E Kore Au e Ngaro

Cook’s Ship, Tupaia’s Ship, Maui’s Ship

Hau’ofa’s and Wendt’s vision of Oceania, to which we have returned over and over in these pages, decenters the relationship between colonizer and colonized in favor of local constructions of the region as a space overwritten by multiple crisscrossings and navigational histories. Why, then, would I hold a description of first contact between Cook and a Māori community as a beginning point for this book? The answer for me is clear. It is because of how, and where, this conversation is taking place: in the English language, between the pages of a book. This book may well travel beyond the university—and indeed, I hope it does—but I am mindful that it has emerged from an aspect of my doctoral research and that I write (and am funded) as a practicing academic in a university. I refuse not to acknowledge the context of this conversation, and I propose that the story of Cook’s trade with Māori, which resulted in his astonished observation that Māori valued Tahitian tapa cloth far more highly than European trinkets, provocatively plays out in allegorical form the relationship between Māori, the Pacific, and the academic context of the university.

When the Indigenous—in this case, Māori—scholar approaches (or, to echo the allegory of European voyaging more closely, is approached by) the university (or the specific discipline of literary studies), it may seem that the most useful and productive trade will be between Indigenous and European knowledges. I will contribute some aspect of Māori knowledge to academia, and in return, academia will allow me access to its carefully guarded and bounded European knowledge. The Western academy, setting out in an age of European exploration into new waters with a colonial presumption to “know”6 the Other as well as to improve modes of European resource extraction, recognizes that it will need to set up reciprocal relationships with those from whom it needs fresh produce and prepares the trinkets and nails for trade. (Interestingly, the very products Cook hoped to acquire from the Māori trading communities—fish and sweet potatoes—are both metaphors for knowledge within various Māori cultural contexts.)7 Specifically, Cook sought to acquire cultivated, prepared, and fished foods; European explorers were inherently dependent on the application of Indigenous labor. Unexpectedly, these fish and kūmara were traded for tapa, a material acquired through colonial trade and perhaps a touch of souveniring, on which, from Cook’s perspective, Māori placed an “extraordinary” value. I have suggested throughout this book that this tapa obtained at Tahiti stands in for the Pacific, given the flourishing of the paper mulberry plant from which tapa is produced throughout the Pacific region, except for most of Aotearoa, and like the kūmara and fish of Aotearoa, tapa is a product of Indigenous knowledge and expertise. The university seeks, at least on the more recent stretches of its journey, not simply natives as objects and informants but also Native knowledges and scholars.

So, then, one of the most exciting things the academy currently offers Māori literary analysis (and perhaps Māori scholarship more broadly) is the opportunity for Māori to connect with the Pacific: to engage with a vast regional comparative context that has the capacity to reaffirm the whakapapa and historical links between the Māori community and our Pacific relatives. While the (at least nominal) inclusion of Māori literature within Pacific literary horizons is an aspect of Pacific studies outside Aotearoa, the (sense of) cultural distinctiveness developed over centuries of no contact with the rest of the Pacific, and the contemporary emphasis on an Indigenous–non-Indigenous bifurcation, means that, at least in New Zealand, Māori and Pacific are not as productively or consistently linked as one might hope or expect. Māori did have remnant forms of tapa, accompanied by complementary oral traditions about much larger and sturdier sheets elsewhere in earlier homes, before they set out on their journey to Aotearoa, which enabled them to recognize, contextualize, and value the tapa they were offered centuries later.8

In our story about the exchange of tapa and food, the university is the ship, a constructed and mobile site for trade.9 This is a productive and complex space, yet it is neither neutral nor egalitarian. The university has become a part of the crisscrossing—the histories, the relationships, the boundaries—of the Pacific and takes its place alongside the many watercraft fashioned by Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Although the university performs an important role, this should not be understood to eclipse, counter, override, or undermine the reasons why people of the Pacific consent to trading in the first place or, indeed, where we might decide this kind of trade can take place. It might be the university, but it might be the Takitimu Festival, the paepae, the stage, online, or around family kitchen tables. We come with our own motivations and have our own systems for determining the value of various products. Sometimes we most desire the thing the university did not set out to acquire, let alone trade, and yet it is what we might have decided to come for. Of course, there are limits to this metaphor of the Good Ship University. Equating this kind of academic space with a story of first contact problematically reinscribes (even insists on) the antiquity or purity of the Indigenous body. Likewise, universities (like Cook’s ship) tend to be inhabited by more Indigenous people from around the Pacific than we popularly give them credit for or than this metaphor allows,10 and there is a problem with a story in which mobile universities meet landlocked Pacific people or trading middlemen (gender bias intended) meet passive, consuming Natives. Yet this metaphor of ships might be a start, at least for getting the conversation going.

