Indigenous Languaging

The bilingual phrasing of this section title is meant to convey a sense of highly situated literary interactions created by Indigenous-to-Indigenous juxtapositions. The Māori verb phrase rere kē translates into English as “to move” or, more precisely, to “flow” or “fly” (rere) “differently” or “strangely” (kē). The postpositional particle kē conveys a sense of the unexpected. Indeed, Māori artist and art scholar Robert Jahnke employs the nominal form of the phrase, rereketanga (moving differently-ness), as a rough equivalent to the English term uniqueness (“Māori,” 42).² The “unique” interpretive movements I trace in this chapter through a sequence of Indigenous-to-Indigenous juxtapositions are linked by a consistent analytic focus on how the presence or absence of Indigenous language functions in each text, a focus that emerged over time from working with the juxtapositions themselves. This focus on Indigenous language raises issues of artistic empathy, linguistic and literary translation, and what the Latin Americanist critic Walter Mignolo describes as “bilanguaging”—that is, thinking, speaking, and writing among two or more languages and cultural systems, fully cognizant of the politics of their unequal, often asymmetrical relationships within (post)colonial linguistic and social hierarchies. Across the main body of the chapter, I demonstrate that this particular series of juxtapositions, this process of moving “unexpectedly” among a number of contemporary Indigenous texts, ultimately enables an analysis of how Habib’s illustrated poem, “When I of Fish Eat,” written entirely in English and augmented by contemporary, “modernist” line drawings, can—for certain audiences—produce bilingual and bicultural effects that enrich the poem’s potential meaning and amplify its aesthetic power. The final section then turns to the case of Ihimaera’s translations, deletions, and transculturations to explore the potential effects of an attempt to globalize the (literary) Indigenous local.

The larger point, however—in line with chapters 3 and 5—is not the inevitability of any particular juxtaposition or analysis but rather the productiveness of this kind of interpretive process among diverse Indigenous texts. Revard concludes “Herbs of Healing,” “I hope readers will have found the sweet and nourishing, the bitter and healing, in some measure in this essay. We are talking about a so far undiscovered country, five hundred years after Columbus mistook it for Japan or China or India or the Earthly Paradise. We are talking about some undiscovered writers whose work is good for this America” (192).³ And good, we might add, for this shared globe. Following Revard’s lead, I attempt to harness the power of surprising, productive juxtapositions for a method of literary analysis that is explicitly trans-Indigenous.

I begin by juxtaposing “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919” with “Sad Joke on a Marae.” I first encountered Taylor’s poem, part of his 1979 collection Eyes of the Ruru (Eyes of the Owl), as I struggled to understand how the twelve lines of Momaday’s poem, part of his 1992 collection In the Presence of the Sun, produce such concentrated power. As discussed in chapter 3, “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919” is one of a series of texts—in both poetry and prose forms, and in anticipation of the 1976 U.S. bicentennial observances and the 1992 Columbus quincentenary—in which Momaday meditates on the story of his Kiowa grandfather being honored by the gift of a fine hunting horse during a gourd dance and giveaway performed near Carnegie, Oklahoma, in the year 1919. Reading Momaday’s and Taylor’s poems together, although they are based in different Indigenous cultures and histories and although they were produced in distinct periods of the twentieth century, helped me to see that the absence of Indigenous language in Momaday’s poem is highly productive of both situated meaning and aesthetic power. This absence is especially productive for readers familiar with Momaday’s larger corpus of published works and thus familiar with a greater range of specific details about the historical events to which this brief poem alludes, as well as with a greater range of interpretations of the ongoing significance of these events that Momaday has submitted to public scrutiny since 1976 with the publication of his narrative poem “The Gourd Dancer” and his memoir The Names.

Momaday’s and Taylor’s poems are related thematically in that each represents and, arguably, performs a moment of emotional, psychological, and spiritual contact between a contemporary speaker and his Indigenous ancestors. Each poem operates, in part, by situating its speaker on culturally relevant ceremonial grounds and evoking a paradox of space and time. In the Taylor poem the speaker, Tu, is explicitly alienated from his Indigenous culture and unable to speak his Indigenous language fluently. Standing on an unnamed marae (Māori ceremonial space) before an unnamed whare whakairo (carved meeting house), he participates in a paradox of space and time when the figure of the tekoteko (carving of an ancestor) offers Tu his own tongue with which to speak. In the Momaday poem, as shown in chapter 3, the speaker is only implicitly alienated from his Indigenous culture and language. Standing on the Kiowa gourd dancing grounds, however, he similarly participates in a paradox of space and time, articulated in the final lines’ provocative juxtaposition “not here”/“am here.” Consider the poems together:

Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919

This afternoon is older

than the giving of gifts

and the rhythmic scraping of the red earth.

