Māori–Pasifika Collaborations

Rongo

In 1973 a newspaper called Rongo was collectively produced by a number of organizations, including Te Huinga Rangatahi o Aotearoa (the renamed New Zealand Federation of Maori Students), the Polynesian Panthers, Nga Tamatoa, and Nga Kuri a Wharei.9 More specifically, the bibliographic detail at the beginning of the newspaper reads, “Rongo is produced by members of Te Huinga Rangatahi O Aotearoa and published by Brian McDonald, Ngahuia Volkerling, and John Miller.”10 The Polynesian Panthers was made up predominantly but not exclusively of people from Pasifika communities and drew its name and inspiration from the Black Panthers and other socially minded activist groups in the United States. Nga Tamatoa, a Māori organization that is often remembered by dominant discourses as a radical activist group of the 1970s, was deeply engaged in issues around the 1970s crisis of the Māori language.11 To put the newspaper into an historical context for the Māori and Pasifika communities, Rongo came out just prior to the 1975 Hīkoi12 and the Dawn Raids, which started in 1974. Despite its rather auspicious timing and production team, Rongo has not yet received scholarly treatment.13 I found a copy of Rongo at the bottom of an uncataloged archive box of Witi Ihimaera’s papers in the special collections of my home institution’s library. The copy had been cut up (presumably, given the file in which it was found, so Ihimaera could keep track of the poetry for a later anthology), but a pristine version of the newspaper is held at the National Library. The catalog information at the National Library reads,

• Subject: Maori (New Zealand people)—periodicals Polynesians—New Zealand—periodicals
• Note: Title from cover “Rongo is produced by members of the Huinga Rangatahi o Aotearoa”—t.p. verso
• Language note: In English, Maori, Samoan, and Tongan.

This catalog description is bare and simple, and the limited details mean that researchers would be hard-pressed to recognize the nature of the document described. The topics treated in the twenty-four-page newspaper are wide ranging in theme and short ranging in time: the focus is very much the present, and where the past is recalled, it is for the purpose of explaining or contextualizing a present-day predicament. In its opening pages, Rongo goes to some length to acknowledge the various contexts and concepts from which it emerges, and it proceeds to treat the topics of culture and language, housing, the work of Nga Tamatoa and the Polynesian Panther Party, prisons (including practical advice about legal assistance available through Nga Tamatoa and prison visiting hours), parliamentary politics, racism, protest and activism, education, arts, and media. Alongside these articles are artworks, photographs, poems, and letters to the editor. Although it is tempting to conduct an article-by-article analysis of Rongo, this present discussion focuses on those aspects that pertain most clearly to the collaboration between Māori and Pasifika people both through structural and editorial choices and through the content of specific articles in the newspaper.

“Rongo” is the name of a Polynesian deity with responsibility for kūmara and also for peace. Kūmara is known to be a staple food for Māori, which suggests that the newspaper will be nourishing and central, but kūmara is also used in many areas as a metaphor for knowledge. Furthermore, because kūmara was acquired during early Polynesian exploratory travel to South America, the title Rongo, echoing human as well as vegetative distribution around the region, turns our attention to the relationship between migration and Indigeneity. In the first page of text in the newspaper, an explanation “He whakamarama mo te ingoa ‘Rongo’” appears in Te Reo and emphasizes that this is an ideal name for the publication because Rongo is recognized in “nga moutere katoa o Te Moananui-a-Kiwa”14 as a deity that explicitly foregrounds Polynesian unity, a theme to which the newspaper returns both in content and structure. Finally, although the whakamārama, or “explanation,” does not explicitly reference this additional meaning, the title of Rongo is a pun that ties the cultural and political context to the function of the newspaper: rongo in Te Reo also means “to hear,” “fame,” “hearing,” “information,” or “news.”