Some time around the early 1850s, Te Arawa writer Wiremu Maihi Te Rangikaheke met a man, Maui Tione, from elsewhere in the Pacific. In an unfinished letter he evidently intended to send “home” to Hawaiki with Maui, who had identified himself “Nō Hawaiki ke ahau,”11 Te Rangikaheke expresses his concern that Māori may have forgotten aspects of cultural practice and philosophy since their migration from tropical Polynesia, and especially since the range of interactions with Europeans that century. Identifying this chance meeting as an opportunity to determine the extent to which Māori had strayed from their roots, he opened the letter as follows:

Ana he korero Maori atu enei naku ki a koutou ki nga tangata o Hawaiki, kia mohio mai koutou ki ena korero.12

He anticipated that “nga tangata o Hawaiki” would be mutually interested in their connection with Māori and able to read the Māori language. Directly addressing “nga tangata o Hawaiki” in this way, Te Rangikaheke demonstrates his own belief that Māori historical accounts of migration from Hawaiki were accurate but also that the people of Hawaiki would reciprocate with generosity according to the conventions of a long-standing relationship.

Although Maui Tione had come to Aotearoa working on a European ship, he advised Te Rangikaheke that his relatives in Hawaiki have a ship of their own. Recognizing that Hawaiki potentially held knowledges and histories away from which Māori had navigated through migrations and more recent cultural change, Te Rangikaheke directly asked for this ship to be sent back to Aotearoa:

A, mea atu ahau ki taua tangata nei, ‘Ki te tae koe ki tou kainga, ki Hawaiki, ina hoki i rongo atu nei au i tau korero he kaipuke ano to koutou: a, ki te tae koe ki reira, mea atu ki ou whanaunga kia homai to koutou kaipuke hei uta kai mai maku, kia kai atu au i nga kai o te kainga i heke mai nei o tatou tupuna o mua.13

Food is literally nourishing, but in this instance, it is also tied up with history (“eat the food of the place from which our ancestors came”). Te Rangikaheke’s request for the people of Hawaiki to send a ship full of food extends our metaphor about ships bringing knowledge to Aotearoa from around the Pacific, an extension that fits the wider context of his letter, which seeks clarification around tikanga and philosophy, and we can imagine his anticipation that knowledge from Hawaiki would provide a kind of nourishment too. Reading Te Rangikaheke’s request as a shipment of knowledge suggests the possibilities and urgency of intellectual discovery through relationship, mutual hospitality, and exchange. Like the Māori people at Uawa instantly recognizing the tapa on Cook’s ship as a manifestation of a bigger picture beyond the here and now, Te Rangikaheke desired to engage in a visceral and personal way with “the place from which our ancestors came in former times.”

Pacific ownership of ships enables an alternative series of travels: journeys and opportunities for trade that are under the control of Pacific people and for Pacific purposes. Later in his life, Banks recalled that “Tupia [sic] the Indian” drew Banks himself “exchanging a nail” with the Māori man at Uawa rather than exchanging tapa, as Tupaia recorded it:

Tupia the Indian who came with me from Otaheite Learnd to draw in a way not Quite unintelligible. The genius for Caricature which all white people Possess Led him to Caricature me and he drew me with a nail in my hand delivering it to an Indian who sold me a Lobster but with my other hand I had a firm fist on the Lobster determined not to Quit the nail till I have Livery and Seizin of the article purchased.14

Banks misremembers the trade which took place but clearly recalls his own anxieties about the moment of trade and his strategy to retain control in the situation. Likewise, the university may misremember or fail to recognize the extent of Māori–Pacific interaction that takes place in its hallowed halls, and even where its memory is prodded, it may, like Banks, falsely recall that exchange as one that it assumes has taken place (the nail, trinkets) rather than the one that has (tapa). Banks and the university have their memory, but we, thanks to Tupaia, have ours. Te Rangikaheke’s request resonates with Hau’ofa’s observations about the history and capacity of mobility around Oceania, reminding us that although Tupaia arrived on Cook’s ship, and Maui on someone else’s, this is not the only possible configuration of how vessels and people—and knowledge—can move around these waters. At the end of the day, much to Cook’s astonishment, Māori—those “Pacific” people that we are—have the power and knowledges to determine the measurement of value for various cargoes, and this power is a mechanism of trade by which we can continue to rhetorically as well as physically navigate around the Pacific, recementing the ties from long ago.