My father’s father’s name is called,

and the gift horse stutters out, whole,

the whole horizon in its eyes.

In the giveaway is beaded

the blood memories of fathers and sons.

Oh, there is nothing like this afternoon

in all the miles and years around,

and I am not here,

but, grandfather, father, I am here.

Sad Joke on a Marae

Tihei Mauriora I called

Kupe Paikea Te Kooti

Rewi and Te Rauparaha

I saw them

grim death and wooden ghosts

carved on the meeting house wall.

In the only Maori I knew

I called

Tihei Mauriora.

Above me the tekoteko raged.

He ripped his tongue from his mouth

and threw it at my feet.

Then I spoke.

My name is Tu the freezing worker.

Ngati D.B. is my tribe.

The pub is my Marae.

My fist is my taiaha.

Jail is my home.

Tihei Mauriora I cried.

They understood

the tekoteko and the ghosts

though I said nothing but

Tihei Mauriora

for that’s all I knew.

Much can be said about either poem on its own.⁴ When the two are juxtaposed, “Sad Joke on a Marae” draws attention to a (now) glaring absence of Indigenous language in “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919.” Taylor’s first stanza deploys the names of five well-known figures, legendary Polynesian explorers and famous Māori prophets, warriors, and rangatira (chiefs). The third stanza announces the speaker’s own Māori name, Tu, which can be translated into English as the verbs “to stand,” “to fight,” or “to be wounded.” The name can be read as an allusion to the Māori concept of turangawaewae (standing place, the place from which one derives social standing) and/or as an allusion to the god of war Tumatauenga, whose name is often shortened to Tu. In addition, the poem deploys several words that are likely to be known not only to fluent Māori-language speakers but also to many primarily English-language speakers in Aotearoa New Zealand, including tekoteko (carved figure), Ngati (a term that designates the name of a tribal group), marae (ceremonial space in front of the meeting house), and taiaha (fighting staff, a traditional weapon). Most prominently, the poem repeats the formulaic phrase “Tihei Mauriora,” which is likely to be familiar to many readers in Aotearoa New Zealand, whether or not they can translate it into English. In Māori contexts the phrase is often used as a speaker’s opening move during whaikorero (oratory) on the marae. It can be translated into English literally as “the sneeze of life,” and it refers to the first sound—in English, the first “cry”—produced by a newborn. It thus can be paraphrased and abstracted as evoking “new life.”

Through the repetition of this provocative phrase, which appears once in both the first and second stanzas and twice in the concluding fourth stanza, as well as through the use of the formulaic language patterns of formal introductions performed during mihi (greetings) and other Māori rituals of encounter in the third stanza, Taylor’s poem emphasizes the role of Māori language and public oratory in this representation of an enabling contact with Indigenous ancestors. Through the primary symbol of the ancestor’s tongue, the poem asserts the recuperative power of speaking as an Indigenous person in an Indigenous space and in an Indigenous manner. The assertion is strengthened by the poem’s sequence of active verbs for speaking: “I called,” “I spoke,” “I cried,” “I said.”

In marked contrast, Momaday’s poem deploys no Indigenous language or overtly Indigenous oratorical conventions, and its unusual phrasing and punning in English draws attention to these absences. In lines 4 through 6, the speaker declares, “My father’s father’s name is called, / and the gift horse stutters out, whole, / the whole horizon in its eyes.” The duplicative adjectival phrase “father’s father’s” focuses attention on the significant ancestral “name,” but this name remains unnamed and unspoken. The passive verb that follows, “is called,” adds to this effect, since unlike Taylor’s sequence of active verbs, the passive verb obscures agency and concentrates attention on the disembodied act of calling rather than on its agent. Absence is further emphasized in the lines that complete the statement. Although the auspicious act of calling produces “the gift horse,” this gift is immediately associated with the repeated word “whole,” which puns “hole,” another word readily associated with absence. (This pun is echoed at the beginning of line 9 with the pun Oh / O, creating another “hole” in the poem.) The statement ends with the word “eyes,” linking line 6 with lines 11 and 12, where the repeated “I” of the speaker declares his paradox of “not here”/“am here.” Moreover, combined with the statement’s one active verb, “stutters”—which, as discussed in chapter 3, suggests both movement and speech that is halting and difficult—the pun between the plural “eyes” of perception and the repeated “I” of subjectivity draws further attention to those “I’s” absent from the poem: the father, the father’s father, and the unnamed Kiowa ancestor who calls his name.

