pacific Mormons sought to fulfill religious obligations that could only take place at a temple. In 1955 Church College opened (this later became a four-year college and was renamed BYU-Hawai‘i). Pacific students were a dominant community at Church College and have continued to be so at BYU-Hawai‘i.

The impact of Mormon missions on Māori communities has been widely felt, especially in the Far North and on the East Coast of the North Island. In 1947, Elder Matthew Crowley, an American Mormon who had lived in New Zealand for some time, recognized the effort required by the Māori saints to undertake religious pilgrimages to the Hawai‘i temple. He praised their devotion and proposed that they build an appropriate house and organize cultural performances that would be a “double blessing”: accommodation and an income to cover the costs of travel for the Māori visitors and a tourist attraction to La‘ie. His proposal is recounted in Hands across the Water—the Story of the PCC:

Let some of the Maori Brethren come to La‘ie and build a carved house for them and other Maoris to stay in while doing their temple work. Already many tourists were drawn to La‘ie by the Temple; such a dwelling would attract even more. And—why not go one step further? Maoris loved to sing and dance. They could earn money, perhaps enough for their passage home, by putting on a program of Polynesian entertainment.40

The plan was intended to benefit Māori as well as the La‘ie community and, more indirectly, the LDS Church. The pairing of temple work and entertainment for visiting community members on religious pilgrimages was later rearticulated as an opportunity for students at BYU-H to financially support their education and participate in the preservation of culture.

The idea that the Māori performance could be joined by contributions from other communities was introduced at this point: according to Hands across the Water, President Clissold replied, “What a wonderful idea! And if the Maoris can do it, why not the Samoans and Tongans?”41 That “the Maoris” should be the instigators and models for this kind of enterprise became central to Elder Crowley’s dream for the place:

I hope . . . to see the day when my Maori people will have a little village at La‘ie with a beautiful carved house. Oh, how they could teach you Hawaiians how to do beautiful carving and wonderful decorative work in their meeting houses. The Tongans will have a little village out there, and the Tahitians and Samoans—all those islanders of the sea!42

At the time, Hawaiians were understood by many commentators to have compromised their own culture beyond repair. (This echoes Te Rangihiroa’s first reactions to Hawai‘i, where he was an early proponent of this idea of Hawaiian cultural degeneration until he lived in Hawai‘i for several years and was so struck by the robustness of the Hawaiian people that he spent his last years completing a mammoth book on their culture.)43 In this context, the comments about Hawai‘i are condescending but perhaps not surprising. What is unfortunate, however, is the apparent inability or refusal of the LDS Church to recognize a link between its perception of diminishing Hawaiian culture and its own part 1n the acquisition of Hawaiian land and the capitalization of the Hawaiian Islands. Crowley’s dream that “all the islanders of the sea” would perform and gather together finally materialized as the PCC, which was opened in October 1963 on the basis of a specific dream by Elder Crowley and with a dual focus: the ability for students to earn money for study and the so-called preservation of Polynesian cultures. The PCC was reopened in 1976 with the addition of Marquesas (1975) and a bit of refashioning all around. Just as Aikau notes that as long as there have been Mormons, there have been Pacific Mormons, we can also add that as long as there has been a PCC, there has been a Māori village.

Māori presence at the PCC is tied to the success of the LDS mission to Māori. The physical construction of the Māori village at the PCC was dependent on visiting groups and individuals, and in an oral history interview in 1982, La‘ie resident Barney Christie emphasized the significance of Māori mobility around the LDS networks.44 Epanaia Whaanga (Barney) Christie was from Nuhaka (b. 1921), but his great-grandparents Hirini and Mere Whaanga had traveled to the temple in Salt Lake City and were buried in Utah. His own father had been nine when he was taken to the United States, and he grew up and was educated there (at the University of Utah) before moving back to New Zealand in 1918. Christie worked on a canoe that had been intended for King George’s visit, but the King died, so the canoe was never completed. However, thirty years later, he brought it to the PCC, where no one knew how to rework a canoe until he made contact with an old carver, Bill Whautapu, who helped him. In 1972 Christie was asked to work in the Māori village of the PCC: he traveled to Hawai‘i in 1973 and returned to continue carving there in 1975. In the BYU-H archives, Christie’s interview about his life in and around the PCC is accompanied by similar interviews with people such as Joe and Millie Te Ngaio and John Elkington. These personal narratives make up an important, site-specific history of Māori connection with the PCC and of Māori diasporic experiences and deserve further sustained research.45