Rongo is aware of its textual genealogy as an example of Māori engagement with print media, as an extension of existing journalistic forms, and as a challenge to others. In the first page of text, an article titled “A History of Maori Newspapers” is written in Te Reo and is accompanied by an image of a front page of Te Paki o Matariki, a Māori-language newspaper from the Waikato region established in 1892. In this article, the genesis of Māori newspapers is traced not only through the importation of the printing press, which is described as “te Pakeha taonga,” but also through the older Māori practice of collaboratively sharing and disseminating information for public debate. The article lists several Māori newspapers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and, after placing Rongo in this genealogy, explains,

Ehara tenei pepa a Rongo hei tango mai i te mana o nga pepa Maori e whakawhiti ana i nga rongo ki nga hunga e marara ana i runga i te mata o te whenua.15

Rongo self-consciously attends to the historical context of its production and elaborates its role as an addition to the existing range of spaces in which to kōrero16 rather than as a critique of those spaces that already exist. At the same time, Rongo pays attention to the political and journalistic context that contributed to its appearance. Directly underneath the story about the Māori-language newspapers, a piece titled “Why the Need for Rongo?” outlines the limits of mainstream media and the desire of the editors to provide a newspaper that is “produced solely to cater for the needs of the Maori and other Polynesian people.” The other item on this first page of text is the explanation of the newspaper’s name, and these three genealogies—the historical, the political, and the cultural—both compel and underpin this unique and significant, even if only one-off, publication. Indeed, these three geneaologies underpin not only this specific newspaper but the relationships between Māori and Pasifika communities more broadly.

The textual genealogy of Rongo is explored not only across time but also across space. Connection with other Indigenous newspapers is demonstrated by the inclusion of a story titled “Why Wounded Knee in 1973?” excerpted from a section of Akwesasne Notes that is itself, according to the information provided alongside, excerpted from The Seventh Fire, the newspaper produced by the Minnesota chapter of the American Indian Movement (AIM). The article responds to “White America ask[ing] ‘Why Wounded Knee in 1973?’”17 The page on which this article appears includes a number of pieces about the context of ignorance and prejudice within which Indigenous people continue to live, including snippets from various New Zealand newspapers that demonstrate the bias of the press and a Rowley Habib poem titled “Go Home Maori” that gently explores the gradual impact of racial prejudice on a single individual. Next to the Wounded Knee story, an explanation of Akwesasne Notes appears alongside information about how to subscribe to that publication. The note opens as follows:

Read of the American Indian Peoples [sic] struggle for Survival and Freedom in THEIR Land of America. Their problems and aspirations closely parallel ours. They publish eight times a year.18

The “close parallels” between the Polynesian Panthers, Nga Tamatoa, and AIM and the producers of Akwesasne Notes are articulated contextually (“their problems and aspirations”) but also organizationally in a small note encouraging Rongo readers to contribute to postage costs: “The Notes People are probably as rich as we are (!) so to help out with postage . . .” Furthermore, these “parallels” are not merely gestured toward in theory but form the basis of relationships between key members of the organizations. This reference to other Indigenous newspapers reinforces the layering of collaboration and relationship and broadens the connections already inherent to the newspaper itself.

One of the most obvious features of Rongo is that the various articles appear in Māori, Tongan, Samoan, and Niuean as well as English. (Although the National Library catalog notes Māori, Tongan, Samoan, and English, it does not mention—or perhaps recognize—the pieces in Niuean contributed by Tigilau Ness.)19 Rongo’s commitments to highlighting and addressing the politics of language are demonstrated by the multilingual publication, a feature even more ahead of its time because of the editorial decision to not provide translations of the content that does not appear in English. Along with the formal decision to publish texts in various languages, there are also articles and poetry in Rongo that directly address the politics of language. The inaugural Māori Language Day (now an annual government-sponsored Māori Language Week) was brought about as a result of the activities of Nga Tamatoa, and the newspaper includes articles by several members either reporting on how the day was celebrated around the country or outlining the context and possibilities of Māori-language revitalization. Some of these articles are printed in Te Reo and some in English, and a short selection of writing in Te Reo by school students is published alongside articles about the place of Māori language in schools and homes. Interestingly, although some of the articles that appear in Te Reo are written by fluent and highly accomplished writers of the Māori language, some appear to have been produced by writers whose level of proficiency was not so high. Their decision to write in a language with which they were less comfortable and yet to which they desired to express a deep commitment further underscores their understanding of the politics of language.20 Reading all the pieces in Te Reo side by side, therefore, one acquires a sense of the range of capacity in Te Reo at the time and the great significance of choosing to publish the languages untranslated.21

Another aspect of language use in Rongo is the struggle to make English work as flexibly as possible to appropriately describe the people by whom and about whom Rongo was produced. An editorial note reads,