Once these absences are made visible, how might we refine our understanding of the ways in which the absence of Indigenous language in “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919” is actually productive of meaning and aesthetic power?

Let us turn to a second juxtaposition by adding the rap track “Tangata Whenua” by the Māori hip-hop group Upper Hutt Posse, who are led by MC Dean Hapeta (also known as D-Word and Te Kupu [The Word]), which I encountered several years after first reading “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919” and “Sad Joke on a Marae.”⁵ “Tangata Whenua” appears on Upper Hutt Posse’s 1995 CD Movement in Demand, and this track can be read as a representation of the political and cultural development of the generation of urban Māori youth that followed the generation represented in Taylor’s poem from the 1970s. (Given the purposes of this chapter, I read “Tangata Whenua” primarily in the context of contemporary Indigenous literary composition and reception rather than in the context of global rap and hip-hop cultures.) Building on Tu’s experience in “Sad Joke on a Marae,” the young, unnamed speaker/MC of Upper Hutt Posse’s rap has reconnected with Māori language. Instead of repeating a single formulaic phrase as a pathetic plea to the ancestors and as a call for a much-needed “new life,” this speaker/MC is able to produce whaikorero, formal oratory, and he is able to do so within an enabling structure of community rather than in a context of debilitating isolation. Significantly, he is able to do so completely and deftly in the Māori language.

The phrase tangata whenua can be translated into English literally as “land people” or “people of the land,” and it carries both the more specific connotation, on the marae, of “hosts” (as opposed to “guests” or “visitors”), as well as the more expansive connotation, on the national or global scene, of “Indigenous people” (as opposed to “outsiders” or “settlers”). On the CD the rap is performed entirely in the Māori language with no English translation. The lyrics are presented exclusively in Māori in the CD liner notes, as well. Moreover, the track evokes a particularly “tribal” sound in its juxtapositions of complementary female and male voices, conventional rap and the Indigenous haka form of vigorous chant, and bass guitar supported by the stirring sound of the purerehua (bull-roarer, a disk of wood or stone strung on a cord and twirled through the air to produce a distinctive whirring), conventional drums, Polynesian log drums, and Afro-Cuban congas. The track opens with a female voice performing a brief but piercing karanga (call), which is appropriate protocol for beginning any ceremony on the marae. The rap itself begins, as is often the case with whaikorero, with the recitation of whakapapa (genealogy). The male rapper asserts that he is the child of Papatūānuku, the earth mother, and Ranginui, the sky father. In the background a male voice calls out the central formulaic phrase from Taylor’s poem, “Tihei Mauriora,” another indication that the rap is meant to evoke a speech on the marae. The rapper goes on to assert that the “root” (te take) of his genealogy is Io Matua Kore, Io the Father of the Void, the first principle in some versions of Māori cosmology.

Following this brief whakapapa, the rap’s hook (chorus) makes bold assertions about what it means to be tangata whenua, people of the land:

Tangata Whenua Te Pake Whakapapa

Tangata Whenua Te Take Me Te Mana

Tangata Whenua Te Hana O Te Haa

Tangata Whenua Te Ahi Kaa

These lines can be translated into English as “Tangata whenua is the persistent genealogy / Tangata whenua is the root and the power / Tangata whenua is the flame of the essence of life / Tangata whenua is the home fire.”⁶ Together, they make strong claims for Māori land rights based in Māori philosophy and customs of land tenure. Other verses describe Māori aspirations for “knowledge” (mātauranga) and “unity” (kotahitanga) and contrast these with the “evil” deeds of the “enemy.” The rap’s closing lines return to the idea of an expansive genealogy connecting contemporary Māori to the earth and cosmos and assert, more specifically, “E rere ana te toto o oku Tupuna i roto i toku Manawa” (The blood of my ancestors runs in my heart), and, “E rere ana te wairua o oku Tupuna i roto i toku tinana” (The spirit of my ancestors runs in my body).