The Māori space at the PCC is simultaneously a marae and a performance-oriented village.46 The marae was opened with support of the Te Arohanui cultural group, a New Zealand–based group that formed specifically for the task. Te Arohanui had a nucleus of thirty members and started at Temple View (the location of the Mormon temple near Hamilton in New Zealand) in 1956. The group had to pay its own fares, but that did not stop 136 members from touring. After being farewelled at Whenuapai by a group of five thousand people, including the prime minister, Te Arohanui conducted a performance tour through the United States, then spent six weeks at PCC helping to finish the physical plant of the village. Finally, the group performed in the opening night ceremonies of the PCC. This huge commitment from New Zealand–based Māori individuals and communities has had long-standing effects on the PCC as well as on individual members of the group. The marae is kept warm by the multigenerational Māori community in La‘ie and surrounding towns: that community is itself a transnational combination of Hawai‘i-born, Aotearoa-born, and elsewhere-born Māori. Some members of the marae community are permanent, such as community members of La‘ie and nearby Hau‘ula (some Māori families have lived in and around this part of O‘ahu for multiple generations), while some are more transitory, such as Māori students who travel from New Zealand to BYU-H for education. The presence of Māori leadership has been important to the marae, and from the beginning, the village had a designated “chief.”

That the PCC is located in Hawai‘i is not inconsequential for the inclusion of a Māori space among its villages. Whereas in New Zealand, “Māori and Polynesian” is common shorthand for “Māori and non-Māori Polynesian” (in which “Māori” cannot logically be “Polynesian”), the presence of Māori in the “Polynesian” Cultural Centre is easily normalized in Hawai‘i. Paying careful attention to the language used to describe the Māori village provides one way to track the place of Māori at the PCC and the ways in which this in turn articulates with the relation between Māori, the New Zealand state, and the international tourist audience. A recent (undated) pamphlet welcomes the visitor to “explore seven ancient Polynesian island villages in one beautiful Hawaiian day.” Whereas the other villages are consistently called by a vernacular name, including Tahiti (which is officially Polynesie Francais) and Hawai‘i (which, if the same rules were to apply to this village as to the present “New Zealand” village, would be called the “United States” village), copywriters have tried a range of ways to describe the Māori village. The village itself has not changed a great deal, but the language has shifted according to a range of factors: time, place, writer, and reader.

A 1969 booklet called Polynesia in a Day includes a map with a “Maori area” (the language of “villages” appears in the 1971 updated version of the booklet) and notes “Haere mai/Maori village.”47 The booklet emphasizes the diversity represented across the Polynesian region, and Aotearoa is used as an example of one extreme:

From tropical Samoa to a Maori village in temperate New Zealand is a contrast that adds zest. The change brings you into a marvellous realm of carvings, weaving and color.48

A description of the waka carved by Barney Christie, which was located on the PCC’s lagoon, highlights the relations between Māori and New Zealand in imperial terms:

Floating in the lagoon nearby is a royal Maori canoe—literally royal for it was intended as a gift to the King of England on a visit to New Zealand which however he never made.49

The slippage between “royal Maori” and “literally royal” suggests that from the point of view of some visitors (and perhaps the American PCC management), the “King of England” seems as much a relic of tradition as the Polynesian cultures represented at the PCC.