In keeping with the sentiments expressed in the above article [‘Ilolahia’s “We Are All Polynesians”], the term “Polynesian” (Poronihiana) will be used in Rongo to cover all of the Maori and Island peoples in New Zealand. Although we would encourage wider use of the application of the term “Polynesian,” we think it necessary that a more suitable word or phrase be introduced—adapted perhaps from elements of vocabulary common to all Polynesian languages. If anyone has any ideas on this please let us know.22

The problem, of course, is one that applies also to Once Were Pacific: we are asking English—and Polynesian languages—to do something they never had to do, and the terms themselves are unable to be pried away from the very historical, social, and political contexts that make them problematic. The awkwardness of the terms only reflects the awkwardness of the power relations between the communities they attempt to describe, and the search for “a more suitable word or phrase” is both crucial and foreclosed in the political climate of the 1970s and today. Significantly, the editorial note refuses simply to claim the power to assert or produce a new term to which others must agree but moves to enter into a negotiated engagement (“if anyone has any ideas on this please let us know”) that is perhaps the only way in which meaningful language change of this kind can occur. Indeed, perhaps with an eternally absent and yet necessary “more suitable” term such as the editors are seeking, the thrill—the possibility of change—is in the chase.

Rongo affirms the place of creative work by publishing individual poems and drawings, profiling Māori artists, reporting on a hui for Māori writers and artists, and including reviews of two novels. In terms of layout, the creative work is published alongside relevant critical, informative, and visual texts, and this enables creative work to participate in the political and editorial work of the newspaper rather than being sequestered into a separate “creative” section. For example, Rowley Habib’s “A Photograph from Home,” which celebrates the diversity and vitality of the Māori community as evidenced in a photograph of Māori children, is placed on a page about the need for Māori language to be taught in schools, and Henare Dewes’s strikingly tender poem “Whakarongo,” which mourns the loss to the individual but also to his community while he is in jail, is printed alongside an article about problems at the notorious Paremoremo Prison and information about legal rights when placed under arrest or in prison. Indeed, recognizing this role of the arts in politics is a feature not only of the early 1970s but also of Pacific political traditions, in which song, performance, clowning, visual arts, and so on, are crucial to social organization and communal memory. On one of the last pages of the newspaper, two book reviews appear side by side: one of Albert Wendt’s Sons for the Return Home and one of Witi Ihimaera’s Tangi. Both are first novels for their writers, and both are also the first from their respective communities. Significantly, although the novels were published around the same time, they are usually discussed alongside other texts. Ihimaera’s novel is most often placed within a context of New Zealand literature, and Wendt’s work is understood as a Pacific text. Reviewed together, the connections between the novels and the significance of their proximate publication are explicit. In this way, Rongo manages to achieve in the literary sphere a version of its broader mission to assert that “we are all Polynesians” and reflect on how this orientation affects the things we take for granted.

The significance of Rongo is enhanced rather than diminished by its loss from the memory of the 1970s: it is not just a record of a particular time but also a record of the things we choose to remember about that time. Why did Rongo manage to find its way off the historical record, except for in a scattering of brief references? For me, Rongo was a serendipitous find. Like Alice Walker, who wrote that she “became aware of [her] need for Zora Neale Hurston before [she] heard of her,” for me, the existence of this one-off newspaper was both unexpected and intuited. Rongo demands the careful treatment of a larger project, and as the 1970s in New Zealand are beginning to fall into the view of historians and other rememberers, I hope that it will receive the attention it is due. The significance of its loss from cultural memory is poignantly demonstrated in Melani Anae’s recent book Polynesian Panthers, in which Panther Nigel Bhana recalls a publication that can only be Rongo but whose title has been published as Ronald:

Ronald was first printed between Nga Tamatoa, Polynesian Panthers and the People’s Union. As far as I know, it was the first political Polynesian-Maori magazine that came out. . . . Ronald was the first that gave awareness to a lot of young Maori and other Polynesians; my generation. And it united them.23

Presumably this is an honest mistake, an accidental oversight. Typos happen all the time, and specific terms in transcripts have an unlucky tendency to be autocorrected by word-processing programs. Unfortunately, though, it means that as the book about the Panthers circulates, the memory of Rongo will not travel with it. When Rongo becomes Ronald, the aspirational layers of meaning behind the name are left aside, as are the politics of unapologetically publishing a newspaper in multiple Polynesian languages. In terms of the ongoing struggle for justice, the shifting of Rongo to Ronald is in many ways inconsequential. Yet this instance of mis-hearing, mis-recognizing, or not knowing about a publication that itself attended so closely to the politics of visibility, history, specificity, and language feels, to me, important. When we miss the opportunity to remember Rongo, we miss the opportunity to recall the extent and modes of Māori–Pasifika collaboration at the time.