Titaua’s ship (for Titaua, in your time of transition)15

Alice Te Punga Somerville

another time we saw you:

you arrived on your ship

loaded with tapa and other gifts

from your home

you spent time talking genealogy:

catching up and trading stories

with relatives you hadn’t seen

for generations

you came with tapa in sheets of impossible size:

proof of what we’d thought were grandparents’ myths

about our shreds of paperbark

stories of Hawaiki.

we knew you’d brought the ship to come and find us:

next time Cook came

we asked him where you were—

we’ve waited for your return.

this time,

your ship was shaped like a lecture theatre—

once again it was loaded with things from your home

though they all spoke with confidence about the cargo in their hold,

and I couldn’t understand a word you said,

I know this is

titaua’s ship

one day, girl,

this won’t be a ship anymore:

one day

this will be our waka

New Literary Genealogies

The interdisciplinary approach of this book should not detract from its implications for the specific disciplinary concerns of Anglophone literary studies, including accounts of postcolonial, Indigenous, Commonwealth, and New Zealand writing in English. The majority of scholars in these fields do not engage deeply with Māori, the Pacific, or Indigeneity, and the field of literary studies has not paid attention to most of the texts and critical claims contained in this book. Many scholars have called for expanding the exploration of Indigenous writing both back in time and in terms of genre, publication site, and status of publication. Although one remedy is to outline the gaps and limits of previous and ongoing work, this section is called “New Literary Genealogies” to foreground the potentially collaborative, additive effect of the present discussion. Like genealogies, these lines of discussion do not limit but add to existing conversations. In the first published novel by a Māori woman, Mutuwhenua, the central character, Linda, makes an argument for charting a new course (she is going to marry a Pākehā man) by reciting whakapapa: “I began to recite the old names to her, the ones from the wall and the ones from before then, and the ones before that.”16 Recounting genealogies affirms genealogical and historical place, and this project has provided an opportunity to talk about the writers already known (“from the wall”) as well as utter the names of writers from “before then.”

The conventional narrative that links Māori writing and publishing in English to the 1970s, when the first single-author publications of fiction appeared, is convenient but also misleading. When Chadwick Allen and Powhiri Rika-Heke independently argue that a better starting point is the first publication of creative work in the magazine Te Ao Hou in the early 1960s,17 they affirm that although writers such as Ihimaera, Tuwhare, and Grace fronted a literary dimension of the so-called Māori Renaissance of the mid-1970s, several Māori writers were already in print.18 Beyond New Zealand, literary scholars have undertaken and modeled major reconsiderations of Indigenous histories of writing. About the Australian context, for example, Penny van Toorn argues that

by adjusting the theoretical lens through which Indigenous writing is perceived, a new history of Aboriginal writing comes into view. It becomes possible to see that when David Unaipon published his first book in 1929, Koori peoples in the Sydney region had been reading and authoring written texts for 140 years.19

Similarly, Abenaki literary scholar Lisa Brooks reminds us that texts by early Indigenous writers are manifestations of vibrant critical conversations happening in other forums rather than evidence of individual alienation or cultural rupture:

The texts of the north-eastern Native tradition emerged from within this indigenous space of exchange, not, as is often portrayed, from displaced Indian individuals reflecting on the state of their lives in relation to the colonial world. Occom, Brant, Aupaumut and Apess weren’t individuals “caught between two worlds;” they were Native thinkers who inhabited many spaces of interaction, just as we do today.20

There will always be more Māori writing than we think, beyond books for sale at bookshops and post-1970s publications. To produce a “new history of [Māori] writing,” we need to conduct careful and ongoing searches of the archive, broadly defined, and seek unpublished as well as scarcely and distantly published works. Although it could be fairly argued that there are insufficient interested scholars and students even to treat those Māori texts that appear on the shelves of mainstream bookshops, there remain a massive number of Māori texts and related paraphernalia in archives around Aotearoa, the wider Pacific region, and the rest of the world.21

Perhaps the most obvious contribution this book makes to chronologically expanding the scope of Māori writing in English is its inclusion of Vernice Wineera and Evelyn Patuawa-Nathan, whose collections from 1978 and 1979 are a significant achievement for Māori and Pacific literary history. Indeed, their collections place Wineera and Patuawa-Nathan in the rather small group of nonwhite women poets anywhere who enjoyed single-author publication before the 1980s. Furthermore, Patuawa-Nathan contributes another kind of earlier written text: the spectral presences of unpublished Māori writing in English. A note at the beginning of Evelyn Patuawa-Nathan’s book of poetry mentions an earlier writing project:

Twenty years ago she wrote a historical novel which the publishers, Collins of London, were interested in publishing. The manuscript for correction went astray in the mail. Evelyn “Didn’t have another copy nor the staying power to stick with it.”22

A collection of poetry in 1979 is a very impressive thing; an historical novel in 1959—the year after Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and five years before Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not Child—would have been extraordinary. (The first novel to make it to publication in the Pacific was Papua New Guinea writer Vincent Eri’s The Crocodile [1970].)23 Interestingly, Patuawa-Nathan had elected to work in the specific mode of an historical novel, whereas the first published single-author New Zealand–based Māori fiction (novels and short story collections) all focused on contemporary themes.24

Still earlier than Patuawa-Nathan’s mystery novel, while researching the figure of Te Rangihiroa for this project, I happened on—in a barely indexed file at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu—a single handwritten short story he had composed.25 We already know that Te Rangihiroa was an immensely prolific writer, leaving behind theses, letters, books, articles, speeches, and notes, and the papers could have conceivably been field notes, or a letter, or just thick description. However, the opening lines—“The rain pelted down on the corrugated iron roof that had replaced the old time thatch on the tribal meeting house at Taumarunui”—feel like something else. Lines have been crossed out and replaced by words for stylistic rather than semantic reasons, and the text self-consciously works at a symbolic as well as descriptive level. As far as I know, this short story only exists in this handwritten draft. Although my current typed version of the story contains some gaps for words I am unable to decipher, “The Historian Who Lost His Memory” is currently around four thousand words in length.26 Unfortunately, these files at the Bishop are not consistently organized in chronological order, which means that one cannot assume that undated material is of the same vintage as the materials around it, and yet Te Rangihiroa’s death in late 1951 provides a latest possible date for its creation.

Continuing back in time, there are more spectral texts to which we do not (currently) have access, including those of our first published Māori writer, Mowhee. Tommy Drummond was the English name given to Mowhee (Maui; Māori spelling had not yet been standardized), who was born around 1796 in Aotearoa and who, after leaving Aotearoa as a child of nine or ten years old, lived in Norfolk Island and Australia. On Norfolk Island he went to school and learned how to read and write, and in Australia he attended Marsden’s Māori Seminary in Parramatta. Although he was returned to his home in 1814, in 1815 he signed up as a common sailor and traveled to London, where he was taken to the Church Missionary Society and placed under the care of Reverend Basil Woodd.27 Before he passed away in December 1816, Mowhee produced a recollection of his life of which the Reverend Woodd published a paraphrased version in several formats, including as Memoir of Mowhee: A Young New Zealander Who Died at Paddington28 and as articles for various missionary publications.

There are, beyond Patuawa-Nathan, Te Rangihiroa, and Mowhee, many references to manuscripts and first drafts of books in letters to editors and publishers,29 and yet we need not look to the furthest extremes of first poets, lost novels, and unpublished stories. We might also, for example, expand our sense of Māori writing in the 1980s. With the exception of Keri Hulme, the most well known Māori writers of today continue to be those who were already publishing in the 1970s: Ihimaera and Grace, but also Tuwhare, despite his earlier date of first publication. After these firsts, the next big bubble of writing is often perceived to have come about in the 1990s, when writers such as Duff and Sullivan appeared, Huia publishers started making a different kind of Māori voice accessible, and the major multivolume anthology Te Ao Mārama was released. However, in between this first crop of single-author publications in the 1970s and the new writing of the 1990s, a number of important and prolific writers started to publish. Taylor and Hinewirangi are treated here because of their mutual engagement with the Pacific, but their presence in Once Were Pacific makes visible their absence from many other discussions about Māori writing in English. Perhaps a revisioning of the 1980s Māori literary scene is an important next step as well.

Genealogies are more like webs than just straight lines, and after she finished reciting the names back in one direction, Linda, in Mutuwhenua, broadened her reach:

“But that’s only the trunk of the tree,” I said, “the length.” And she nodded, waiting for me to go on. “Now these are the branches that spread everywhere,” and I continued the recitation, linking every name with every name until there were no more. “And every branch reaches out,” I said. “Touches every other.”30

A key intervention of this book has been to name writers in the Māori literary line, but discussions about Māori literary histories are complemented by other discussions, and I will gesture here toward some other possibilities for Māori literary studies and, indeed, because “every branch . . . touches every other,” for literary studies more broadly.