The problem of describing a Māori village that represents people from a place more commonly known by its English name (New Zealand) has meant that copywriters have negotiated an ongoing tension between accuracy and accessibility of meaning. A 1975 pamphlet describes the village as “Maori” on the map but “Maori New Zealand” in a written portion. An early (undated but post-1975) brochure for the PCC lists the Māori village as “Aotearoa”:

The Maori welcome you with kia ora (key-ah-OH-rah). Because Aotearoa, as the Maori call their New Zealand homeland, has a temperate climate, the styles of dress and architecture are quite different from the other Islanders.

From 1982, a twenty-four-page booklet titled This Is Polynesia includes a Māori carving on its front page, and the Māori village is called “Aotearoa,” with “New Zealand” in much smaller print alongside:

Greeting word: “Kia ora.” The Maoris are Polynesians of New Zealand and they call their homeland Aotearoa, or the Land of the Long White Cloud.50

Advertisements in 1984 describe the Māori village variously as the “New Zealand” and “Maori New Zealand” village, but a map lists it as “Aotearoa”; in 1985 “Maori New Zealand” had been retained; and in 1986 they were back to “Aotearoa.” A pamphlet from 1987 put a dollar each way: on the map, the village is “Aotearoa,” but later in the brochure, it is “Maori New Zealand.” A full-size booklet from the same year, however, notes “Aotearoa (New Zealand)” on the map and “Aotearoa (New Zealand)—The Land of the Long White Cloud” in the text. By 2000 “New Zealand” is back, and on the map, “New Zealand” is accompanied by “(Aotearoa—Maori)” in much smaller print. A recent pamphlet marks the return of Aotearoa-free “New Zealand”: an interesting return, given that the villages themselves are described as “ancient Polynesian island villages” and “New Zealand” is not a very “ancient” name. The Wikipedia listing for the PCC lists the Māori village as “Aotearoa (present-day New Zealand).”

The shifting name attributed to the Māori village emphasizes the instability of the terms involved at the PCC. Despite the Māori village being central to the physical conceptualization of the PCC since its beginning, it struggles to maintain a fixed position linguistically. The PCC desires to represent cultural (“ancient”) Polynesia and not the national, political Pacific. For example, the coexistence of a Tahiti village and a Marquesas village is only made possible through ignoring the fact of French imperialism, which includes the islands in the same conglomerate.51 However, visitors to the center are likely to have heard of “Tahiti,” and so the meaning of the village is clear from its vernacular name. The same could be said, as I have already argued, for “Hawai‘i.” “Aotearoa,” conversely, is not a widely known name (or at least, outside the Indigenous world): on one hand, it makes the village appear to be more “Polynesian” when it has a Māori name, but on the other hand, it obscures the meaning for most visitors. Because the PCC by definition has no interest in non-Māori New Zealand culture, in this singular site in Hawai‘i, unlike at home, Māori get to occupy the space of “New Zealand” all by themselves. The slipperiness of the name for the Māori village, then, produces possibilities as well as limits to cultural representation when that culture is removed from its occupying nation-state in every way but in name.

Our Sea of Anthologies: Māori in Collections of Pacific Literature

Do Māori texts belong in Pacific anthologies? The regional Pacific is not merely reflected in but produced by Pacific literary texts and institutional configurations. The lineup in any Pacific literature course or anthology clearly indicates a particular view of what might be included in the “Pacific.” The course Special Topic: Pacific Literature was a first for Victoria University of Wellington (VUW) in 2008. Despite Albert Wendt’s presence at VUW as a student in the 1960s, an institutional commitment to Pacific studies as a discipline, and a sizeable Pacific student community, a course focused on Anglophone Pacific literature had not yet been offered. When designing this course, my desire to expose students to a wide range of texts meant that four of the seven texts we read were anthologies: Whetu Moana, Niu Voices, Vārua Tupu, and ‘Ōiwi 3.52 In just four books, my students and I could access a huge variety of creative texts and, in the introductions, readable, short, clear critical texts. Anthologies have shaped the literary navigation of the region. Commenting on the collection of writing from Francophone Polynesia, Varua Tupu, Oscar Temaru writes, “We all belong to the Pacific, as brothers, sisters, and cousins, and it is significant that we are able to travel freely across the reef, physically and through the imaginations of our artists, and get to know one another again.”53 Pacific anthologies become waka: taking on things and travelers, dropping them off in new places, accruing value and meaning from the diversity of their cargoes.