“Nesians Are You with Me?”: New Zealand Hip-hop Articulates a Nesian Style

The neologism Nesian was popularized in New Zealand by Nesian Mystik, a band with Māori, Samoan, Cook Islander, and Tongan members, in their 2002 debut album Polysaturated. As I have already suggested, very few prominent Māori-authored texts or narratives in conventional literary genres come from the mixed Nesian neighborhoods of Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch, and hip-hop artists from these neighborhoods are at the forefront of articulating the complex relationships between Indigenous Māori and diasporic Pasifika urban communities.24 Polysaturated advocates a “Nesian style” within the discourses of Pacific genealogical and navigation histories as well as the experience of marginalization and racism in New Zealand. The appearance of the term Nesian is one way of reckoning with being at the limits of language. Because Nesian is both a familiar and a new term, Nesian Mystik has the opportunity to define what it means:

New Zealand hip hop flowing with that hint of Nesian style Represent straight where you’re from cause everyone knows it’s a must Cause this Nesian style mooli is this style we bust.25

Reconfiguring Pacific communities as Nesian extricates the “island” (-nesian) root from the Western-imposed cartographic and anthropological prefixes (poly-, micro-, and mela-), echoing Hau’ofa’s reframing of the (colonially imagined) Pacific as the (Indigenously imagined) Oceania. Nesian thereby challenges existing dominant constructions of the relationship between Indigenous and diasporic Pacific communities in New Zealand. Although Nesian Mystik rejects the term Polynesian (“Polynesian aint even a label we made up / We were given names by the civilised discovers”26), then, their conscious use of terminology that enables Māori–Pasifika connections to congeal echoes ‘Ilolahia’s claim that “we’re all Polynesians” in Rongo. Similarly, the neologism polysaturated, which the group uses for their album title, is productively ambivalent, at once celebrating and critiquing the “saturation” of Polynesia. This idea of saturation is an appropriate watery metaphor but also speaks to unlawful or unexpected mobility across permeable borders. Nesian people are situated within the boundaries of one nation-state or city or neighborhood, yes, but they participate in the complexity, border crossing, linguistic differences, political positionings, and cultural nuances of the wider Pacific region.

“Lost Visionz,” the final track on Polysaturated, traces the migration histories and diasporic backgrounds of the group members. Donald opens the track with a spoken section pertaining to his feelings of dislocation, and this is followed by a series of histories: Feleti’s family foregrounds a Samoan experience (this section is spoken by Feleti’s father, the Reverend Mua Strickson-Pua), Awa speaks about Māori struggle, and finally, Sabre delivers several stanzas of historical commentary. Before Sabre’s contribution to the track begins, then, three of the group members offer perspectives on Aotearoa-based Pacific identities and identifications: their own “visionz,” “lost” or otherwise. Donald asks specifically about the implications of growing up feeling dislocated from his “cultural history”:

Are you educated in your cultural history? To be honest, I’m not. And all I want to know is why.

Even though I live in another country, I still acknowledge my Tongan ancestry. And even though I don’t know it a lot, or as much as I should know about my culture, just like many other people; but why?

Donald ties his sense of cultural displacement to his physical distance from a certain geographic space (“although I live in another country”), which speaks to many Māori as well as Pasifika narratives. These discourses of authentic identity (“or as much as I should know”) exclude lived realities (“to be honest, I’m not”). The majority of Māori hip-hop artists are urban,27 the majority of Pasifika hip-hop artists are New Zealand born or at least New Zealand raised, and in the face of these removals, an Aoteoroa-based Pacific gains utility. Donald then asks whether whakapapa and cultural affiliation have the capacity to trump knowledge or experience:

I’m proud to be Polynesian, and I take pride in being Tongan. But because I don’t know much about my culture, does that make me any less of a Polynesian, or a Tongan, than I am?