Once Were Pacific has returned over and over again to place. My own lived experience in the urban centers of Auckland and Wellington and outside Aotearoa, and the position of my iwi as urban because of occupation by a large city rather than because of migration from a rural homeland, has compelled me to look for texts produced by urban and diasporic Māori writers. Although the more prominent Māori writers in English are mostly based in the cities, much of their writing continues to focus on stories that either center on or look toward the rural space. Similarly, although much of Ihimaera’s fiction and Sullivan’s poetry, to name two examples, have been produced outside New Zealand’s borders, few discussions or collections of Māori writing treat the Māori diaspora. As long as 80 percent of the New Zealand–based Māori community lives in urban spaces and up to 20 percent of the Māori community lives overseas,31 it seems remiss to not include this other writing too. Although many contemporary Māori texts do site their narratives either fully or partly in urban areas, the scholarship on these texts has yet to develop nuanced, specific, and theorized approaches to thinking about the urban space. Furthermore, dominant treatments of Māori engagements with urban space tend toward melancholic or problem-oriented discussions; Māori in cities are understood more in terms of the distance between themselves and their utopic rural homelands than through their proximity to other urban people, including Pasifika people.32 Once we pay attention to Māori engagements with Pasifika communities, then, sidelined histories and spaces and creative forms become visible.

Once Were Pacific extends literary genealogies beyond conventional narratives of time and space but also beyond the conventional forms treated in literary studies: hip-hop, children’s literature, film, television, visual art, and cultural ephemera take their place here beside poetry, fiction, and theater. Certainly some sites already expect this formal range to count in literary studies, but in Aotearoa New Zealand and much of the Pacific region, literary studies is formally conservative and often, because of the poor resourcing and limited value placed on Pacific literature, stretched just to teach and research the available texts that are conventionally literary. Furthermore, the discussion of genre and form throughout this book draws attention to the related considerations of publication, production, funding, distribution, and circulation.

Finally, the development of scholarship about Māori writing in English must not take up the space of, and yearns for the intellectual company of, parallel development of scholarship about Māori writing in the Māori language. Taking a broader view of Māori-language writing, there is work on Māori-language newspapers,33 but literary studies work on other written Māori texts, both historical and contemporary, is needed, and that which is undertaken has tended to languish in theses and unpublished papers. Arini Loader’s master of arts thesis on the prolific nineteenth-century writer Te Rangikaheke and doctoral research on nineteenth-century writing in Ōtaki, Krissi Jerram’s master’s research on contemporary Māori-language short fiction in the Huia anthologies, Jillian Tipene’s work on literary translation of Māori-language texts, and the work of organizations such as Te Reo o Taranaki, which have specialist archivists working directly with communities as well as with depositories, are but four examples of the possible directions in which this strand of scholarship will continue.34 Linda reminds us that “every branch reaches out” and “touches every other.” No single scholar can be proficient in all these areas of research, and no scholar needs to be. At the same time, it is too easy to focus only on one genealogical line and forget about the branches between. Instead, I am advocating here a collaborative, interdependent, “reaching out” approach to the ongoing development of the field of Māori literary studies and beyond.

Māori: Indigenous versus Pacific?

If Māori once were Pacific, what of our unique ties to the specific place of Aotearoa New Zealand? Is it possible to be Pacific and Indigenous at the same time? In a certain light, this book could, at its extreme, be shorthanded as “migrant” versus “Indigenous.” To be more direct, according to the logics of Indigeneity and migration as those concepts tend to be articulated at present, claiming that we once were Pacific does not easily sit alongside a simultaneous claim to Indigeneity. Indeed, on some levels, this book risks—through its focus on Māori as a Pacific identification—being construed as undermining the political imperatives and possibilities of Māori as an Indigenous identification. Returning to the specific space of Matiu/ Somes Island, which was introduced at the beginning of this book, allows us to think about this problem in another way: can we understand ourselves as “always-having-been-theres” (Matiu in the mouth of the fish) and as “arrivals” (Matiu named by Kupe) at the same time? Is this contradictory? How, indeed, does this book project maintain, assert, and/or practice sovereignty? Is it possible that Once Were Pacific could inadvertently undo or threaten sovereignty?