A literary collection is, rather obviously, the result of collecting. In his introductory notes to the vast five-volume anthology of Māori writing, Te Ao Mārama, Witi Ihimaera describes the collection as “a marae where our writing will stand, to reflect the times, and to show others a little of what we were like during a crucial decade.”54 Barbara Benedict, writing about the rise of the English-language literary collection in the eighteenth century, describes editing as an act of “gathering together”:

Both the terms “anthology,” derived from the Greek for a collection of flowers, and “miscellany,” meaning a dish of mixed fruits designate a collection: literally, a gathering together of objects, in this case literary works.55

Benedict argues that the appearance of the new genre of the literary collection during the historical period in which various other forms of collecting were also on the rise is no coincidence. Indeed, the practice of literary collection is closely allied to the specific mode of European colonial expansion that was fanatical about collecting, categorizing, and cataloging plants, animals, ideas, materials, and people. The opportunity to “gather together” writing from a range of sources to produce a nuanced and multivoiced perspective on a time or place is particularly helpful in a regional anthology of the Pacific, a region whose immense diversity compelled Wendt to describe it as “so vast, so fabulously varied a scattering of islands, nations, cultures, mythologies and myths, so dazzling a creature.”56 Indeed, the anthology seems an important tool in a region crisscrossed by Indigenous, indentured, enslaved, settler, colonizing, and transient peoples, let alone the multiplicity inherent to a region that covers one-third of the earth’s surface, with over twelve hundred Indigenous languages. While creative texts by non-European writers appeared around the Anglophone world from the 1950s, and collections of creative works by white Anglophone writers appeared earlier in settler countries such as New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the United States, nonwhite writers were seldom included in those anthologies.57 Partly because access to the white publishing world was difficult, and partly because a large number of factors led to a greater proportion of short pieces by Indigenous and other nonwhite writers, literary collections were crucial to the development of national and regional literatures. It is perhaps ironic that this distinctly colonial mode of collecting, which underpinned most Pacific–Europe relationships and from which the Pacific has suffered a great deal, produced a genre that has served the Pacific so well.

But do Māori texts belong in these Pacific anthologies? The Pacific produced in anthologies is demarcated as much by absences as by presences. Anthologies are about time and place, but they are also about selection: someone does the “gathering.” According to Māori writer Paula Morris, who edited The Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Short Stories in 2009,

there’s some creativity, I guess, in selecting, and interpreting. I like the intellectual challenge presented by writing an introduction. A creative challenge too, like writing a book review—reading, thinking, structuring and argument. Choosing words precisely. Trying to engage a reader. Drawing lines in the sand!58

Editing is as “creative” and “fictional” an act as any of the creative pieces contained in the resulting anthology, and an anthology is securely located in subjectivity and politics. The politics of editorship has significantly inflected—even shaped—the parameters of Pacific writing. Non-Indigenous editors produced the first collections of Pacific literature (e.g., New Zealand–based Bernard Gadd’s 1977 Pacific Voices: An Anthology of Writing by and about Pacific People59), and their selections tended to include European writers resident in the region and strikingly fewer Indigenous writers than the later anthologies. A London-based publishing company’s request that Pākehā New Zealander C. K. Stead edit The Faber Book of Contemporary South Pacific Stories60 (to be part of a series of anthologies of short fiction by Australian, Caribbean, Latin American, Canadian, and gay writers) sparked off a series of events that foregrounded the stakes of anthologizing in the region.

