Māori and the Pacific

There Was an island

I spend a lot of time with various relatives on a mostly uninhabited island that sits in the middle of Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington Harbor, the large bowl of water around which the city of Wellington is wrapped. The island, which takes a forty-minute stroll to circumnavigate, is a twenty-minute ferry ride from Wellington and a ten-minute ferry ride the other way from Petone, or Pito-one, the place from which my relatives watched the first Europeans sail into our harbor. When we are standing on Matiu Island, we are standing on (at least) two stories, two narratives, two explanations for who and how we are as Māori.

When we are on Matiu, we are in the mouth of a fish. Before the North Island was given its descriptive, poetic, and creative English name, it had another name that we still use: “Te Ika a Māui.” This name is derived from the original fishing up of the island by Māui, the trickster demigod figure who pops up all around the Pacific. Māui took his grandmother Murirangawhenua’s jawbone and fished up te ika, the memory of which is still encoded in the name for the various parts of the fish. One end of the island is called “Te Hiku o te Ika,” the “tail of the fish,” and Wellington is located at the other end: “Te  Ūpoko o te Ika,” the “head of the fish.” Māui’s hook went into the mouth of the fish, which (according to my relatives) is our harbor. This is a story of firstness: as long as there has been a fish, there have been us. When we introduce ourselves to other Māori people, we name the mountains, lakes, rivers, and harbors to which we are related so they know who we are. We are standing in the mouth of a fish on which our people have always lived, and on this basis, we are Indigenous.

When we are on Matiu, we are also standing on a memorial to a female relative. Kupe and his family were living in Hawaiki, our ancestral home-land, and traveled south in pursuit of an octopus. (Some people give other reasons for this trip.) They followed the octopus into very cold waters and ended up in Aotearoa, which was so named because of its appearance—a “land of a long white cloud”—when approaching from across the sea. Te Whanganui-a-Tara, my harbor, was used as a haven while they were here, and the island in its center offered a particularly lovely place of refuge. Kupe and his entourage left Aotearoa and went back to Hawaiki and told everyone about this cold but amazing (and enormous!) place they’d found. As he left, Kupe named the two islands in the harbor after two of his beloved female relations, “Mākaro” and “Matiu.” When we introduce ourselves to other Māori people, we name the waka on which our relatives traveled to Aotearoa from Hawaiki so they know who we are. Matiu Island is an important memorial to the voyage of Kupe and to the predicted migration of Polynesians (and, more broadly, Pacific people) to our islands of Aotearoa, as manifested in the naming of the islands in my harbor after younger female relatives. When we stand on Matiu, we are standing on a memorial to our collective voyaging from across the ocean we know as Te Moananui a Kiwa. On this basis, we are migrants; we are Pacific.

Yet, because of our location on Aotearoa and in New Zealand, other articulations have been urgent. There is a third story about Matiu that explains its contemporary official name of “Matiu/Somes.” This story is about Matiu’s history as Somes Island. Somes Island is geographically useful in the same way that Alcatraz is useful: as a close but separate island near a major city, it offers (at least in theory) an easy place to keep things and people. After “the Crown . . . assumed ownership of Matiu in 1841 or thereabouts without the consent of or any consultation with Māori, and without making any payment,”12 Somes was used for various kinds of internment: for new migrants to New Zealand; for Japanese, Germans, and Italians; for people with particular illnesses; for conscientious objectors; and so on. Later, it was an area of quarantine for incoming animals of all kinds, and still later, it served as a different kind of quarantine area: a wildlife sanctuary for species that are no longer able to thrive on the disease- and pest-ridden North and South islands. Ironically, Matiu/Somes is now a refuge for native species that are threatened by the very livestock and methods of farming that entered New Zealand through the island in the first place. Matiu/Somes is doubled, bicultural: Māori and non-Māori, Indigenous and non-Indigenous.13 The slash between Matiu and Somes in the official name of our island simultaneously separates and connects. Our own narratives about this island, which are tied to Matiu rather than to Somes, exist in endless relationship with this third, colonial narrative.