Donald’s narrative is reminiscent of the introduction to Wineera’s collection, introducing a relationship between Tongan(ness) and Polynesian(ness) that seems less of a slippage (in which Polynesian is Tongan, and vice versa) and more like a concentric relationship. Donald’s perspective is represented as unsure and exploratory, and this section is structured as a set of questions (the last of which may or may not be rhetorical). Furthermore, on the track itself, the English-language narrative is overlaid with a woman’s voice speaking Tongan that demonstrates both the ongoing survival and frustrating proximity of the Tongan language. The translation of Donald’s experience from English into Tongan signals that although he expresses his experience in the English language, it is not rendered irrelevant or hopelessly removed from Tonganness after all. As well as asking whether “not knowing about [his] culture” makes him “less of . . . a Tongan,” he asks whether this “not knowing” makes him less “of a Polynesian,”28 implying that Polynesianness requires knowledge of specific culture, in his case, Tongan.

After Donald’s piece, Mua Strickson-Pua (who is a poet in his own right and a member of Polynation, the poetry group discussed later in this chapter, and who is the father of one of the members of Nesian Mystik) describes his family’s migration from Sāmoa to New Zealand. He consistently refers to New Zealand as Aotearoa, emphasizing a conscious decision to see New Zealand from the perspective of manuhiri but also making a claim of belonging in the national space by using the name of the new home as it occurs in the local Pacific language. His speech begins with the statement “Sāmoana” and ends, after considering their time in Aotearoa, with the statement “Fa’afetai e le Atua—Aotearoa—Sāmoana.” Aotearoa is thus sandwiched into the concept of Samoanness and, in particular, Sāmoana-ness. From the perspective of a Samoan family, surrounded by a wider church community in Grey Lynn, this spoken section focuses on an Auckland-based family and community and yet also makes reference to the Samoan oral tradition that fuses Christian and Indigenous understandings: “Sāmoana. Sāmoa’s founded on God by Tū herself from Malaelā.” He narrates his family’s migration to New Zealand29 and the survival of the stories and histories intertwined with their bodily presence. Strickson-Pua underscores the continued prominence of those traditions when he acknowledges his parents, who “paid the price of love and sacrifice / keeping alive our lifeline between Sāmoa and Aotearoa,” and he projects this continuation as essential to the survival of the “nation”:

Today, we celebrate the fruits of victory. Our family—our story—our history—lives on. . . . Next generation, you are the hopes of our nations now.

Again, Strickson-Pua maintains a staunchly genealogical approach to diasporic Samoan experience, and rather than lamenting the distance between New Zealand–born Samoan people and their forebears in Sāmoa or in the early years of migration, he passes the responsibility to the “new generation” and describes them as a “hope” for “nations,” which, in the plural, suggestively seems to mean New Zealand and Sāmoa.

Finally, Awa (Te Awanui Pine Reeder) adds a sung sequence that contextualizes the previous and following discussions on the track in terms of the specifically Māori struggles. The background sound shifts in Awa’s section of the track to incorporate the songs of native New Zealand birds, which marks this part of the track as a specifically Aotearoa-based section. Just as the other members of the band name moments, places, individuals, and identifications in their representation of personal and community histories, Awa references several significant events in Māori history:

Here’s an insight to a time

You’ve got to step back to before the Springbok tours

Social circumstance conditioned minds had to adapt to survive

Our people at the frontlines . . .

He begins by pushing his listeners to contextualize his own (and their own) personal history with events prior to the controversial 1981 tour of the South African rugby team, an event that has been described as the closest New Zealand has come to a civil war (since, presumably, the nineteenth century). The reference to “people at the frontlines” is ambiguous: it could refer to participation in the “frontlines” of protest and struggle but also to the “front-lines” of war, recalling perhaps the purpose of Māori involvement in World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Malaya, and so on, as an expression of and payment for citizenship. “Our people” have occupied, and continue to occupy, both positions—citizen and critic—and both are attempts at “survival” in response to “social circumstance.” Because “at the frontlines” could mean either of these, both are valid and even interdependent.