Juxtaposed with “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919” and “Sad Joke on a Marae,” “Tangata Whenua” reveals a similar collapsing of distance in space and time, a similar connection of the contemporary with the ancestral, in at least two ways. For audiences fluent in Māori language and familiar with Māori cultural concepts, such as ahi kā roa (the long-burning home fires, a customary claim to land rights), that connection is evoked in the rap’s specific content, which explicitly links the rapper to Māori ancestors and the gods. But the rap potentially evokes this kind of connection for those listeners who do not possess this level of skill in the Māori language or this level of knowledge of Māori culture. Similar to Taylor’s use of the formulaic phrase “Tihei Mauriora,” which gains force and builds meaning through its strategic repetition,⁷ the rap’s extensive use of “tribal” acoustic elements—including called, chanted, and sung Māori language, but also Māori musical instruments and distinctive Māori vocal performance customs such as the karanga and the haka—evokes contemporary Māori connection to the ancestral. Even in the absence of a high level of Māori linguistic skill or semantic understanding, these sound elements can be productive—at least for certain audiences—of particular kinds of meaning and aesthetic power. Within a contemporary, global music form, these sound elements can defiantly signify Māori Indigeneity.

How might we conceptualize the potential of a performed rap composition to evoke a contemporary Indigenous connection to the ancestral at the level of its acoustic elements, as opposed to exclusively at the level of its linguistic content? One approach is to situate the creation, performance, recording, and editing of Upper Hutt Posse’s rap within a broader context of contemporary Māori arts practices. Māori artist and art scholar Robert Jahnke has developed a conceptual model for contemporary Māori visual art that imagines a continuum running between the pole “customary” (art created by Māori that maintains “a visual correspondence with historical models”) and its opposite pole, “non-customary” (art created by Māori in which “visual correspondence and empathy with historical models [is] absent”) (“Māori,” 49–50). Much of contemporary Māori art is produced in the vast middle space between these poles, Jahnke argues, and it is neither “hybrid” nor caught “between” but “trans-customary”: art that establishes not a strict correspondence with customary forms but rather a “visual empathy with customary practice” through the use of “pattern, form, medium, and technique” (48). Note that Jahnke draws his key distinction between “strict correspondence” with “customary forms” and “visual empathy” with “customary practice.”

Jahnke’s model makes immediate sense when viewing a wide range of contemporary Māori or other Indigenous works of art. In the North American context, for example, we can look to the baskets constructed by the Onondaga and Micmac poet, scholar, and weaver Gail Tremblay. One striking example of Tremblay’s work, Strawberry and Chocolate (2000), is on permanent display at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC.⁸ A “customary” Northeastern Indian basket typically is woven from thin splints of wood. In contrast, Tremblay has crafted her contemporary basket from a combination of strips of standard 16 mm motion picture film and strips of full-coat magnetic film. The material for the basket is “non-customary” within Jahnke’s model, but how this material is used—the physical practice of the basket’s making—nonetheless demonstrates “empathy” with the “customary practice” of making northeastern baskets. Specific manipulation of the strips of film produce the basket’s distinctive shape and textures: its square mouth and reinforced lip, the contrast between its smooth inner walls and curled, three-dimensional exterior. Even the luminous red and brown colors of the film strips demonstrate empathy with a “customary” strawberry basket produced from dyed splints of brown ash, while at the same time evoking the playfulness and sensuality of the contemporary basket’s title. The juxtaposition of materials and practices in Tremblay’s piece make suggestive statements about relationships between a contemporary art form, such as film production, and a customary art form, such as basket making. Similar to a strawberry basket, a film can be a tool for gathering and storing items of value that nourish and delight the community, and it can be both strong and beautiful, utilitarian and aesthetically accomplished. Tremblay’s Strawberry and Chocolate is easily situated along Jahnke’s continuum as an example of “trans-customary” American Indian visual and plastic art.

Upper Hutt Posse’s Māori-language rap occupies a similar position along a continuum between “customary” and “non-customary” Māori music. “Tangata Whenua” fits Jahnke’s criteria for the “trans-customary” in its use of recognizably customary sound elements, patterns, and techniques, only in an aural rather than in a visual or plastic medium. Following Jahnke, we can describe their techniques as creating “aural empathy” with customary practice.

