Introduction to Part 1

In Tupaia’S painting of exchange between Māori and European men, the European extends a piece of tapa recently acquired in Tahiti. The plant from which tapa is made, the paper mulberry tree (Broussonetia papyrifera), which Māori know as aute,1 could not thrive in Aotearoa’s colder climate, and so the production of the cloth had all but diminished there. However, the moment Māori reconnected with the tapa, and indeed, the moment Tupaia chose to represent that scene with the new technology of European paint, Māori were reglued into the Pacific region. Although moving south of tropical Polynesia did not mean that Māori had literally left the Pacific as such, the ongoing physical connections had died down over the past few centuries. An Aotearoa-inclusive Pacific considers the geographic region of the Pacific and notices that Aotearoa is a part of that area on the basis of cultural, linguistic, genealogical, and geographic proximity.

In part 1, the regionality of the Pacific is to the fore. Whereas the configuration of Māori and Pacific in the national space will take center stage in part 2, here we retain a regional focus. As a significant departure from New Zealand–centered accounts of Māori writing in English, this project includes in its scope Māori writers who live and publish outside New Zealand, many of whom articulate specific ties to the Pacific. The complicating factor is that around “the region”—that is, outside New Zealand—Māori tend to be considered a part of the Pacific anyway.2 Why does Aotearoa’s place in the Pacific region even require attention when we note that there is a Māori village in the Hawai‘i-based Polynesian Cultural Centre (PCC) because of shared “Polynesian” ancestry and culture and that the inclusion of Māori literary and critical texts in the Pacific Literature syllabus at the University of the South Pacific is unmarked? Although exploring the presence and position of Māori in the Pacific has urgency—or indeed, makes any sense—only within certain national borders, and though some texts and critical discussions do articulate Aotearoa as part of the Pacific region,3 this book focuses on the basis of that inclusion, especially in the present moment, which is marked by legacies of colonialism and migration.

Part 1 is the realm of tapa, and I am using “tapa” as a generic name to describe the cloth that has a vast number of production techniques and names across the Pacific. Tapa is simultaneously regional and specific. Although the paper mulberry plant itself is found around the region, having been carefully and painstakingly carried in seed form as a part of the progression of migration across the ocean, and though most of the processes of collecting, preparing, and finishing the bark bear strong relation to each other, the cloth produced in every region of the Pacific is distinctive. Hawaiian kapa has watermark patterns stamped into it, Fijian masi is stenciled, and Samoan siapo is made in long strips that are glued together, to describe but a few examples. The continuities of plant and process are not undermined but are instead quietly distinguished by discontinuities that have developed in each specific place. As a metaphor, tapa provides an opportunity to reflect on cultural (including scientific, philosophical, material, architectural, legal, artistic, spiritual, and social) and genealogical continuities across the Pacific and simultaneously to observe local specificities. Like for tapa, there is no regional name for the Pacific Ocean: Māori may call our ocean Te Moananui a Kiwa, but others have other names and memories of the great expanse. Our present and recent modes of circulation, mobility, and connection compel us to create a singular entity—tapa, Pacific—by using a singular word. Though masi is not the same as kapa is not the same as hiapo, when they are understood as versions, or perhaps iterations, of each other, we have the opportunity to draw connections that may lack prominence in any single example.

In Aotearoa, the meaning of tapa is twofold: it describes those shreds of paper bark worn as ornaments in memory of much larger sheets long ago and far away, but it also (and more dominantly) refers to sheets of the cloth brought in from around the Pacific and especially from those places with which New Zealand has a history of specific relationship. While Māori are certainly included under the Pacific umbrella (small scraps of tapa), one is far more likely to hear “Pacific” and think of those places from which Pacific migrants to New Zealand came (large sheets of tapa). The uneven familiarity of these two meanings echoes the prominence of the idea that we once were Pacific. In Aotearoa, the aute struggled to grow because the paper mulberry is best suited to the warm temperatures of tropical Polynesia. Indeed, it only remained in a small number of particularly warm locations: the Far North, Hawke’s Bay, and the East Coast of the North Island. Despite the predicament of climate, however, the aute was still meagerly present when Europeans arrived at Aotearoa to stay.