Once Were Pacific

If we once were Pacific, what are we now? The book title Once Were Pacific clearly plays with the titles of Duff’s 1990 novel and Tamahori’s 1994 film, Once Were Warriors,14 and so directly refers to, and inverts, dominant ideas about Māori before interaction with Europeans. Such narrow representations draw, of course, on a mythical precolonial “once” that ventures back not to another time but to timelessness. The title Once Were Pacific suggests that although we have been understood as warriors, we have also been pacific in its original sense of being calm; our histories cannot be restricted to monolithic characterizations and narratives. Additionally, Māori scholarship, writing, politics, and discourse have tended to focus either on the occupying nation-state of New Zealand or, recently, on particular articulations of (fourth world) Indigeneity.15 Directly engaging the title Once Were Warriors foregrounds the circulation of texts by and about Māori. The unfamiliar idea that Māori once were Pacific is juxtaposed with the familiar claim that we once were warriors. The project of decolonization in which all Indigenous people are engaged demands the grappling with, not the erasure of, colonization; it is about re-remembering.

At specific moments, we have articulated ourselves as Pacific people: when, why, and how? In some ways, it seems odd to claim that Māori have not retained a strong sense of connection with the Pacific when the migrations to Aotearoa are always already recounted and memorialized in many spaces. Indeed, it is almost paralyzing to reflect on the vast and multiple ways in which Māori people “of waka memory” have articulated, and continue to articulate, connections with the Pacific. At times this project has felt like a ridiculous attempt to describe something that is always going to be far larger than what is accountable in a single book. Vernice Wineera published the first collection of poetry in English by a Māori woman when her collection Mahanga came out in Hawai‘i in 1978, and she later wrote a poem that includes the following lines:

This island

Is the tip of an underwater volcano

so large it is disorienting

imagining all that mountain beneath you.16

Once Were Pacific is a tip that can barely hope to indicate the bulk of the mountain beneath. Even to get its head above water, it depends on all that it does not manage to represent in its own pages. The presence of Pacific pupils at Māori boarding schools, Pacific players on Māori sports teams, Pacific soldiers in the Twenty-eighth Māori Battalion of World War II, and the appointment of Māori people to Pacific governmental roles (from Te Rangihiroa as medical officer to Niue and the Cook Islands in the 1910s to Georgina Te Heuheu as minister of Pacific Island Affairs in 2008) all demand further consideration. Specific moments of encounter in more recent times, such as the second South Pacific Festival of the Arts held in Rotorua in 1976, ongoing activist connections in New Zealand and around the Pacific region, the collaborative carving effort of a large pou in Manukau City, and countless others, would provide a rich space for reflection and demand recognition as well. This project, which is “so large it is disorienting,” is merely a starting point, “the tip of an underwater volcano”; while humbled by being a mere tip, it is also compelled by the underwater volcano. Ultimately, I hope, Once Were Pacific will provide space for conversations alongside those we are already used to having: about Māori, about writing in English, about Māori writing in English, about Indigeneity, about the Pacific. The urgency and significance of this book are derived not from the singularity of the Māori–Pacific connections it describes but from the mountain of those various connections that have been obscured.