If we take into account the 1998 video produced to augment the effects of “Tangata Whenua,” we can investigate the multiple possibilities for aural and visual empathy within a single, multimedia text. Space does not permit full analysis of the visual component of the music video, and that level of analysis is not necessary to make my point. Instead, I focus on a visual motif that recurs over the course of the video’s three minutes and ten seconds. This visual component narrates a dramatic story in which the practices of industry threaten the land, water, and traditional food resources of Aotearoa New Zealand with toxic pollution and, thus, threaten the health of the people of the land, the tangata whenua. Throughout the visual narrative, the frame repeatedly returns to images of a whare whakairo (carved meeting house) on a rural marae. Exterior shots of the whare focus on the elaborate, ochre-colored carvings of ancestors decorating the front of the house. Interior shots focus similarly on the walls, which feature alternating carved pou (wood slabs) and woven tukutuku panels. Similar to the house’s exterior, the interior pou are carved into highly stylized likenesses of the Indigenous community’s ancestors and record its whakapapa (genealogy).

For the greater part of the visual narrative, in these interior shots the pou are consistently centered within the frame, so that the alternating tukutuku panels can be partially seen on either side of the wood carving; the tukutuku create a woven and geometrically patterned border for the centered, curvilinear carvings. Toward the end of the video, however, following the visual narrative’s climax, in which the poisonous effects of industry are reversed through Māori spiritual practices, there is a brief, twenty-second sequence in which the composition of this repeated interior shot is also reversed. In this sequence the interior shot of the whare’s wall repeats eight times. In each shot a woven tukutuku panel—rather than a carved pou—is centered within the frame so that now the partially seen pou create a carved ochre border on either side of the woven tukutuku. In addition to this reversed composition, each of these eight interior shots includes a Māori child positioned at the center of the frame; that is, each child is positioned as centered in front of a patterned tukutuku panel. Each child’s relatively small upper body is thus framed on either side by the visible woven panel behind him or her, which is then flanked on either side by carved pou. Read from left to right, each frame is organized as the sequence pou, tukutuku, child, tukutuku, pou. Through the visual empathy of this positioning, each child becomes, in effect, a living pou within the alternating sequence of carved pou and woven tukutuku. That eight different children appear in the eight interior shots is both noticeable to the viewer and striking. Although each shot is on screen only briefly, the different children are visually distinctive, not only in terms of their gender, relative physical sizes, apparent ages, and clothing but also in terms of their skin and hair color and Polynesian facial features. All of the children, whether they have darker or lighter skin or hair, are positioned identically as pou within the interior of the house. They are all identically positioned as carvings of Māori ancestors. Each becomes a part of the whakapapa encoded in the walls of the whare whakairo. All of these children, the visual empathy asserts, are equally tangata whenua, equally people of the land. Linked to the Māori past through whakapapa, all of these children represent future ancestors of the Māori people—future tupuna—as understood in Māori terms.

We can extend this analysis by including the visual imagery of the shots placed between those of the Māori children in the twenty-second sequence. These alternating frames depict a dramatic sunrise over a low, perfectly level horizon of a calm ocean. In each, the sun emerges slightly higher from behind the dark horizon and the sky becomes increasingly orange, until the final shot in the sequence, following the eighth shot of a Māori child positioned before a tukutuku panel, in which the sun emerges as a perfect orange disk, filling the sky and the frame with golden light. This movement from darkness to light can be linked to versions of the Māori creation story, which moves through multiple stages of darkness until the dramatic revelation of the world in which we now live, designated te ao mārama, “the world of light.”

The audio component of the video supports the above analysis and helps connect the two sequences of alternating images. The concluding lines of the rap’s final verse introduce and then play over the interior shots of the eight Māori children and the exterior shots of the dramatic sunrise: “E rere ana te toto ō ōku tūpuna / I roto i te ngaringari nei, I te ngaringari nei / I te tinana nei, i te waiata nei.” On their website, Upper Hutt Posse translates these lyrics into English: “Flowing is the spirit of my ancestors / In this unity song, this unity song / This body, this waiata [song].” The alternating visual sequences of the children and the sunrise begin precisely with the repetition of the phrase “I te ngaringari nei.” Thus, the sequence of visual images of the Māori children positioned as pou and the sun rising over the ocean are edited to coincide with the rapping of the three parallel phrases “this unity song,” “this body,” “this song.” These lyrics represent a slight revision from the lyrics of the original version of “Tangata Whenua” recorded in 1995. The addition of the Māori term ngaringari (unity song), along with its explicit juxtaposition with the terms tinana (body) and waiata (song), introduces a meaningful and productive Māori pun. As Upper Hutt Posse’s posted translation indicates, as a noun, ngaringari translates into English as “a song to make people pull together”—that is, a “song” (waiata) that helps the community become a single “body” (tinana). As a verb, however, ngaringari translates into English as “to increase in numbers.” Combined with the images of the Māori children positioned as pou inside the whare whakairo, itself the “body” of an ancestor, and with the bright sun emerging out of the dark ocean horizon as though both it and the world were being born anew, the repetition of ngaringari links the “unity” of the Māori community to its generational “increase.” Positioned as the conclusion to the visual narrative’s story of the community’s response to destructive elements from the colonial world, generational increase is linked, as well, to the ability of both the human community and the greater cosmos to build anew a world marked specifically as Indigenous. Tihei mauriora, indeed.

