A Time and a Place

In August 2008, a deed of settlement was signed between the Port Nicholson Block Claim and the Crown.1 At Pipitea, marae leaders from Taranaki whānui spoke on behalf of the whānau, including my own family, who had been repeatedly mistreated by successive New Zealand governments. In response, ministers representing the Crown offered an apology and the promise to pass the legislation, which would give effect to the compensation package that had taken over twenty years—and in some ways, 169 years—to negotiate. One of the details of the package was that the “harbor islands,” including Matiu/Somes and Mākaro, would be returned to those from whom they had been wrongly taken.

For my own part, I have a particular relationship to Matiu/Somes through my involvement in refurbishing the Whare Mahana, our iwi house on the island, and the extension of this into an ongoing role connected to the kaitiakitanga2 of the island. In very real ways, I, having been raised outside of the Wellington region, have been literally “painting my way home” to meaningful connection with my broader iwi through my physical labor in renovating the house. Given my active research in this area of Māori–Pacific connection, the significance of this specific involvement with Matiu/Somes is not lost on me. I moved back to the Wellington area from the United States in early 2005, and coming home to Te Ātiawa and to Te Whanganui a Tara has meant a homecoming to Matiu and, in turn, to Kupe’s prophetic act of naming. Ngugi wa Thiong’o has talked about the act of naming as an act of memory. Any new name brings a memory that is overlaid on top of existing memories and induces a process of forgetting and amnesia that foregrounds one particular narrative and diminishes another.3 Quite rightly, the focus for our iwi has been on the relationship between “Matiu” and “Somes”—between specific Indigenous communities and the Crown in all of its institutional manifestations. Now that Matiu has been returned to us, we have the opportunity to renotice the other pairing of names in our harbor: Matiu and Mākaro. In that pairing, we find another series of relationships and another framework of history. We might turn to the opening of Wineera’s 1978 poem “Hokule’a,” which, reflecting on a key moment of the resuscitation of Polynesian voyaging, articulates this sense of possibility:

We have all watched

with some misgiving

the ocean of possibilities

beyond our doors,

wondering, in our complacency,

whether we had courage enough

to chart a course

to farther islands.4

Regaining Matiu represents an opportunity to reframe relationship with the Crown but also with the Pacific. We find another mode and motivation for our articulation of who we are.

The final writing and editing of this book is taking place on Matiu. There’s a big table here, pushed up against the window of the dining room of the iwi house, and this table is where a great deal of connecting and reconnecting takes place for many of us associated with the island. I am sitting at the dining room table, looking out at our harbor, surrounded by water and recalling the tears cried by my own relatives as we fought and pleaded and negotiated and waited for our islands to be returned. Now that we can stand on these islands again, we have both an opportunity and a responsibility to shift our gaze to another place. From the top of Matiu, there is a clear view of Wellington city and New Zealand’s parliament buildings. However, if you turn a little to the left, from the peak of Matiu, you can see all the way past Mākaro and out to the channel between the harbor and the open sea. Beyond the channel stretches Te Moananui a Kiwa.

As they did for Kupe, these islands provide a temporary refuge for a tired people, but they can also impel and symbolize a broader picture of connection and migration. While the island was Somes, the government decided to lop off the top of its head to install gun emplacements during World War II: the peak of Matiu is now several meters shorter than it once was. Colonialism and our necessary period of introspection and struggle may have diminished our view of Te Moananui a Kiwa, then, but we can still see enough to remember who we are and to whom we’re connected. Spending time here, reflecting on Kupe’s naming of our island, the relatively more recent visit from Tupaia makes a different kind of sense. No wonder the “fondness” shown toward the large sheets of tapa that day when Tupaia and Cook dropped by in 1769 was described as “extraordinary.” Standing on Matiu, knowing that there are koura in the waters around and tapa in the waters beyond, and holding a paintbrush—or laptop—in hand, we articulate who we were and who we are: we once were Pacific, and along with our numerous other identifications, we will continue to be so.