Once Were Pacific is about the intersections of Indigeneity and migration. It turns to creative works (broadly defined) produced by Māori in Aotearoa and around the Pacific, and by other Pacific people based in New Zealand, and asks, How do Māori and other Pacific people articulate their connections at the levels of region (New Zealand as a part of the wider Pacific) and nation (Māori and Pacific communities in New Zealand)? How does the distinction in New Zealand between Māori and Pacific blur the complexity of historical and contemporary connections? How do Māori articulate and negotiate the rather difficult intersection between discourses of migration (we came from Hawaiki on waka) and claims to Indigeneity (we’ve always been here)? Claiming that we once were Pacific does not undermine or delegitimize national or transnational discursive formations that seal Māori into one of two possible relations—with the state or with Indigeneity—but rather suggests that the Pacific is a rich and significant additional context for Māori articulation and scholarship. Indeed, this book implicitly asserts that Māori exist outside, beyond, and between any narrow fads of framing, stereotype, or representation. Despite a dominant differentiation between Māori and the Pacific, then, this book keeps turning back to those scraps of the Pacific that are still visible. On seeing the tapa on Cook’s and Tupaia’s ship, Māori response was primarily one of recognition and reconnection. For Māori—for us, for me—these moments in which Māori and the Pacific are reunited suggestively complete the cycle that started when our ancestors navigated their way to Aotearoa generations ago.

Connections, Disconnections

Māori and Pacific people connect differently at the levels of region and nation. Because of the histories of migration mentioned earlier, Māori are both geographically and genealogically a part of the Pacific region. We presently make up around 14 percent of New Zealand’s total population (we numbered 565,329 in the 2006 census17), and in addition, an estimated one in five Māori people live outside New Zealand. However, as a result of recent histories of political and physical mobility in the region, Māori relate to the Pacific in the national space as well. Over the second half of the twentieth century, as migrants from other places in the region made their homes in New Zealand, and echoing the production of the local identification of Māori over time, a new Pacific identification emerged here. Colloquially, migrants from elsewhere in the Pacific are often known by a local umbrella term: Pasifika (a transliteration of Pacific also spelled “Pasifica,” “Pacifika,” “Pacifica,” and “Pasefika”), and in this book, Pasifika refers to New Zealand–based non-Māori Pacific people. Although there are obvious problems with lumping together culturally and linguistically distinct groups with a single term, a strategic amalgam can create visibility and the grounds for collaboration.

At present, Māori–Pasifika connections are deeply inflected by the colonial project within which Māori and a number of Pasifika communities are rather tightly bound. A combination of factors has led to the Pasifika community making up 6.9 percent of the New Zealand population, but the foundations were laid by two forms of colonialism in the region: specific colonialism, where New Zealand officially colonized Sāmoa (1920–62), the Cook Islands (1901–65), Niue (1901–74), and Tokelau (1926 to present), and broader impacts of colonialism in the Pacific, whereby disparities in the region and the usurpation of Māori land and resources led to New Zealand becoming a destination for economic migrants. In the postwar period, Māori communities were moving to New Zealand’s cities at the same time as the first sizeable migrations from elsewhere in the Pacific arrived there—and often in the same suburbs. Māori and Pasifika people have had to scramble for the few resources available to them in the area of employment (competition for work, particularly in the areas of unskilled, semiskilled, and trade labor, still persists today) but also in the areas of education, housing, health care, and so on.18 Alongside this dominant movement of Māori and people from around the Pacific toward urban spaces, in the 1960s and 1970s, some specific Pacific groups were sent to rural and town areas to work in laboring, forestry, and agricultural jobs, through which they had opportunities to interact with local communities. Māori communities were efficient and effective in including Pacific migrants, both formally (rituals of welcome, provision of practical support, and cooperative political activism) and informally (intimate relationships and friendships), until the more numerically significant arrivals from elsewhere in the Pacific simultaneously prevented this kind of local incorporation and enabled some Pacific communities to produce viable community organizations of their own.