When I went to a conference in Taipei in November 2005 at the invitation of an Indigenous Taiwanese scholar, Dr. Pu, I was struck, as are many Māori people who make that trip, by the unbelievable physical likeness between the people I met and my relatives at home. I’d been invited because there is an ongoing and growing interest in connections between Māori (the babies of the Pacific) and Indigenous Taiwanese communities (the place from which many people believe we originally come), and I got to play the somewhat bizarre game of “how do you say . . . ,” in which I spoke English and they spoke Chinese and the only language we shared was the one with which my relatives had left Taiwan over five thousand years ago. However, I was not the only person exploring Māori–Indigenous Taiwan links in 2005. So was the New Zealand mainstream media. Indeed, mainstream coverage of the news of Māori genetic links with the Pacific appeared in newspapers in 2005, even though much of this information was not very new. (For example, the hip-hop group Nesian Mystik refers to mitochondrial DNA in their 2003 album Polysaturated.) Meanwhile, at the Native American Literary Symposium in 2006, Hokulani Aikau talked about the implications of always starting discussions of Hawai‘i with explanations of “the peopling of the Pacific.” Aikau argued that centering the narrative about the arrival of Hawaiians to Hawai‘i ultimately serves the desire of the U.S. state to incorporate Hawaiian people into the discourse of “a nation of immigrants” against which claims to Indigeneity are pitted.

What is the link between genetic research about Indigenous people in Aotearoa and Taiwan and national discourses of a nation of immigrants? Is there a connection between these links and the relationship between Indigeneity and migration? Well, 2005 was election year in New Zealand, and election years here are known as Māori-bashing years. Everyone wants cheap votes, for which we pay the price: either Māori are ridiculous and need to be stopped from getting all the extra privileges, or Māori are ridiculous and, luckily, someone knows how to save us from ourselves. The 2005 election was particularly nasty because of the 2004 Seabed and Foreshore issue, which was heightened when Don Brash, leader of the opposition National Party, kicked the election season off with his now infamous Orewa speech in early 2004.35 Brash’s major platform was on the complete erasure of Māori status as Indigenous people with special (he called them “race-based”) rights or positions. The specific phrase of “a nation of immigrants” started to turn up in his campaign speeches. How curious, then, that suddenly the mainstream media wanted to focus on Māori histories of migration from Taiwan. I’m not the only person to have connected some of these dots; Alec Hutchinson’s 2006 journalistic essay “Worlds Apart” explores Indigenous resistance to the use of DNA for the purpose of making grand claims about Pacific migration. Drawing attention to the documentary Made in Taiwan, discussed in the conclusion to part 2, which aired on mainstream television in early 2006, Hutchinson cites Paul Reynolds, who described the politics of this genetic research:

Indigenous people aren’t stupid. We’ve been here before. We’ve had centuries of exploitation by non-indigenous people. This is highly political. It’s race-based research, and therefore it can be manipulated and used for political benefit. . . . This could link straight into what Don Brash wants to hear: that everybody comes from the same place.36

Neither Reynolds nor I dispute the genetic research itself or the idea that Māori are the descendents of Polynesian navigators who may ultimately have come from present-day Taiwan. What is at issue here is the politics of research and the potential “manipulation” of that research by those in power to reinforce their own positions by diminishing Māori claims to Indigeneity.

Following Kealani Cook’s observation that “contemporary efforts to reconnect” are irrevocably “shaped” by ongoing histories of interaction, including interaction with colonialism, it is striking to recognize that the discourse of a nation of immigrants is central to Made in Taiwan. In this documentary, our stories (and indeed any other explanations, linguistic, anthropological, botanical, etc.) are marginalized by the so-called scientific evidence supplied by genetic research.37 The opening comment is voiced over a shot of people walking on the footpath of a cosmopolitan Auckland street: “In New Zealand we all come from somewhere else.” Although Māori navigation histories and non-Māori immigrant histories can be read in such a way that this is technically true, “all coming from somewhere else” problematically smoothes out any distinctions between the relative positions of Māori and non-Māori in the contemporary nation-state. In the context of reactionary but dominant mainstream concerns about Māori getting special treatment, especially as land and other claims are worked through and as strategies such as quotas for educational institutions and Māori-run social services are set up to counter the damage that has been done by general provision of these services, a documentary that provides scientific evidence that Māori are “from somewhere else” in the same way as all other New Zealanders are cannot help but participate in affirming particular political positions. This is about the third—Somes—story of our little island called “Matiu.” The national narrative plays these two first narratives (the fish one and the Kupe one) against each other to achieve this. To assimilate the Indigenous into the nation, a narrative of shared immigrantness is foregrounded.

