Introduction to Part 2

Te Papa, New Zealand’s national museum, opened its new exhibition Tangata o le Moana: The Story of the Pacific People in New Zealand in October 2007. Such a major permanent exhibition requires compelling, clear, and “Pacific” branding, and a photograph titled “Double Afro” taken by Glenn Jowitt outside Hillary College in Ōtara during the Māori and Pacific secondary schools dance festival in 1981 seemed to lend itself to the task. A young Polynesian man, with an afro and early-eighties-era clothes, looks straight at the camera with a shy smile and wears a sweatshirt that reads “London Paris New York Rome Otara.” The meanings of the photograph are densely layered. In general terms, it is a rare example of a positive and seemingly candid representation of a young Polynesian man. More specifically, the sweatshirt subversively juxtaposes the very local place name “Otara” with major northern hemisphere urban centers, humorously suggesting that despite its apparently peripheral and invisible location from the point of view of the usual centers, New Zealand—and specifically Ōtara—might be a center for some. Another layer is that for a knowing New Zealand audience, Ōtara is not just any local suburb mischievously masquerading as a metropolitan space but a very specific low-income neighborhood marked in mainstream popular discourse by a particular chain of signifiers: large Māori and Pasifika communities, government housing, factory and other manual labor, poverty, crime, gangs, violence, dysfunction. A further layer is that Ōtara derives its name from Tara, who is memorialized in the names of several other features of the landscape around the area. Like the name of the young man wearing the sweatshirt in the photo, Ōtara is simultaneously knowable, known, and unknown.

In a September 2007 newspaper item, communications manager Jane Keig enthused, “It will be really lovely to find out who he is—he’s the star of our exhibition.”1 On the strength of their excitement, Te Papa sought information about the man depicted in the photo, and after the Manukau Courier (the free local newspaper distributed in the broader area that includes Ōtara) ran a piece about the search, Te Papa was put in touch with Daniel Maaka. Born and raised in Ōtara and now working as a telephone counselor, Maaka was as enthusiastic as Te Papa about the use of the image: not for his own sake but for that of his beloved Ōtara. The Manukau Courier coverage of Maaka’s serendipitous identification reports that he was pleased that it “gives a positive outlook on [his] home town.” Maaka continues, “I’ll always be proud of where I’m from. I want people to see good things come out of this place,”2 extending the Ōtara-centric claim of the sweatshirt he wore back in 1981; he is still invested in challenging and countering the negative press Ōtara usually receives. One might imagine that Daniel Maaka would reinforce the spirit of the exhibition Tangata o le Moana. Indeed, Keig responded to the revelation that Maaka had been located by saying that Te Papa was “really looking forward to meeting him. . . . It’ll be great to put a face to the name and hopefully have him join in our celebrations.”3 The plot thickened, however, because on tracking down the real Daniel Maaka, they found that, as TV3 put it (and as some might guess was a possibility from his last name), “the face of the Pacific is actually Maori.”4

Immediately there was a problem. A Pacific exhibition in New Zealand could not be advertised by an image of a young Māori man. Whereas the Polynesian Cultural Centre in Hawai‘i regularly uses the image of an identifiably Māori man as a symbol of the Pacific region, Te Papa apparently cannot.5 Cherokee writer Thomas King describes some people responding to his appearance and activities by claiming he’s “not the Indian [they] had in mind,” and perhaps in this case, Maaka was not the “Tangata” Te Papa had in mind. Maaka is not the right kind of Pacific person either because Māori people aren’t Pacific people or because, in New Zealand at least, Māori people aren’t Pacific people in the same way that non-Māori Pacific people are Pacific people. A spokesperson for Te Papa, Paul Brewer, attempted to clarify the situation:

No one here is disputing the fact that Maori are not [sic] Pacific Island in origin but clearly the exhibition is about more contemporary arrivals (and) having a Maori as a hero image is probably not as appropriate as having someone who is Pacific Island.6