The link between operations of visual and aural empathy through various types of patterning leads to a third juxtaposition and a fourth primary text for analysis. Published in the 2003 anthology Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English, “Blood Quantum” by Naomi Losch provokes on a number of political and aesthetic levels. Of particular interest here are the poem’s strategic deployment of Hawaiian language and use of complex visual and aural patterning, which, for lack of a more precise term, I will call bilingual punning. Losch’s poem is written primarily in English. Similar to “Sad Joke on a Marae,” it includes several names of illustrious ancestors and of significant sites in the landscape (lines 2–4). “Blood Quantum” draws additional attention to Indigenous language, however, in its deployment of a single line written entirely in Hawaiian. Positioned at line 10 in the nineteen-line poem, the line divides the English-language text into equal halves. In effect, it forms an Indigenous fulcrum, with nine lines of English balanced above the Hawaiian and nine lines of English balanced below. In line 1, Losch’s speaker opens the first half, “We thought we were Hawaiian”; in line 11, which immediately follows the line of Hawaiian language and begins the second half, the speaker states, “And yet, by definition we are not Hawaiian.” Together, these lines describe a paradox of contemporary Indigenous identity created by official blood quantum standards that echoes Momaday’s paradox of space and time, “not here”/“am here”:

Blood Quantum

We thought we were Hawaiian

Our ancestors were Liloa, Kuali’i and Alapa’i.

We fought at Mokuohai, Kepaniwai, and Nu’uanu,

And we supported Lili’ulani in her time of need.

We opposed statehood.

We didn’t want to be the 49th or the 50th,

And once we were, 5(f) would take care of us.

But what is a native Hawaiian?

Aren’t we of this place?

“O ko mākou one hānau kēia.”

And yet, by definition, we are not Hawaiian.

We can’t live on Homestead land,

Nor can we receive OHA money.

We didn’t choose to quantify ourselves,

¼ to the left                            ½ to the right

⅜ to the left                            ⅝ to the right

7/16 to the left                        9/16 to the right

15/32 to the left                      17/32 to the right

They not only colonized us, they divided us.⁹

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

(Whetu Moana, 120)

The line of Hawaiian, moreover, is framed by quotation marks, drawing further attention to its difference: “‘O ko mākou one hānau kēia.’” The glossary included at the back of Whetu Moana translates this line into English as “This is our birthplace/homeland (a Hawaiian phrase)” (267). The translation makes clear that the line of Hawaiian is a response to the questions posed in the two lines immediately preceding it: “But what is a native Hawaiian? / Aren’t we of this place?” Losch’s poem articulates—and, in its columns of separated fractions, visually manifests—how U.S. federal and Hawaiian state governments have worked to divide the Hawaiian community through imposed policies, such as blood quantum requirements, that limit who can claim Hawaiian status and therefore access both to tangible resources, such as land, and to symbolic and social resources, such as recognition and legitimacy. The single line of Hawaiian works as an expression of collective Indigenous self-identification despite the pronouncements of official policies. It literally centers the ancestral, in the form of Hawaiian language, in a text that describes ongoing colonial practices of domination, division, and erasure.