Māori–Pasifika connections are marked by discourses of relationship and reconnection but also of disjuncture. For example, we might consider familial prohibitions on marriages or partnerships with the other, informal prejudice, ethnically drawn rivalries between youth gangs, and so on. Compounding this, Pākehā racism has tended to lump Māori and Pasifika together in a way that flattens out differences and further marginalizes all communities involved. Surely a focus on Māori–Pasifika connections should also attend to the rather embarrassing genealogies of suspicion, derision, and competition between our communities. They certainly provide a counterpoint to Pacific-centered discourses that echo and sometimes explicitly draw on Albert Wendt’s and Epeli Hau’ofa’s visionary framings of an Oceania whose insistently regional focus allows little room to problematize the relationships between Indigenous and immigrant Pacific peoples in particular spaces. Except for occasional popular and mainstream references to race-based violence in the wake of specific incidents, the articulations of disconnection (or indeed connection) between Māori and Pasifika communities are literally off the mainstream record, and so deciding to publicly discuss them in this book feels like a rather risky, invasive, and even duplicitous act. And yet, the complex patterns of prejudice that inflect Māori–Pasifika relationships at the national level can also shape Māori articulations of connection with the Pacific region, and a project that focuses on connections demands a frank and complex exploration of disconnections too.

This book argues that Māori and Pasifika communities are drawn into the logic of New Zealand–specific prejudices as long as they insist that their primary relationship is with the New Zealand nation-state. Recalling the two names of our island in Wellington Harbor, the multiplicity inherent in the name “Matiu” can be diminished by the presence of the alternative name, “Somes.” On one hand, tāngata whenua (Indigenous or local people; here the people responsible for Matiu) may subsume Pasifika communities under the category “not Indigenous” (Somes) given that Pasifika communities are not Indigenous to the current configuration of the New Zealand nation-state.19 On the other hand, migrant communities can tend to focus on their relationships with the visa-granting nation (Somes) rather than other, Indigenous, coexisting nations that occupy the same land. (Indeed, the public ferry that carries visitors to the island continues to refer only to “Somes.”) This stalemate can be paralyzing for our discussions of Māori–Pasifika connections, and yet I believe this is the very reason that this kind of project should be undertaken. Indeed, it is in these moments and modes of Māori articulation with the Pacific that the nation-state is relegated to one strand of a matrix of relationships within which tāngata whenua operate.

Writing in Place

Any book is a product of place: one always writes somewhere, and I am writing in a discipline, in a university, and in Aotearoa. Throughout Once Were Pacific, arguments will return to the place of place, from this point right here through until place is given the final word in the epilogue. The roots of this book lie partly in a chapter of my doctoral dissertation, written in the lands of the Cayuga Nation (upstate New York) and the Kanaka Maoli (Hawai‘i), but more particularly, the roots of Once Were Pacific are embedded in this place. One specific point of genesis for this project was an interaction in Hawai‘i when someone mentioned that he was pleased that there was another Pacific Islander in the English department that year; I replied, “Awesome—who is it?” before realizing that the person was talking about me. In that moment and that place, a Māori person was unproblematically Pacific Islander, but Māori and Pacific Islander are distinguished in New Zealand to the extent that I had not recognized myself when I had been spoken about.

Who was that Pacific Islander in the English department? For my part, I have mobility in my blood: I am a member of the Te Punga family, and our tribal connections are primarily to Te Ātiawa. After living in Taranaki on the west coast of the North Island since arriving across the Pacific Ocean from Hawaiki many generations ago, we migrated farther southward to the Wellington area—to the land around the harbor in which Matiu Island is located—in the early nineteenth century. Although that is our home base, we have been moving ever since, as individuals and in small family clusters. I was born here in Wellington, but when I was five years old, my immediate family moved to Auckland, where I attended a school in which almost all the kids were Pacific (Māori and Pasifika). Although one tends not to notice these things when one is small, on reflection, I can see how all of this affects who I am today and, importantly, why this is my first book. There are many stories to be told about Māori writing in English and many places to tell them. I have felt some urgency around telling this particular story—Māori articulations of connection with the Pacific—because it helps answer questions that were in the air I breathed growing up and because the relationship between Indigeneity and migration is so crucial to Indigenous creative, cultural, political, and theoretical activities in the present.