Putting aside questions of why a marketing campaign for a museum is busying itself with the task of providing “hero images” and how such a “hero image” might relate to “actual” representation, Brewer’s comments point to the problem of timing. While Māori are certainly Tangata o le Moana (people of the ocean) historically (“in origin”), the focus of the exhibition is on recent (“more contemporary”) migration. At a spatial level, Māori may fit the migration history from tropical Pacific islands farther north that is signaled by the exhibition (“o le moana”), but they do not satisfy a chronological requirement. This difference in chronology is both represented and slipped over by the distinction Brewer makes between “Pacific Island in origin” (i.e., Māori) and “someone who is Pacific Island”7 (i.e., someone from the Pacific who is not Māori). Despite the name of the exhibition, the difference isn’t one of people (tangata) or place (moana) but history: Māori are indeed “tangata o le moana,” but not within the historical scope of the New Zealand nation-state and its activities.

None of this would have mattered if Maaka had not been located. Indeed, Daniel Maaka was more use to Te Papa when he was unknown, when his Māori body was able to stand in for the Pacific just as the Māori name of his home suburb did. It might seem strange that the fact of being Māori overrides any other readings of his Polynesian body. He is still the same man as the one depicted in the photo: in 1981, he was young, Polynesian, Ōtara-centric, with an afro, in a specific urban space. More broadly, the joke on his sweatshirt is still funny, and the photo still suggests the complex relationships between modernity, capital, race, gender, migration, place, and colonialism. And yet once the real Maaka was outed, his body could no longer be productively illegible: his Polynesian body was forever and irrevocably marked by the more specific detail of his being Māori. The problem for Te Papa wasn’t putting, as Keig had put it in her media statement, “a face to the name.” The problem was putting a name to the face.

Intriguingly, although Te Papa decided that using a Māori body to advertise a Pacific exhibition was too problematic, the concept of Jowitt’s image was not scrapped in favor of another representation of Tangata o le Moana. Instead, Te Papa decided to reproduce the photo with a newly illegible (but guaranteed properly “Pacific Island”) body: a young Pacific man around the same age as Maaka had been in 1981 and who also wears an afro, wears a replica sweatshirt, and poses for a 2007 version of the image. The new photo does not update the previous image: alongside the blatantly reproduced sweatshirt, details such as the light blue shirt poking over the edge of the collar and an identical pose suggest this is a case of deliberate mimicry. It is worth noting that Te Papa is in Wellington and Ōtara in Auckland. Whereas the sweatshirt in the spontaneous 1981 photograph is Ōtara based and worn by a young man from Ōtara, Te Papa (and, presumably, the reprinting of the sweatshirt and posing of the new photo) is in Wellington. Where a familiar visual image is copied (the Mona Lisa or a Gauguin painting, for example), the prominence of the original means that the reproduction is clearly marked, and so meanings can be derived from the simultaneous similitude and difference between the original and the reproduction. In this case, however, the new image reproduces a largely unknown visual image that is sidestepped because the specificities of a particular back story—the whakapapa of Daniel Maaka—threaten to contaminate the representation of a true Pacific, even if that back story remains virtually unknown. At what point, we might feel compelled to ask, does this kind of mimicry become forgery: forgery undertaken not in the name of deceit but in the name of so-called truth? Although Maaka cannot be “Pacific Island” because of the truth that has been uncovered, the exhibition’s “hero image” is not simply an image of another (and Te Papa approved) truth but is instead a simulacrum: a copy of a Pacific moment that never existed.

The press coverage of the story about a single photo staged by Te Papa in emulation of an earlier photo snapped at an event in the 1980s prompts a series of questions. What is the effect on the branding of a Pacific exhibition when the real person in the original photo is Māori? Would Pacific Island communities mind the man in the photo being Māori? Would Māori communities mind the man in the photo being Māori? If an exhibition about the people of the Pacific was staged elsewhere in the Pacific, could Māori stand in for Pacific, and if so, then why is it different when the question is asked in New Zealand? Ultimately, when in New Zealand, are Māori people Pacific? Part 1 of this book treated an Aotearoa-inclusive Pacific in which Aotearoa is part of a geographic region and Māori are part of ancestral and ongoing stories of cross-oceanic navigation. Here in part 2, we focus on the national context, the here and now—certainly the here, and for the reasons of temporality mentioned earlier, also the now.