Whether one can be a migrant and Indigenous at the same time is particularly pressing in the context of a state that articulates itself as a nation of immigrants. Unlike nations in which the majority of citizens trace their descent from people who have “always” lived in the specific place, or thereabouts, settler nations like Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand depend on a different logic to connect themselves to territory. Non-Indigenous claims to affective connection with particular landscapes mimic Indigenous connections with land, and yet the mimicry is never sufficient. The settler claim is never as deep or long or complex as that of the Indigene, and so the figure of the Indigene always threatens to trump settler claims of an emotional or historic connection with place. Although invisibilizing, nullifying, or coopting ongoing Indigenous presence is one settler strategy, where Indigenous presence is unavoidable or incontrovertible, the concept of a nation of immigrants links citizenship to immigration instead of autochthony. Rather than New Zealanders sharing a common connection with place, they share a common experience of mobility.

In a nation of immigrants, migration is framed as an equally disconnecting and reconnecting experience, despite the historical and ongoing inequities of mobility. To a large extent, of course, this makes perfect sense. Non-Indigenous New Zealanders share the experience of arrival rather than connection with land back into antiquity or genealogical (or cultural or linguistic) connection with each other. Once everyone becomes an immigrant and nationhood thereby becomes inseparable from an experience of movement away from an earlier home, everyone gets to claim a history of removal, disconnection, adjustment. Crucially, this configuration connects one with the land by permitting access to the nation-state and not vice versa, which neatly sidesteps any involvement in historical (and ongoing) acts of state violence against Indigenous communities. The idea of a nation of immigrants can have some positive outcomes; according to its logic, my nephew’s father (born in Eritrea) has the same rights and access to citizenship as my own father (a Pākehā New Zealander). (Of course, it’s always more tricky than this: I suspect that my nephew’s father gets asked where he’s “really” from more often than my nephew’s grandfather does.) When the access point of the nation is (quite literally) the journey rather than the destination, the settler occupies the center of the national narrative, and a claim of belonging is granted to the non-Indigenous New Zealander through the systems of connection and ownership bestowed on a citizen.38 In this way, the haka, for example, is the property not of those whose dance and martial form it may be but of the nation. It stands in for New Zealandness not because Māori have an elevated status in New Zealand or because this is a way of “showing respect” for a particular dimension of the nation but because the haka is one of the commodities one receives along with the passport, national anthem, and permission to get teary eyed about central Otago during The Lord of the Rings, whether or not one has actually been there. It’s not that narratives of connection do not feature—but the narratives are the property of citizens rather than the basis of citizenship.39

But what about the Indigenous New Zealander? Once the link between connection with land and membership of the nation is ruptured, the Indigene’s primary connection with land no longer threatens the ability of dominant settlers to understand themselves to be at home in New Zealand. (Indeed, ongoing Indigenous connection with land is understood to be presumptuous and unjust: if all New Zealanders are New Zealanders in the same way, why should Māori get special treatment? In this formulation, Māori who articulate ongoing connection are framed as disloyal subjects, the “community” is disrupted by “protestors,” or “haters and wreckers,” as they were called by a prime minister.)40 Because Indigeneity is usually expressed as a claim of historic connection to specific place, the Indigenous subject doesn’t easily fit into a nation of immigrants, and migration is posed as a shared experience that flattens out other forms of connection. The difference between Māori and non-Māori migration to these islands is thereby articulated as temporal rather than as a difference of kind. Like Taylor’s character Sione in “Pa Mai,” the only difference between Māori arrival on canoes and Pasifika arrival on Air New Zealand is timing.41 In this context, the recognition of lawful immigrant status is framed as a generous and inclusive act of the state, to the extent that evidence of migration actually forces incorporation into the nation and undermines a possible claim of difference on the basis of Indigeneity. Discursively, at least, rather than the settler becoming quasi-Indigenous to articulate connection with landscape or nation, the Indigene becomes quasi-settler.42