I write as a practicing academic, a scholar, a researcher, and a teacher. Though there are many spaces in which these roles may be filled, I choose to work in a university. However, this book (and this scholar) sits alongside, and seeks neither to ignore nor detract from the multiple ways in which Māori migration across the Pacific is remembered, articulated, and mobilized in whaikōrero, waiata, ruruku, karakia, haka, and visual arts. Once Were Pacific is not about waka traditions or Māori involvement in the revival of Pacific navigation,20 but it takes for granted that people of waka memory affirm and share those memories in spaces outside as well as inside the university. Plenty of people who are well versed in the topic of waka traditions and the history of voyaging in the Pacific occupy scholarly halls, library bookshelves, and paepae.21 In important ways, for example, this book seeks to sit alongside a large gathering that was hosted by Ngāti Kahungunu on the eastern coast of the North Island in November 2008. Relatives of Ngāti Kahungunu and of the other Tākitimu-derived iwi (tribes, nations, people) based around that part of the island poured into the area from around the Pacific: most obviously from the Cook Islands, from where the Tākitimu had departed for Aotearoa, but also from Sāmoa and beyond. In a press release, Ngāti Kahungunu iwi chairperson Ngahiwi Tomoana describes the festival as

a celebration and development initiative in the rebuilding of relationships of indigenous peoples across Aotearoa, the Pacific and the Hawaiiki nation. We encourage all families and communities to celebrate our past, our present and our future in Aotearoa and the Pacific by participating in the festival.22

Over the course of five days, descendents of Tākitimu celebrated their connections and shared stories and cultural products. Wānanga and other learning opportunities enabled the connections to be communicated and debated during the festival. I hope this book will provide space for other kinds of conversations alongside those we are already having about Māori, about writing in English, about Māori writing in English, about Indigeneity, and about the Pacific.

Once Were Pacific has regional and global roots but has been written in Aotearoa. If I lived elsewhere—indeed, when I did live elsewhere—the questions that would matter would be differently configured to the ones I ask in this book. This book asks questions that are important here, and yet writing from and in a specific place is not necessarily the same as parochialism. This book seeks to speak with, rather than for, others; it also seeks to refrain from speaking at others. Although I have provided cultural and linguistic translations at some points throughout the book to offer hospitality to a wider readership, this is not a visitor’s manual or travel guide. I anticipate that the tight focus of Once Were Pacific on Māori will, rather than produce barriers to consideration of its arguments in allied contexts, ultimately enable more robust extrapolation of its claims beyond Aotearoa. The specificities of the discussion will better enable connection rather than separation. As I write about the dynamics of connection and borders between Māori and Pasifika people during the 1970s Dawn Raids, for example, I cannot help but think about other borders as they are negotiated in the present day in relation to the designations “Indigenous” and “migrant.” Or, to extend the previous example, in Hawai‘i, a Māori person may well be a Pacific Islander, but is a Hawaiian?

Within the world of academia, this book is located at the intersection of particular approaches and fields, and a central aim of the book is to produce new readings of existing texts to explore how Māori (and some Pasifika) writers already explore connections with the Pacific. It seems worthwhile, for the sake of the interdisciplinary readership of the book, to spend some time reflecting on its disciplinary terrain. Once Were Pacific centers Anglo-phone literary studies,23 broadly defined, with one hand on interdisciplinarity while keeping a firm view on Māori, Pacific, and Indigenous studies. Literary studies emphasize the place of creative texts in the broad range of Māori articulation; it infuses my approach to a wide range of texts rather than simply restricting my focus to texts or genres that look and feel a particular—literary—way. Poetry, fiction, plays, films, TV, music, and so on take their place alongside journalistic writing, visual texts, scholarly work, historical writing, archival texts, performances, songs, chants, and beyond. In addition, paying attention to the means of creative production cannot help but (re)narrate broader publishing, literary, and creative contexts. I am interested in Māori articulation of connections with the Pacific rather than in establishing (or proving) whether or why those connections might exist; this is not a history as such or a book about waka traditions, although both are present throughout. Concurring with Thomas King that “the truth about stories is that’s all we are,”24 I take for granted that we cannot account for history outside of discourse; any language we use itself bears the mark of the histories we describe. Crucially to my politics as well as my disciplinary training, focusing on articulation foregrounds the extent to which our worlds are themselves produced by language. Articulation is about how and perhaps why rather than what; texts are engaged not only with the description or representation of things (communities, histories) but with their very production.25