Part 2 is the realm of the koura: the Aotearoa-based Pacific, the Pacific that is found within the borders of Aotearoa. In exchange for tapa, the Māori man in Tupaia’s painting extends a koura. A photograph used in Te Papa exhibition publicity materials may be explained away as an isolated incident with very few potential effects on the way real life plays out in Aotearoa New Zealand or the broader Pacific. This incident may be representative of very few similar moments (it may stand in only for itself), or it may be one of many such examples. My interest in the photo used for the Te Papa exhibition Tangata o le Moana is not to decide whether the right decision was made but to ask how and why Te Papa might have felt compelled to make a decision at all. Although the Te Papa photo might be a coincidental constellation of specific people and factors on one level, on another level, it foregrounds a range of cultural and social categories and so, in turn, draws our attention to the intersection of a number of strands: representational, historical, political, national. Te Papa is “Our Place,” the national museum of New Zealand, after all, and this emphasizes the national context within which Māori articulate a connection with the Pacific.

Part 2 focuses on the koura in the outstretched hand of the Māori figure in Tupaia’s painting. In the realm of koura, things are local and specific: discourse, trade items, Māori. In the realm of tapa, though, Māori are part of a larger Pacific region; here Māori have a special position, and other Pacific communities relate to Māori on these terms. Although the regional Pacific might provide the metaphor of tapa, this perspective is balanced by a focus on the space within which Māori are tangata whenua. In popular usage, the phrase tangata whenua is often literally translated as “the people of the land” to suggest a singular meaning of the phrase that is contemporarily and popularly translated as Indigenous. In New Zealand, and to the nation-state, Māori certainly are Indigenous, and this translation can indeed provide the English speaker access to a useful dimension of the phrase. Another meaning, however, that is not completely separable from but also not overtly suggested by the idea of Indigeneity is the dimension of hospitality. Māori are tangata whenua, hosts, in Aotearoa, and one natural extension of this is that everyone else is manuhiri, guests. Part 2, then, explores the relationship between tangata whenua and manuhiri, host Pacific people and guest Pacific people, Māori and Pasifika.

As the frame changes from region to nation, so does the language. In the context of New Zealand, a new entity emerges: Pasifika, those communities who are not Indigenous to the North or South islands of New Zealand but for whom New Zealand is now (a) home. The legal and political (and perhaps affective) basis of most Pasifika migration to New Zealand—and Pasifika migration has been happening for generations—is through relationship with the settler nation-state. For non-Māori Pacific people, New Zealand is the entity that grants visas and checks passports at the door.8 In theory, at least, Pasifika communities are legally guests, and then citizens, of New Zealand (rather than Aotearoa) and so are either compelled by—or at least complicit with—the attitudes to the position of tāngata whenua that serve the needs of that settler nation-state. Importantly, though, Māori and Pasifika communities have at least two avenues by which connection can be both articulated and practiced: one is the legacy of connection treated in part 1 of this book, including the cultural, linguistic, and whakapapa links that preexist the arrival of Europeans to the region, and the other is the shared experience and often physical proximity of Māori and Pasifika communities, which often come about as a result of both communities suffering at the hands of the racist colonial settler nation-state. This twinning of shared cultural backgrounds and shared social predicaments appears over and over in articulations of the connections between Māori and Pasifika communities in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Certainly the historical precedents for Pasifika connections with Māori communities in Aotearoa are numerous and deserve their own historical treatment. Just as Pacific people arrived in Aotearoa and became Māori over a period of time here, so, too, Pasifika is a localized and accumulated identity. In this book, Pasifika is used as a term that transliterates Pacific to uniquely express a diverse and dynamic experience that is additional to, rather than a replacement for, home island identification. When used carefully, Pasifika is not simply a homogenizing umbrella term under which particular Pacific identifications and preoccupations huddle but is a particular constellation: migrant, with connection to New Zealand; diasporic; manuhiri, guests. Importantly, although the representation of Pasifika communities by mainstream media has tended to be narrowing and stereotypical, there is a vast array of diversity within the Pasifika community, dependent on originary home, present location, and various cultural and historical specificities. Although it is helpful to attribute the presence of large Pasifika communities in New Zealand at present to the labor migrations of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s (and perhaps the more recent short-term worker visas targeted at Pacific migrant labor will produce a further iteration), small numbers of Pacific people migrated to New Zealand before this period, especially for military and educational reasons.