How, then, might we reconcile these simultaneous designations of migrant, Indigene, and citizen, and what does it all mean for this book? Māori don’t have a defense when we’re accused of being immigrants because we are, in fact, in Aotearoa on the basis of a series of migrations. Why would we want to defend ourselves against being migrants? Because this status is used as proof that we’re not Indigenous. Indigenous need not open up so much that it includes all migrants, but the danger of not carefully uncoupling migrant from not Indigenous is that some communities will continue to have our Indigenousness challenged in ways that currently feel indefensible. We need to be smarter than the logic of these arguments. I do not want to suggest that it is unethical or problematic to explore Māori–Pacific connections per se. The risk of the project of this book is therefore not the research itself but the historical, racial, political, legal, and scholarly contexts within which the research is conducted. Merely engaging with the Pacific and regionalism is risky business for communities that rely heavily on claims around Indigeneity—without the room to clarify the complexities of that term—for political, legal, and sometimes physical survival. Does being Pacific—being migrants from across Te Moananui-a-Kiwa—default us out of conventional modes of articulating ourselves as Indigenous? Does identifying strongly as Indigenous default us out of conventional modes of understanding ourselves as Pacific? If we as Māori have decided to wrest back the conversation so we get to talk about what matters to us, rather than being paralyzed by or dismissive of these possible implications, we need to work our way through them on our own terms.

Returning again to our island of Matiu/Somes, when do we get to ask these questions about Matiu if we still spend so much time focusing on the relationship between Matiu and Somes for our survival? Indeed, it is hard to stop talking about the third story of the island (Somes; the colonial–national dimension), especially when we need to constantly correct people who, despite “Matiu” being reinstated as a (half) name in 1997, insist on calling the island “Somes.” Constant vigilance about making our very presence visible can distract us from the multiplicity inherent in our understandings about the autochthonous and migratory stories connected to the island’s name “Matiu.” When we stand on Matiu, we are both these things: our people have always been there, and we arrived there. That’s the place to start.

Once Were Pacific

Once were Hawaiki. Tupaia’s first encounters with Māori in 1769 were marked by curiosity, engagement, and the establishment of relationship. Beads and nails were less “valued” by Māori on first contact than lengths of tapa recently obtained from Tahiti because Māori oral traditions had retained a memory of the existence of such large pieces of tapa, even though the temperate environment in Aotearoa made production of even scraps of tapa all but impossible for a thousand years. A century later, Te Rangikaheke’s concern about changes to Māori cultural practice and philosophical understandings, both because of recent colonialism and because of isolation from the wider Pacific region prior to European arrival, compelled him to respond in very specific ways when he met a man he identified as coming from “Hawaiki.” Writing a letter to the people of Hawaiki to affirm tikanga and seek correction may seem a little strange, but there is a logic of connection and reciprocity that underpins Te Rangikaheke’s decision to write. Years later, in 1920, Rewiti Kohere, writing as “RTK” in the Gisborne newspaper Te Kopara, explored the topic of cross-Pacific connections in his article “Kei Hea Hawaiki.”43 He argued that European knowledge of the Pacific region was able to help Māori answer the question about where Hawaiki is located, and he argued that Hawaiki is a multiplicity rather than a singular site: “Kua ki ake au kahore i kotahi te Hawaiki.”44 In RTK’s articulation of Hawaiki, each of the sites around Polynesia is a Hawaiki of sorts, and this configuration produces room for connection as well as room for specificity. Certainly “Hawaiki” can suggest a Polynesian-centric notion of the Pacific region, although Uncle Rawiri from The Whale Rider reminds us through his sojourn in Papua New Guinea that the possibilities of connection extend beyond our closest Polynesian relatives to elsewhere in the Pacific too.

In 2008, Ngahiwi Tomoana echoed RTK’s argument for the potential of reengaging Hawaiki to articulate contemporary connections when he described a distinctly political—and pro-Indigenous—kaupapa for the Takitiumu Festival:

Ngāti Kahungunu will be hosting the inaugural Takitimu Festival to give effect to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This festival will be 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.45

Tomoana proposes a particular configuration—a “Hawaiiki nation”—by which specific Indigenous communities can agitate for their rights in the context of the United Nations Declaration. Just as the scientific gathering of genetic data can be used for certain purposes, so, too, can the gathering of “indigenous peoples across Aotearoa, the Pacific and the Hawaiiki nation.” Rather than articulating Indigenous rights in terms of a relationship with the colonizing nation-state, however, Tomoana quietly sidesteps New Zealand altogether: “our future” is in “Aotearoa and the Pacific.” The historical Hawaiiki nation centered on Taputapuātea, a space whose underlying purpose was to provide the governmental, diplomatic, artistic, spiritual, and scientific basis for the continued flourishing of the various specific communities contained within its sweep. As a vision for self-determination, sovereignty, tino rangatiratanga, mana motuhake46—as a vision for Aotearoa, for Māori, for the Pacific—this one gets my vote. After all, e kore au e ngaro; he kākano i ruia i Rangiātea.