Although a critically uneven but vibrant conversation about Māori writing in English has taken place for as long as that writing has been produced, little sustained formal critical attention has been published. Even sixty years after Kohere’s 1951 The Autobiography of a Maori,26 arguably the first published single-author creative monograph in English by a Māori writer, there are only five published book-length treatments of (English-language) Māori literature,27 of which only three focus solely on Māori texts (specifically fiction), and none was written in New Zealand or by a Māori scholar. The predominant focus on Māori writing in English has been on Māori connections with Pākehā and privileges the New Zealand national literary context, and though some work in the field of Pacific literary studies smoothly assumes that Māori are in the Pacific, this book applies some pressure to the naturalization and limits of that inclusion, not to disprove or undermine it but to more carefully elaborate its terms. At the same time, conventional national and regional histories have tended to overlook moments of Māori–Pacific connection such as those investigated in this project. Tracy McIntosh’s exploratory “Hibiscus in the Flax Bush” and two pages of Donna Awatere’s Maori Sovereignty seem to be the only critical pieces published about these connections.28 At the same time, Anglophone Indigenous studies, within which Māori studies is most obviously and most often located, has not tended to focus on migration and diaspora,29 with the clear exception of scholars whose work treats Hawaiian and Chamorro communities on the U.S. mainland.

Whereas the verticality of Indigenous relationships with non-Indigenous communities is widely explored, horizontal modes of Indigenous–Indigenous connection have enjoyed far less critical consideration. My research focuses on Indigenous “movement and cultural traffic,” to borrow a phrase from historian Tony Ballantyne, who advocates for work that explores “the forms of movement and cultural traffic that linked colonies in the ‘periphery’ together” rather than the many postcolonial narratives that reinforce the center–periphery relationship between London and the colony.30 Al-though Ballantyne’s focus is on predominantly European movement between the settler colonies, this project is both Indigenous centered and comparative, departing as it does from research into Indigenous–European or black–white interaction but also from research that focuses entirely on a singular Indigenous community. Within the New Zealand national space as well as in the region, I am interested in how Māori and other Pacific people talk about each other. This does not cut out the European gaze completely, but it certainly sidelines that gaze and produces spaces where its power is decentered.

An Extraordinary Fondness

Let’s return to Tupaia’s painting and reflect on the moment in which a Māori, a Raiatean, and a European stand in close proximity. The triangulated relationship between Māori, Raiatean, and European that is both represented and recorded in the painting offers a productive structure for this book. Although there are many links between the two parts of the book, the relationship between Māori and the Pacific looks different when one is looking at the region (part 1) or the nation (part 2).

In part 1, Once Were Pacific turns to focus on the realm of the tapa that is extended for trade, exploring the ways in which Aotearoa is articulated as part of the broader Pacific region on the basis of cultural and geographic proximity. Starting with three specific instances—an individual, a tourist attraction, and a literary form—the first chapter interrogates the ways in which Māori are present in Pacific spaces. Next, as a significant departure from existing accounts of Māori writing in English, in chapter 2, the project includes in its scope Māori writers who live and publish outside New Zealand and who have specific ties to the Pacific such as Robert Sullivan (based for some time in Hawai‘i, published in New Zealand), Vernice Wineera (lives and published in Hawai‘i), and Evelyn Patuawa-Nathan (published in Fiji). This is the first critical treatment of the latter two writers and the first to look at Sullivan’s work in this way. Chapter 3 focuses on Witi Ihimaera and Hinewirangi, two Māori writers based in Aotearoa who have written about Māori as a part of the regional Pacific. Part 1 concludes by reflecting on the impact of cultural and historical differences as well as proximities in the region.