Potentially more is asserted in the line than the fact that the Hawaiian Islands constitute an Indigenous “birthplace” or “homeland.” Literally, one hānau translates into English as “birthing sands.”¹⁰ As in the Māori language, in Hawaiian as a noun one refers most specifically to sand; hānau, like the Māori word whānau, refers to both giving birth and being born. The visual and aural patterns of these words create additional levels of meaning and aesthetic power. The Hawaiian word one is located at almost the horizontal center of line 10, the vertical center of the nineteen-line poem, with nine lines balanced above and nine balanced below. The line’s semantic content in Hawaiian thus locates sand/land at the center of this meditation on an embattled contemporary Hawaiian identity. In a poem that announces a quantitative and mathematical methodology as its subject—blood quantum and its colonial system for translating Indigenous identities into tables of descending fractions—Losch’s horizontal and vertical centering of Hawaiian language and sand/land can be read as an assertion of an alternative system for articulating Indigeneity. Where dominant, official policy measures fractionated “blood,” Losch responds with geographic coordinates, intersections of meridians and parallels. Determining location by means of these lines of longitude and latitude requires a fundamental plane from which to measure all possible positions within the system—that is, an equator. Losch’s line of Hawaiian language functions as this great, defining circle. It asserts an alternative system for reckoning Indigeneity measured not by “blood” but by enacted relationships to land.

In the otherwise English-language poem, the line of Hawaiian and its precise centering of sand/land draws attention, as well, to its potential to create bilingual punning. On the page, in its visual (alphabetic) representation, the Hawaiian word one (oh-nay) looks exactly like the English word one (wun). In other words, the Hawaiian and English terms are homographic (spelled the same) but heterophonic (sound different) and heteronymic (carry different meanings). At the geographic center of the poem, therefore, a bilingual pun joins the idea of land to the idea of unity (oneness), further supporting the poem’s activist message that all Hawaiians, regardless of their status under imposed rules of blood quantum, are united in their regenerative relationships to the homeland—one hānau, the place of giving birth and being born.

Within conventional English-language literary studies, we are accustomed to think that sound patterning and semantic relationships within poetic structures (including punning) work to “defamiliarize” the ordinary, to emphasize the possible connotations of a given word or set of words over their explicit denotation. As a form of wordplay, both monolingual and bilingual punning are typically deployed to create humorous or satiric effects. Losch’s Indigenous bilingual pun works toward different ends. To a greater degree than those of either monolingual or more typical bilingual puns, its effects are highly dependent not only on the specific and specialized linguistic skills of particular listeners or readers but also on their level of cultural and historical knowledge. For readers who are actively bilingual and bicultural, Losch’s pun offers the possibility of a synchral experience of (at least) two distinct language and cultural systems. Her bilingual pun is thus a form of repetition with variation. It is also a form of reiteration, saying the same thing and not saying exactly the same thing (at least) twice. Rather than defamiliarizing “ordinary” language, Losch’s Hawaiian–English bilingual pun works to create additional layers of meaning for particular audiences by engaging multiple denotations (both one as “sand/land” and one as “a single entity”), as well as multiple connotations (both “birthplace/homeland” and “unity/lack of division”). Instead of creating an obvious hierarchy of meaning, this bilingual punning stresses simultaneity. And this simultaneity is precisely the source of the Indigenous bilingual pun’s potential for political and aesthetic power.

Losch’s bilingual (and bicultural) punning responds to the ongoing subordination of Hawaiian individuals, communities, and culture within the (post)colonial context of the state of Hawai’i and to the ongoing subordination of Hawaiian language within the U.S. and global contexts of (post)colonial translation. Walter Mignolo, in Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (2000), describes similar interactions among colonial power relations, the history of translation, and contemporary discursive strategies produced from “subaltern” perspectives within Latin American and U.S. Latino contexts in terms of “languaging,” which he defines as “thinking and writing between languages” (226). More specifically, Mignolo analyzes “bilanguaging,” which he defines as “not precisely bilingualism where both languages are maintained in their purity” but rather a practice where both languages are maintained “at the same time in their asymmetry.” Such practices, Mignolo argues, are “not a grammatical but a political concern,” since “the focus of bilanguaging itself is redressing the asymmetry of languages and denouncing the coloniality of power and knowledge” (231). These concepts describe the conditions for the production and reception of Losch’s specific Indigenous pun. And they articulate the conditions for Indigenous literary production and reception more generally within contexts of settler colonialism, where Indigenous languages and cultures are engulfed and often overwhelmed by the sheer force of colonial languages and cultures and by a history of active suppression by imperial and settler governments.