Each discussion of the Pacific imagines a different version of the region. According to some, we once were Oceanic. Oceania, which appears in the subtitle of this book, can be discursively traced through Wendt in 19764 and Hau’ofa in 19935 to the successive explosion of its use. Even though it is an English term that belies a degree of colonial infiltration and complicity, Oceania can be conceptually traced—as they both argue—back through countless generations.6 Wendt’s essay “Towards a New Oceania” famously opens by claiming the region as a region and outlining the reasons for his decision to turn from “fact” (he had completed a master of arts degree in history) to creative articulation:

I belong to Oceania—or at least, I am rooted in a fertile portion of it—and it nourishes my spirit, helps to define me, and feeds my imagination. A detatched/objective analysis I will leave to the sociologist and all the other ’ologists who have plagued Oceania. . . . Objectivity is for such uncommitted gods. My commitment won’t allow me to confine myself to so narrow a vision. So vast, so fabulously varied a scatter of islands, nations, cultures, mythologies and myths, so dazzling a creature, Oceania deserves more than an attempt at mundane fact; only the imagination in free flight can hope—if not to contain her—to grasp some of her shape, plumage, and pain.7

The essay continues to praise Oceania by advocating, as well as turning to, creative written works to grapple with the similarities, possibilities, and colonial histories of the region. In 1993 the Fiji-based Tongan academic and writer Epeli Hau’ofa extended the concept of Oceania in his essay “Our Sea of Islands,”8 one of the most influential and widely read pieces of Pacific scholarship, in which he demonstrates that local principles and cosmologies can radically shift the terms by which we know ourselves and each other. “Our Sea of Islands” reapproaches the concept that marks the broadest parameters of this area of study—the region itself—on its own terms and thereby recenters Indigenous knowledges of the Pacific. Rather than accepting the smallness and isolation the West associates with the region, “islands in a far sea,” Hau’ofa claims that the Pacific is “a sea of islands”9 in which people construct their world by their very inhabiting, and traversing, of the ocean:

The contemporary process of what may be called world enlargement that is carried out by tens of thousands of ordinary Pacific Islanders right across the ocean . . . mak[es] nonsense of all national and economic boundaries, borders that have been defined only recently, crisscrossing an ocean that had been boundless for ages before Captain Cook’s apotheosis.10

He proposes that because Pacific people have always occupied and traveled around the Pacific, the ocean has always been a part of the experience and worldview of Pacific people and so is itself meaningful space rather than a watery gap. This argument collapses the European binary of sea and land, transforming Pacific space from the smallest to the largest in the world, and he renames it “Oceania.”

Aotearoa is necessarily and inextricably a part of Hau’ofa’s Oceania because Māori are Oceanic seafarers. Hau’ofa writes about Māori navigation (albeit, or perhaps significantly, in parentheses) as an example that challenges the externally proposed model of population dispersal by “accidental drift”:

(Only blind landlubbers would say that settlements like these, as well as those in New Zealand and Hawai’i, were made through accidental voyages by people who got blown off course—presumably while they were out fishing with their wives, children, pigs, dogs, and food-plant seedlings—during a hurricane.)11

His configuration of Oceania has significant implications for the reading of Māori texts because Aotearoa is visible when someone looks at the place with “Oceanic” eyes rather than treating New Zealand as a white (or an empty) metropole to which Oceanic people migrate. The construct of Oceania has deep, complex, and politically explosive implications for the ways in which any scholar might approach the field (or, to use a better metaphor, ocean) of study. Oceania proposes a dynamic regional sensibility that enlarges and puts pressure on contemporary structures of nation and region. Although I am using the term Pacific throughout this book, the subtitle names Oceania to affirm that Once Were Pacific both grows out of and elaborates the Oceanic scholarly and cultural project as well as to take advantage of the dual association Oceania has with the region and the people of the region.