While the Faber anthology has been treated elsewhere (most fully in Hereniko and Schwarz’s “Four Writers and One Critic”61), it is worth outlining here because it so neatly and horrifyingly demonstrates the politics of Pacific anthologies. The episode is now recognized as a remarkable line drawn in the sand of Pacific literature in 1994. Just before the anthology entered the final phase of publishing, Albert Wendt, Witi Ihimaera, Patricia Grace, and Keri Hulme withdrew their work. These writers, who between them form a mammoth constellation in the landscape of Pacific short fiction (and indeed, of Pacific literature in general), staged this withdrawal to protest Stead’s editorship. This eleventh-hour withdrawal had two major effects: the anthology was guaranteed a much-diminished place in the literary scene, and Stead wrote an extremely prickly and defensive response to the situation titled “A Note on Absences,” which followed the introductory essay. This protest emphasized the problems of continued Eurocentrism in the treatment of Pacific literatures and the significance of anthologies as spaces of production and contestation in the region. Certainly Wendt (or Ihimaera) would have been a more appropriate editor for the collection, and even if Faber didn’t realize this, presumably Stead would have. To put the timing of the publication in context, when the Faber anthology appeared in 1994, Wendt’s Lali was fourteen years old and had enjoyed numerous reprints, Ihimaera’s coedited collection of Māori writing Into the World of Light62 was about the same age, and the first volume of Ihimaera’s Reed-published multivolume anthology Te Ao Mārama had come out in 1992. As well as implicitly sidelining the achievements and capacity of these two as editors,63 the Faber anthology also failed to recognize that Wendt’s and Ihimaera’s earlier work as anthologists in the 1980s was instrumental in providing the opportunity for writers in the Faber collection to enjoy recognition in the first place.64

However, this is not the only possible reading of the story. For the purposes of the present discussion, it is significant that three of the four writers who withdrew their work were Māori (Hulme, Grace, and Ihimaera), and being Māori had actually excluded them from Wendt’s anthologies to date. Indeed, whereas Indigenous and other nonwhite writers around the Pacific found themselves left out of national collections and regional Pacific anthologies produced by white editors, these collections tended to include Māori writers. Though Stead’s editorship was certainly problematic, neither Lali nor Nuanua included Māori writing. The positive impact of Indigenous editorship of Pacific anthologies, at least at that time, was at the cost of Māori and Hawaiian writers. While Wendt’s view of the region, collecting on the basis of country of origin, made many states visible, it obscured others, including Aotearoa. Certainly it would be ungenerous for Māori writers to bemoan their exclusion from Pacific anthologies that provided the only possible means of publication for writers from many places around the region. After all, Māori have other publishing opportunities available to them. Although some Pacific nations have had success with self-publication,65 anthologies of Pacific literature bring together these literatures with others and make possible their mobility to other places.66 The need for anthologies is exacerbated by the size of various Pacific nations and, thus, the size of their writing communities, readership, publication infrastructures, and distribution networks.67 At the same time, texts from the larger Pacific nations that have managed to publish and distribute collections at the national level—Aotearoa, Hawai‘i, Papua New Guinea, and Fiji68—also benefit from being brought into relationship with other Pacific texts and readerships.69 Suffice to say that the scope and shape of the regional Pacific are reconfigured in each anthology, and the place of Māori is relitigated each time.70

One of the important functions of the anthology is to create a sense of “us.” Tusiata Avia introduces a chapbook collection, Fika: First Draft Pasefika Writers: “These writers individually and collectively have contested the quiet space, the empty page, and allowed something bigger than themselves to be made.”71 In whose interest is this community building carried out? Obviously the implied present members of the community and their contemporaries are crucial, but Ihimaera extends this to a witnessing, testimonial, historical role:

an opportunity to say to the present, “This is how we are,”—to say to the future, “This is how we were.”72