Awa’s challenge to “step back to before” to understand the contemporary situation (“always historicize,” as some would put it) is both enacted and modeled in a sung bridge in the track:

We do remember Bastion Point

We do remember Parihaka

We do remember Waitangi

Awa names three specific events from the most recent to the most historical, following his own call to “step back” and ultimately reciting history as a genealogy rather than a chronology. Briefly, Bastion Point is a specific piece of land around which Auckland has arranged itself and which the local iwi Ngāti Whatua occupied for 507 days in 1977–78 to retain their land base. Although this event was a specifically Indigenous struggle, many Pasifika people assisted and supported the protestors, including members of the Polynesian Panthers, and it became the basis of many activist and community networks. Parihaka is the settlement in Taranaki that, after bitter fighting in Taranaki from the 1860s and the total confiscation of all land in the region, was led by the prophets Te Whiti and Tohu, who advocated passive resistance. In November 1881, government and local militia stormed Parihaka, arresting men and taking them south and looting and razing the homes and other buildings. The story of Parihaka was suppressed for many years and has become known as a particularly shameful moment in New Zealand’s history. Finally, Waitangi is a reference to the place where the infamously and unfortunately mistranslated Treaty of Waitangi, the document by which the British Crown extended its sovereignty over New Zealand, was signed in 1840.

Most obviously, the repeated claim “we do remember” confirms that “we” indeed remember and asserts that this history is not forgotten. The repeated pronoun “we” could speak on behalf of Māori as opposed to nonMāori, although it is also possible to understand the “we” as Pacific inclusive. After all, not just Awa but all of Nesian Mystik produced the track, and so perhaps all of them “remember.” Repeating the phrase “we do remember” both describes and enacts an act of memory: it is at once a statement of confirmation addressed to those involved in the specific struggles, a challenge to the colonizing power that the memory lives on, and a mnemonic device in and of itself that encourages and enables the re-memory of these events. Being Pacific in Aotearoa is thus tied to “remembering” Māori struggles, potentially even those that happened before the arrival of one’s own family. When Awa is singing “we” on behalf of his relatives, he asserts a specific Indigenous memory of national history, and when it is on behalf of Nesian Mystik (and, in turn, their respective communities), he articulates a model for Pasifika recognition of recent and historic Māori struggle and the formal treaty-derived bicultural basis of this country of which they are a part. This again echoes Hau’ofa’s vision for Hawai‘i and New Zealand about “alliances [between] an increasing number of Islanders with the tangata whenua (indigenous people) of Aotearoa.”

“We Are Polynation”

A group of Māori and Pasifika writers and musicians came together as a group called Polynation for two shows in 2008: the West Auckland Poetry Festival and the Queensland Poetry Festival. Directed by Tusiata Avia, who also performed as a poet, Polynation’s performance in Brisbane was recorded and produced as a DVD by another group member, Doug Poole.30 A still camera records the performance, which takes place on a simple stage with three fixed microphones. The performers walk into and out of the light over the course of the show, the bright lights of the space from which pieces are read becoming a dually visible and vulnerable space. In his written reflection of his experience, Poole relates his own fears about walking into the lit space—“Three sentinel microphone stands await on a flying carpet . . .”31—and compares the darkened space to the Samoan conceptual space of darkness in which both he and the contents of his poem “Cautionary Tale” also “await”: “I have waited in Pouliuli, they have waited, the beatings, abuse, death. My blood coursing backward, I walk toward the microphone.”32 Having opened with the first lines of Selina Tusitala Marsh’s “Fast Talking PI,” and deriving a sense of structure from her occasional return to the stage to contribute more lines of the poem, the show moves toward a final piece—“We Are Polynation”—in which all the performers are on stage.

The individual contributions from the members of Polynation are varied in form and theme. Several relate to the question of representation and stereotyping, including the public release of the infamous Clydesdale report, in which a Massey University economist branded Pasifika communities a “drain on the economy.”33 Several of the Pasifika performers reference aspects of Aotearoa. Selina Tusitala Marsh’s long poem includes the lines “I’m a fale PI, a marae PI,” and “a Matariki PI,” and this incorporates Māori (and mixed Māori–Pasifika) PIs into the realm of Pasifika experience in New Zealand. In Karlo Mila’s poem for Luamanuvao Winnie Laban, the Samoan woman MP, she compares her white hair to the kotuku, a heron not only native to Aotearoa but also symbolic of special status; this reference quietly demonstrates Mila’s familiarity with Māori concepts. In “O/E,” Tusiata Avia imagines traveling in Russia and bumping into atua Māori (Māui, Hinenui te Pō, Rangi, Tangaroa) who are engaged in exceedingly everyday activities. Having long been involved in a range of collaborations with Māori communities and political causes, Mua Strickson-Pua (who speaks in Nesian Mystik’s “Lost Visionz”) includes Aotearoa in his naming of “islands” from which Polynation comes, and in another poem, he describes his relationship with his grandchild through the use of a Māori rather than Samoan word: “Cheden and I / mokopuna, Papa.” The only poem entirely in a language other than English, Daren Kamali’s “Viti” is in Fijian but includes the word “Aotearoa.”