If Māori are Pacific, Māori literary studies must therefore be connected to Pacific literary studies.12 In some ways, the field of Pacific literary studies has come about as a local incarnation or manifestation of English literature and language teaching. In other ways, the line between Pacific literary studies and Pacific studies is blurred,13 not least of all because Pacific scholar–writers, such as Albert Wendt, Epeli Hau’ofa, Vilsoni Hereniko, Teresia Teaiwa, Steven Winduo, Sina Va’ai, Regis Stella, Haunani-Kay Trask, and Konai Helu Thaman, have contributed many of the now foundational texts of Pacific studies. (This phenomenon of critics also being involved in literary production is so common that Steven Winduo gave them a name: “Pacific Writer Scholars.”)14 Many non-Indigenous scholars have also worked with the texts produced in the Pacific since the beginning of the field, and many scholars of Pacific literature turn to aesthetic and cultural frames already in the region before writing.15 For example, Wendt’s 1996 essay “Tatauing the Post-colonial Body” took Pacific literary studies in a new—and yet not new at all—direction, insisting as it did on the dynamic relation between this critical endeavor and the cultural, aesthetic, and political contexts from which the texts come.16

Fiji-based Subramani’s landmark 1985 text South Pacific Literature re-mains the only book-length study produced within the region to attempt to speak to and for the whole Pacific. Certainly Subramani’s contribution to literary studies in the Pacific deserves greater attention than it presently enjoys, but here we focus on his articulation of the relationship between Māori and the region:

The literatures of Australia and New Zealand form the fifth region. The literatures of Maori and Aboriginal peoples share common motifs with literatures of other Pacific regions. But they ought to be viewed as belonging to the mainstream of Australian and New Zealand writing.17

Subramani excludes Māori and Indigenous Australian literatures on the basis of “belonging to the mainstream,” which he believes overrides shared “motifs” and is unhelpful for elaborating the relationship between Māori and Pacific literatures or people. (Interestingly, this exclusion does not extend to the book’s cover, which includes, among other icons, the stylized illustration of a Māori carving.) The three major edited collections of Pacific literary criticism are Sharrad’s Readings in Pacific Literature, Goetzfridt’s Indigenous Literature of Oceania, and Hereniko and Wilson’s Inside Out, which came out of the 199418 conference on Pacific Literatures held in Hawai‘i.19 All include Māori texts in their scope but tend to focus on diasporic movements from the independent Pacific to New Zealand, Australia, Hawai‘i, and the U.S. mainland, which means that a Pacific critical and political gaze in this direction has often focused on a metropole (New Zealand) more clearly than on a Pacific nation (Aotearoa).

A great deal of Pacific literary studies scholarship exists in journal articles (in the journals Mana and SPAN but also elsewhere), book chapters, conference proceedings, theses, and introductory essays to anthologies and critical collections. Although the surprisingly poor commitment to Pacific literature from many universities around the region is disheartening, a number of scholars are now engaged in the study of Pacific literatures, both within and outside the discipline and departments of English. The critical and institutional interventions made by the previous generations of Pacific literary scholars are being continued and expanded by a new wave of researchers and writers such as Ku’ualoha Ho’omanawanui, Ka’imipono Kaiwi Kahumoku, AnnaMarie Christiansen, Brandy Nālani MacDougall, Noenoe Silva, Selina Tusitala Marsh, Juniper Ellis, Liz DeLoughrey, Michelle Keown, Susan Najita, Chadwick Allen, Emelihter Kihleng, and Craig Santos Perez. All these scholars—and this is certainly not an exhaustive roll call—extend both the range and sites of Pacific literary studies and are committed to projects covering a vast constellation of concerns: comparative, national, regional, disciplinary, interdisciplinary, Indigenous, migrant, diasporic, and more.