One of the early and recently re-remembered episodes in the history of Māori–Pasifika connections is the inclusion of Pasifika soldiers in the celebrated Twenty-eighth Māori Battalion in World War II. Louise Mataia, whose master of arts thesis is titled “Odd Men from the Pacific,”9 has been at the forefront of this research, and Te Papa’s Tangata o le Moana exhibition includes a display of all Pacific soldiers who participated in New Zealand’s armed forces, including with the battalion. Indeed, the Pacific men were usually placed in D Company, which is the company in which my own relatives (including my grandfather and great-uncle) were located. Alistair Te Ariki Campbell’s brother Stuart enlisted with the battalion and was killed overseas; I consider Campbell’s poetry about the battalion in chapter 4.10 In some ways, this part of the discussion belongs in the first part of this book, which retains a regional focus, because most of the Pacific men were not resident in New Zealand at the time. However, the men enlisted in New Zealand’s national armed forces, and so the story belongs here; otherwise, we risk failing to recall that Sāmoa, Niue, Tokelau, and the Cook Islands were part of New Zealand’s territory at the time, and so from the point of view of the men (and, to some extent, the military), they were in the national space at the same time. Elaborating Pacific connections in the military did not stop after World War II; many such interactions, between Māori and Pasifika as well as between Māori and Pacific people, have taken place in New Zealand’s armed forces since then.11

Boarding school is another site in which Pacific and Māori connections were historically established in New Zealand. Actually, the schools are not entirely disconnected from the military spaces mentioned earlier: several of the solders on whom Louise Mataia’s research focuses had spent time studying at a Māori boarding school. The historic Māori boarding schools provided a particularly rich space for emergent Māori–Pasifika connections: boys from around the Pacific—Sāmoa and the Cooks but also the Solomon Islands—attended Te Aute. For example, in 1968, a Solomon Islands student at Te Aute, Gina Tekulu, contributed a piece of writing to the Māori magazine Te Ao Hou.12 In Vainetini Kuki Airani Cook Islands Women Pioneers: Early Experiences in Aotearoa New Zealand, several of the women refer in their interviews to girls from the Cook Islands who attended the Roman Catholic Māori girls’ school Hukarere. Mama Aere Cuthers’s sister Tutai went on scholarship to Hukarere in 1925 and became close friends with the Reids, “a Maori family who lived in Taupo;”13 ten years later, Mama Alice Ani Maka Beritane attended Hukarere before boarding with a Samoan family in Auckland. During World War II, Komera Trubovich recalls meeting her “Aunty Metu” and spending time with her and “Boy Tomoana’s father and his wife”:

Then they would invite us to come and visit them. From then on they started to raise funds for the war effort. They asked me to help them with fundraising and this meant dancing in front of people.14

In a slightly different school space, we might turn our attention to Māori and Pacific students attending the Latter-day Saints boarding school, which was known as Maori Agricultural College before it became Church College.15 All these Māori religious schools attended by Pacific students have contributed to relationships between individuals, families, and communities. In his novels Ola and The Mango’s Kiss, Albert Wendt places Māori and Pacific children side by side in boarding situations, echoing his own experience at New Plymouth Boys and gesturing toward boarding schools as important spaces in which friendships between Māori and Pacific children had the potential to produce attitudes and sensitivities that would stay with people through adulthood.