The Māori member of Polynation is Kath Hayward-Nathan, and unlike the rest of the performers, she wears overtly traditional items—a large carved comb in her hair and a feather cloak—throughout her performance. Poole recalls,

As Kath walks onto the stage, the iridescent light of her Korowai, Moko, Pounamu Taonga, and Heru, pushes aside the darkness.34

Though the Pasifika women wear large flowers behind their ears, they are all clearly plastic and so, while they are traditional in terms of function perhaps, they are also engaged with contemporary representation, kitsch, and the possibilities of its ironic fold back. This visual differentiation cannot help but distinguish between Pasifika as engaged with modernity and Māori as timeless. Although it would be absolutely incorrect to suggest that heru or korowai are necessarily timeless in and of themselves, or indeed that heru and korowai cannot themselves contain subversive or ironic claims, the visual impact of the korowai made of natural materials compared to the bright clothing of the Pasifika women is rather stark. Interestingly, the male performers are dressed in T-shirts and blue jeans, with the exception of Strickson-Pua, who wears a tie and shirt and, in the final piece, “We Are Polynation,” a tie with a large Māori graphic design.

“We Are Polynation” merits longer discussion in part because it is the title piece of the show but also because it is a collaborative single work. Each of the members of the group walks onto stage and states “we are Polynation” and then contributes her own perspective on how this might be configured, the next performer coming on stage in time to join the person in her final claim, “We are Polynation.” In this way, “we are Polynation” becomes the first and last thing uttered by each performer, and all the members on stage join in for that single line. The performers stay on stage after they have spoken, which means the effect of repeating “we are Polynation” is both connective and cumulative: like a chant, these words are repeated and become the customary way by which individuals are woven into the group. Like call and response, it is spoken by the whole group and then echoed back by the newly included member as a sign of his own joining to the whole. As the members of Polynation gather in the light—out of the Pouliuli, to use Poole’s words—their claim is declarative and demonstrative. In an inversion of Nesian Mystik’s strategy of reframing the suffix -nesian of Polynesian, Polynation makes use of the prefix poly-, for “many.” This is a declaration and demonstration of multiplicity at the same time as the prefix poly- in the New Zealand context is always inflected by the hegemony of Polynesian. It is worth mentioning that like any continually chanted phrase, the words themselves lose the immediacy of connection with precise meaning and slip into producing meaning through their sound and rhythm as much as their definitions. At some point, “we are Polynation” starts to sound like “we are Polynesian,” a slippage that is exclusive (especially with the presence of a Fijian member in the group) but that also provides a mechanism by which the Aotearoa-based Pacific and Aotearoa-inclusive Pacific find their connection. Being Polynesian grants Māori access to Polynation in ways that being PI or Pasifika does not. It is also worth putting some pressure on the “we” here: is this an articulation of the group itself, the poly- (perhaps Pacific, perhaps multiple) dimensions of the New Zealand community, or a multiculturalist vision of the entire New Zealand nation?

At the same time as they declare Polynation into existence by insisting on repeating the line “we are Polynation,”35 the members demonstrate the multiplicity and parameters of what this means by their physical presence and through their own verbal contributions. Daren Kamali offers the connective tissue provided by their shared kaupapa: “Pacific poets from different island nations / Brought together to form a perfect combination.” The Aotearoa context of this “polynation” is alluded to in Mila’s articulation of “fingering the long white cloud,” but Strickson-Pua explicitly focuses on the place of tāngata whenua in his understanding of himself as one who is (as he states in one of his individually performed poems) “becoming Samoan.” Wearing a Māori tie, he recites Māori words that provide an opportunity to connect: both for himself and his aiga to Aotearoa but also for the group Polynation:

Atua, Tupuna, Matua,

Whanau, Aiga, Mokopuna

Samoa Aotearoa China

Whakarongo Kaupapa

Whakapapa

Aloha Alofa Aroha

Aue aue hī.36

Strickson-Pua brings Sāmoa (and China and Hawai‘i) into the poem, and yet the Māori words provide not only thematic structure but also conceptual and aural shape.