Part 1 comprises three chapters, each of which considers a specific way in which Aotearoa is a part of the Pacific region. In chapter 1, three configurations of Māori people in Pacific places allow us to focus on the structures by which Māori are included in the region. First, it examines Te Rangihiroa (Sir Peter Buck), the medical doctor, politician, military serviceman, and anthropologist of the early twentieth century who explored Māori connections with the Pacific through his scholarly work on the region and whose decision to spend his last two decades in Hawai‘i exemplifies the continuation of Māori mobility throughout the region. Next, the chapter examines Māori presence at the PCC, a commercial visitors’ attraction in Hawai‘i. The PCC has cultural, religious, and educational purposes beyond its commercial enterprises, and all of these have produced certain kinds of Māori engagement in (often literal) performance of the “Pacific” over a number of decades. Finally, the chapter proposes the literary anthology as a crucial space in which articulations of the “Pacific” as a region are both produced and extended. I argue that although Pacific literary studies has tended to focus on individual writers and texts, paying attention to anthologies enables a different kind of regional literary analysis. Holding together an individual, a tourist site, and a specific form of publishing might feel like a stretch, but this combination enables us to consider the sheer range of means and contexts by which and within which the relationship between Māori and the Pacific is produced.

Chapter 2, “Pacific-Based Māori Writers,” foregrounds the work of Vernice Wineera, Evelyn Patuawa-Nathan, and Robert Sullivan, three writers who are based and/or published in the Pacific outside of New Zealand. Wineera and Sullivan are (or have been) based in Hawai‘i, and Patuawa-Nathan is the only Māori writer published by the Fiji-based South Pacific Creative Arts Society. Following on, chapter 3 considers the small number of Māori writers based in Aotearoa who have written about Māori as a part of the Pacific region and focuses on Ihimaera and Hinewirangi, who enjoy differing levels of fame and critical attention and whose work has not previously been read side by side. Chapters 2 and 3 both extend the writers, texts, and modes of reading that currently dominate discussions of Māori writing in English. Including Māori writers outside Aotearoa in a discussion of Māori literary studies has been one of the great pleasures, and will be one of the major interventions, of this book. Finally, in a concluding section, I propose some possibilities of regional analysis.

This realm of tapa, the region, points directly to historic navigational feats that produced a new group of people, Māori, living on these cold southern islands. Māori planted and then nurtured the aute over these centuries, despite an inhospitable climate. Writing about the aute in his 1923 discussion of Māori clothing, Te Rangihiroa cites Colenso’s 1880 words:

I once saw this plant growing in an old plantation at the head of the Kawakawa River in the Bay of Islands—that was in 1835. There was, however, but one small tree left, which was about six feet high, with few branches, and not many leaves on them, it appeared both aged and unhealthy, and it soon after died. On my finally leaving the Bay of Islands in 1844, to reside in Hawke’s Bay, I heard of some aute trees still living at Hokianga. I wrote to a chief of my acquaintance there (EM Patuone), who kindly sent me several good cuttings; saying (in a letter) that the plant there was nearly destroyed by the cattle of the Europeans. Unfortunately . . . I lost them all.20

Te Rangihiroa follows with an observation that “the plant is now extinct in New Zealand.”21 This tragic final turn of events for the aute was therefore brought about by the introduction of European farming. Although a focus on the New Zealand state and its machinery for redress and partnership has been urgent and essential for Māori since the nineteenth century, the same alienation of land that loudly undermined Māori sovereignty also quietly and literally killed off one of the modes by which Māori had intentionally retained a connection with the Pacific. Although it would have been easy simply to let it die out in this temperate environment, the aute was deliberately cultivated and the technology associated with turning its bark into paper was maintained, a mnemonic device to recall living and moving across the Pacific region, and these chapters explore the extent and modes by which this continues to be recalled. This careful maintenance of the aute plant and tapa production in Aotearoa provides an explanation for the remarkable moment described by Cook’s crew of an unexpectedly rapturous Māori response to the great sheets of tapa they encountered in 1769.