There are so many spaces in which Māori–Pasifika connections have been established: workplaces, sports teams, activist organizations, educational institutions. Mama Cuthers attributes the many people who worked as farmhands in Porangahau “and other Hawke’s Bay locations”16 to the work of Tuku Tukutamaki; Komera Trubovich got work with Sonny Edwards’s shearing gang, where a Cook Island woman was the head cook. (Members of the shearing gang put in money so she could go on a trip to Rarotonga, and Komera brought back fruit for the people who had contributed.) Mere Tepaeru Tereora took seriously the links between Cook Island Māori and New Zealand Māori destinies and joined the Māori Women’s Welfare League, was involved in the establishment of the immersion language early childhood education movement Te Kohanga Reo (and went on to be a major feature of the Cook Island equivalent, Te Punanga o te Reo Kuki Airani o Aotearoa), and was involved in the Aotearoa Moananui-a-Kiwa Weavers group. In terms of sports, the whole area of Pasifika participation in Māori sports teams is fascinating, as is the negotiation of Māori national teams to play alongside Pacific teams in regional competitions for rugby league and other sports.17

Part 1 focused solely on Māori writers, but here, in the spirit of connection and reciprocity, we consider Pasifika texts alongside Māori texts. Part 2 opens with chapter 4, “Māori–Pasifika Collaborations,” which explores specific moments in which Māori and Pasifika people have deliberately collaborated by mobilizing whakapapa connections and/or social predicaments to achieve specific ends. Following the treatment of explicitly collaborative work, chapter 5, “‘It’s Like That with Us Maoris’: Māori Write Connections,” considers Māori writers who represent connections between Māori and Pasifika communities in New Zealand, and chapter 6, “Manuhiri, Fānau: Pasifika Write Connections,” pays attention to Pasifika treatments of the same. Finally, chapter 7, “When Romeo Met Tusi: Disconnections,” foregrounds three texts that mobilize Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as a structuring mechanism for exploring the disconnections between Māori and Pasifika people and, in doing so, treats perhaps the most difficult aspect of this entire project. Disconnection between Māori and Pasifika communities is rarely treated in published texts, and given the plentiful anecdotal and lived evidence of these layers of disconnection, I wonder if this has more to do with who gets to publish their texts than with whether articulations of those connections are urgent or important. While a Pacific-region-focused analysis might expect the communities represented in these texts to connect on the basis of their shared common heritage of navigating through the Pacific by the stars, Māori–Pasifika couples in these texts produced and set in the nation-state are more likely to be presented as tragically star-crossed lovers.

Several articles in the publication Te Ao Hou report on the arrival of people from around the Pacific and their welcome not only to New Zealand by the state but also to Aotearoa by local Māori people. In 1967, for example, a group from Tokelau was taken to Maketū for a marae welcome and was also met along the way by students from a Māori boarding school and by various Māori community leaders and workers. At Maketū,

both the Maoris and the Tokelauans presented musical items during the ceremony, and after the evening meal the visitors were entertained at a concert, again reciprocating with many of their own traditional items.18

The group was then taken to Rotoehu, where they were welcomed not only by the local iwi but also by Tokelauan and Fijian workers already resident in the area. The entangling of Tokelauan and Fijian histories in the context of Pacific histories in New Zealand deserves treatment, but that is not the only relationship that was being forged in those moments. During the evening in Maketū, the cultural performances that were exchanged echoed, albeit softly, the exchanges between Tupaia and the Māori people with whom he interacted two centuries earlier. Although these Māori–Pasifika connections were not universally experienced, and though dominant ways of recalling Pacific migration to New Zealand have been through a narrative of labor provision for the settler state, these moments of encounter and the relationships they produced are an important dimension of the realm of the koura.