Finally, Kath returns to the stage—the last of the Polynation members to join the group—and after joining in with the phrase “we are Polynation” recited by the others, she sings her contribution, which is a Christian blessing in the Māori language. In this way, her participation in the “polynation” the members have produced through uttering its name takes the same form as the Pasifika members but is also distinctive: she does not wear the same style of clothing as the others and does not contribute an articulation of “polynation” in the same way, either in terms of type or language. In some ways, perhaps, this is an appropriate position: the Māori member is simultaneously poly- in terms of Polynesian but tāngata whenua in terms of the -nation. Conversely, it would be interesting to imagine what other possibilities there might be for Māori inclusion in a “combination” (as Kamali puts it) such as this. Perhaps the inclusion of more than one Māori member would relieve Kath—her literary contribution and her body—of some of the burden of representation. After Kath sings, the entire group ends the show with another chant from a much older series of migrations. Poole writes,

Our last calls bless the audience, our words, our journey. We reach to heaven, pulling down the wairua of our ancestors, drawing them deep within ourselves, we take our last breathe [sic], exhaling. . . . Taiiki [sic] E!37

The closing of the chant—“haumi e, hui e, taiki e”—is a ritualized Māori articulation of journey and migration, and this acknowledges the particular place of Māori in the poly- nation. The final physical gesture, a staged pūkana in which the performers strike an iconic Māori pose, which Poole describes as a “final act of defiance,” underscores this Māori dimension to the configuration of Polynation. Yet, although the performance is extremely well directed and presented overall, I admit that the members of Polynation appear to strike this final pose a little awkwardly. The least assured or confident part of the performance, perhaps this moment gestures toward a space somewhere between anxiety and confidence.38 I do not offer this as a criticism as such but instead as an acknowledgment that the vulnerable moment in which this group attempts to match its own (literal) performance with its aspirations offers a rich parallel to the broader national (and regional) projects of collaboration: alliances and combinations. Perhaps, to echo Strickson-Pua’s words, the group—and maybe any group—is at its most productive when it is in a process of “becoming” Polynation.

Māori–Pasifika Collaborations

Through collaborative work, Māori and Pasifika people in the national space have produced activist and creative work that not only articulates Māori connections with the Pacific but also embodies and recalls those connections through lived relationships and shared artistic vision. Each of these collaborations has taken shape in Auckland, and this confirms the centrality of the urban space in the negotiation of connections in the national context. Work on Māori experiences of the city should take account of these kinds of connections, and work on Māori–Pasifika connections cannot help but engage with the urban space. Additionally, all of these connections have consciously selected terminology that joins the members through Polynesianness—Rongo the Polynesian deity, the neologism Nesian, and poly- the prefix—and yet, in each collaboration, the specific position of Māori on the basis of Indigeneity is marked. The collaborative work of Rongo, Nesian Mystik, and Polynation produces a unique, historicized, specific articulation of Māori–Pasifika connections, but it also produces a record of the relationship to which we can look back to remember those connections should we risk forgetting them.

In its book review section, Rongo proposes the connections between texts authored by Māori and Pasifika writers when it reviews Tangi and Sons for the Return Home side by side. Certainly there are striking similarities between these books, which are the first novels by a Māori and Samoan writer, respectively. At the heart of both novels is a young man who attempts to reconcile himself to his place in his family and community; both narrate the process of moving from a rural or island origin to Wellington city and back again, and in both novels, a Pākehā girlfriend is used as a representative and catalyst for further introspection. Finally, the young male protagonists in both novels are understood by their families to have had exceptional opportunities in Wellington, and yet both seek to connect with an element of home, which, in both cases, is done through the process of finding a way to grieve appropriately for an older male relative. However, the novels offer two very different visions of 1970s New Zealand (and, indeed, 1970s Wellington). Whereas Māori are frequently mentioned in Sons, and the plot is partly propelled by the process by which the young Samoan man realizes that his belittling view of Māori is inappropriate because of physical but also cultural proximity, there is no Pasifika presence in Tangi. The next two chapters consider the representation of Māori–Pasifika connections by Māori and Pasifika writers, respectively. Although these texts are all individually authored, it is worth bearing in mind the initial urge of Rongo to read such texts alongside each other. Within the texts, and in the broader conversations (or perhaps vā, or space between, according to Wendt’s own formulation) between them, when looking at them in a certain way, alongside one another, they all participate in a larger collaborative process: the production of a genuinely Pacific (Māori and Pasifika) literary history in New Zealand.