Ihimaera produces community by using the inclusive plural pronoun we (“how we are . . . how we were”), whereas Wendt oscillates between the singular and the plural in the introductions to his anthologies. His 1980 introduction to Lali was a version of his essay “Towards a New Oceania,” which he had written as an introduction for Mana, volume 1, number 1, in 1976. After Lali opens with a description of its title, a new paragraph starts with Wendt’s now immortal words “I belong to Oceania,” echoing precisely his 1976 opening. The first pronoun, then, in Wendt’s introduction to Lali is personal and singular: “I belong to Oceania.”73 As in the earlier essay, the plural pronoun appears in the second paragraph:

In spite of the political barriers dividing our countries, an intense creative activity is starting to weave firm links between us.74

In the introduction to Nuanua, again Wendt uses the plural pronoun, and although he later speaks from his individual position (“for me”75), he starts the anthology with an assumption—and thereby the production—of a “we”:

In many of our Pacific languages nuanua means rainbow . . . the richness and variety of our literature, both oral and written.76

One of the effects of the inclusive plural pronoun is its implicit recognition of a Pacific readership: the “our” might be a Pacific “our” on whose behalf Wendt writes, or it might be an “our” in which a Pacific reader is included. As a Māori reader, I find that many discussions about my home and my region are written like tourist brochures. By what is explained, translated, omitted, and not known, I know that the writer doesn’t have a reader like me in his mind as he writes. So although I am a Māori person—a person from Oceania—when I read discussions of Pacific literature, I am often forced to peer over the shoulder of the expected reader: the white reader from the metropole. For this reason, I love rereading these introductory essays and feeling included in Wendt’s “our.” It’s quite a radical act when Wendt finishes the introduction to Lali by writing about “the warmth and love of our mother, the Pacific” because in that phrase—in which the phrase “our mother” connects him and me and others who share “our mother”—he simultaneously makes me visible and forces the non-Pacific reader to read over my shoulder instead.

The question of whether Māori texts belong in a Pacific anthology is remade in this context: who is the “we” in a Pacific anthology? Why do I, as a Māori reader, imagine myself to be included in his “our”? If we wish to credit Wendt with the production—or at least the foregrounding—of a regional consciousness, what is the scope of the region implied by his “we”? Barbara Benedict describes the anthology-produced community (“something bigger than themselves”) in this way:

Because of their cooperative means of production and multiple authorship, anthologies are material expressions of a kind of community, and their format also directs readers to understand them as vessels of a common enterprise, even while registering the independence of each author. . . . Often the community is in fact created by or for the anthology itself, rather than serving as the basis of it.77

Each time a region is produced by a collection, borders are marked out in introductions and implied through the selection of texts. One of the problems of collection in the Pacific is the difficulty of producing criteria by which writers and communities are admitted or omitted. So Wendt’s anthologies have not collected writing by white writers, and yet to protect the collections in this way, it becomes very difficult to include, for example, Fiji Indian writers and Māori writers in the same collection. After all, Lali and Nuanua include Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers from Fiji on the basis of their deep affiliation to a country that’s a part of the independent Pacific, and Whetu Moana includes Māori writers on the basis of our affiliation with Polynesia, which is incapable of recognizing later arrivals from outside the region. Whetu Moana bears the mark of its triple-Aotearoa parentage (Wendt is based in New Zealand; Sullivan and Whaitiri are both Māori) and collects on the basis of Indigenous ancestry rather than nation-state. Importantly, this approach produces the conditions for reading diasporic alongside Aotearoa-based Māori writers.