Part 2 turns to the realm of the koura, or crayfish, which is reciprocally extended; this section foregrounds Māori–Pacific connections as they are elaborated and negotiated in the national context of Aotearoa New Zealand. An Aotearoa-based Pacific focuses on the national boundaries of New Zealand and recognizes that communities from all over the Pacific—including Māori—interact with one another within those boundaries. Indeed, because it is subsumed by the nation-state of New Zealand, which is host to large diasporic Pasifika communities, Aotearoa is in very particular ways the site of a Pacific microcosm. After considering a series of collaborations between Māori and Pasifika communities in chapter 4, chapters 5 and 6 treat Māori and Pasifika texts that engage Māori–Pasifika relationships, respectively. Given that the majority of Māori and Pasifika people in New Zealand live in relatively close proximity in urban areas, and given the appearance of haka hulas (children of mixed Māori and Pasifika relationships),31 it is curious that the relationship between Indigenous (Māori) and immigrant (Pasifika) communities is rarely treated in Māori cultural production. Chapter 7 turns its attention to three performed texts (two plays and a television series) that explore Māori–Pasifika disconnections by mobilizing the story of Romeo and Juliet.

Finally, the book concludes by stepping out further from the painting itself and turning its attention to the production of the text: to Tupaia and to his use of the paintbrush, the third item that is being held in the moment of encounter depicted in his painting. The paintbrush provides an opportunity to ask a series of questions: who’s looking at whom? Who gets to paint or, in this case, write? What parameters shape the conception and mobility of a text? Which cultural, political, and economic configurations inflect this project and its publication in an Anglophone and American academic context? The conclusion considers the significance of the gaze and means of production that ultimately inflect all articulations and reflects on the stakes and implications of the project of Once Were Pacific, not to limit the project but to more carefully articulate its possibilities. A key disciplinary aim of Once Were Pacific is to carefully respond and contribute to contemporary literary studies. Rather than pitting itself in opposition to the fields of New Zealand, Pacific, Indigenous, and Māori literary studies as well as postcolonial and ethnic literary studies, this project seeks to extend and broaden that scholarship, and the final section of the book gestures toward the implications of the project for those fields. In line with the call from Indigenous studies to consider the broader political and institutional contexts of research, it is necessary to be self-conscious about the present project. Once Were Pacific closes by considering the potentially negative extrapolation of an argument by which—at its possible extreme—“Indigenous bodies” might be recoded as “migrant bodies.” Ultimately, Once Were Pacific argues for a kind of regional identification—Tomoana’s “Hawaiki nation” perhaps—that emphasizes rather than distracts from Indigeneity.

Perhaps this—all of this—is something along the lines of what Tupaia saw when he depicted the trade between Europeans bearing tapa and Māori bearing koura. In her discussion of Cook’s voyaging around the Pacific,32 Salmond rightly comments that we will never know the extent and nature of the conversations between Tupaia and specific Māori communities with which he conversed. With a rather different conviction, Banks, the European depicted in Tupaia’s painting, recalled later in his life that the picture focused on him. Walking a fine line between the unrememberable and the misremembered, Once Were Pacific looks at Tupaia’s sketch and reads it in terms of the complicated dynamic of Māori–Pacific connection it implies: a symbolic reunion of those Mead describes as “relatives spread across the great Pacific ocean.” I like to imagine Tupaia recognizing the significance of that moment in which Māori acquired the first new influx of material culture from one of their ancestral homes—tangible affirmation of oral traditions and cultural practices that had been passed down through generations of isolation from the rest of the Pacific—and choosing that as the image to record for posterity.