It seems that, at least for the time being, Māori texts belong in Pacific anthologies when they are Polynesian anthologies. Paradoxically, or perhaps just unexpectedly, the use of Polynesia—a term often derided for its colonial origins and connotations—enables a rather radical re-viewing of Aotearoa and Hawai‘i. When the Pacific is made up of all the independent nations in the region, a huge range of countries are included in its scope, but others drop out. Whetu Moana looks at the homelands of Māori and Hawaiian people, and rather than seeing the white nations of New Zealand and the United States, it sees the configurations of those places outside colonialism: Aotearoa and Hawai‘i. Perhaps this is a manifestation of Wendt’s rather brilliant formulation of postcolonial in his introduction to Nuanua: a way of looking at New Zealand and Hawai‘i “outside/beyond colonial.”78 Using the term Polynesia as the central tenet of collection excludes those parts of the Pacific that aren’t in Polynesia, then, but it also enables two particular communities to be included alongside work from places we’d expect to see represented in a Pacific anthology: welcome, Māori and Hawaiian writers.79

Māori People in Pacific Spaces

Te Rangihiroa’s ideas about the Pacific changed over his lifetime. When he first went to Hawai‘i, he was disparaging toward the Hawaiian people, whom he considered to be extremely compromised and whose cultural legacy he believed to have already passed. After two decades living on O‘ahu, he had shifted in his thinking so that his last book, a mammoth undertaking, was about Hawaiian arts and crafts. In the context of this chapter, the remarkable feature of this story is not that Te Rangihiroa had the capacity to conduct such a shift in his thinking, although that is impressive in its own right, but rather that it points to the possibility of genuine negotiation in the relationship between Māori and the Pacific. Te Rangihiroa was more than equipped to make an intellectual assessment of Hawaiian culture when he arrived, but he had the wisdom, rigor, and curiosity to recognize that simply ticking off a set of categories will only provide a superficial observation. His ideas changed because he was in Hawai‘i, interacting with Hawaiians, drawing and redrawing lines over the course of over twenty years in their company. Although a book like this could simply decide on a policy or formula by which all things Māori might be determined to be Pacific, Te Rangihiroa—and the PCC and Pacific anthologies—remind us that it is through the lived, negotiated, ongoing, and specific interaction between Māori and the Pacific that articulations of connection, or otherwise, have any meaning and, indeed, any possibility of change.

Māori people in Pacific spaces cannot help but foreground the layers of connection, reconnection, and disconnection between Māori and the Pacific. Although these three examples—Te Rangihiroa, the PCC, and Pacific literary anthologies—are dramatically distinct, they all gesture quite directly toward the significance of historical, cultural, economic, religious, and creative contexts in this negotiation. Furthermore, these three examples remind us that the relationship between Māori and the Pacific is multimodal and multigenerational: in each iteration of the relationship, different pressures and motivations affect the stakes and limits of connection. Each of these Pacific spaces has a life at the regional level, and it is worthwhile recalling that Māori also spend time in Pacific spaces within the national context—and although these connections are bordered and configured differently, they are a worthwhile comparison. Later in this book, for example, the inclusion of a Māori village at Auckland’s annual Pasifika Festival provides a significant and contrasting counterpoint to the Māori village at the PCC.

Each moment of connection and each articulation of being Pacific or being Māori is itself a site in which the relationship between the two is recalled and maintained. Furthermore, each of these three disparate examples affirms that the extent to which Māori are part of the Pacific depends on the specific context within which the relationship is negotiated. Te Rangihiroa was a Māori individual in Pacific geographic, scholarly, cultural, and racial spaces; Māori people at the PCC are in a Pacific performance, religious, and economic space; and Māori texts in various anthologies are present in particular Pacific literary, cultural, creative, educational spaces. In each case, the relationship between Māori and the Pacific has implications for the production and maintenance not only of the category “Māori” but also of the category “Pacific.” The biographer of Te Rangihiroa cannot help but consider his work to be Pacific work; the visitor to the PCC will unconsciously include Māori in a lineup of Polynesia; and the reader of Whetu Moana will take for granted that alongside poetry from Sāmoa, Tonga, Niue, Hawai‘i, and the Cook Islands, there will be poetry from Aotearoa. What some of that Māori poetry might look like is a story for the next chapter to tell.