Instances of what we might now call Indigenous bilanguaging can be either less or more overt than that evidenced in Losch’s “Blood Quantum.” Consider, for instance, a single sentence from the celebrated 1986 novel Potiki (The Final Born) by the Māori writer Patricia Grace. Although written primarily in English, Māori words and phrases appear throughout this text without direct translation or a glossary, and the novel’s final moment is rendered in an extended Māori passage with no translation. Thus, the novel’s overall linguistic composition reveals the status of te reo Māori within a New Zealand language hierarchy, as well as the role Māori language plays in ongoing Indigenous resistance to colonial and neocolonial power.¹¹ The sentence in question is written exclusively in English; for bilanguaging readers, however, it can produce effects similar to those of Losch’s more obvious bilingual pun:

Every day the sounds came closer until one day we could see the yellow cuttings that the yellow machines had made, and the yellow clothes and the yellow hard hats that the men wore who worked the yellow machines. (106; emphasis added)

Set in the early 1980s, Potiki narrates ongoing colonial relations between Māori and Pakeha through the story of a Māori family’s battles to save its homeland from developers who want to build a luxury resort there. The sentence appears at the point in the narrative when the developers attempt to physically force the Māori family off its land: with large earth-moving machines, they destroy the hills above the coastal village, causing dangerous flooding.

Grace’s sentence draws attention because it repeats the adjective yellow five times among the sentence’s thirty-nine words. The repetition connects the destruction of the land (“yellow cuttings”) to the earth-moving equipment (“yellow machines”) and to the working men—some of whom are Māori—forced to become agents of destruction through employment with the Pakeha company (“yellow clothes,” “yellow hard hats”). In addition, the repetition connects these elements to the European-derived cultural connotations and literary allusions of yellow, including negative associations of cowardice (yellow-bellied), disease (jaundice), insanity (the 1891 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman), irresponsible representation (yellow journalism), and greed (one of Christianity’s seven deadly sins). For actively bilingual and bicultural readers, the repetition of yellow and the aural and visual patterns it creates across the sentence can suggest that Grace’s strategy involves more than exclusively English-language and European-derived literary emphasis, connection, and allusion. Within the greater context of the novel, where the interplay of dominant English and subordinate Māori indicates more than a century of ongoing linguistic and cultural interactions, the repetition can suggest, as well, an active Indigenous negotiation—a Māori intervention within the lexical and semantic structures of (post)colonial New Zealand English.

One of the Māori translations for yellow is “renga.” As an adjective, renga can mean “yellow” or “light-colored.” When discussing water, it can also mean “discolored” or “turbid,” potential references to scenes earlier in Grace’s novel when the developers pollute the ocean near the Māori family’s home with runoff from their digging and when they dam the local stream in order to flood the family’s gardens and cemetery with muddy water. In other contexts renga can mean “scattered about,” a potential reference to the developers’ attempts to dislocate the family through tactics that include offers of service jobs and money, as well as verbal threats and physical violence. Renga can also be used as a verb, and then it means to “overflow” or “fill up,” more potential references to the flooding caused by the developers. Like many Māori words, renga can be doubled, producing the form rengarenga. As an adjective, in addition to “scattered about,” rengarenga can mean “crushed,” “pounded,” “destroyed,” and “beaten,” as well as “strident” and “raucous.” All of these meanings resonate in the scene described by the sentence and in the larger plot of the novel. In a subsequent scene a group of rangatahi, Māori young adults, destroy the yellow machines and effectively put an end to the developers’ digging, drawing positive connotations of “strident” and “raucous” to their activism (166).

Unlike Losch’s strategic positioning of the Hawaiian–English homograph “one/one,” Grace’s repetition of the English adjective “yellow” does not easily fit the typical definition of punning: a word or phrase that exploits confusion either between similar-sounding different words or between two senses of the same word. And yet, similar to Losch’s bilingual pun, the aural and visual patterning of Grace’s English-language sentence can provoke connections and allusions across English and Māori languages and Pakeha and Māori cultures. The interplay among the connotations the sentence and the scene accrue through the repetition of the English adjective yellow and the connotations added by an awareness of the multiple meanings of the Māori words renga and rengarenga create a potential third text. While the monolingual reader of English can understand the basic meaning of the sentence, the actively bilingual and bicultural reader—the bilanguaging reader of English and Māori—is privy to more complex associations and interpretations. In addition to pointing up the novel’s larger engagement with the asymmetrical power relations of colonial translation, the sentence points to an understanding of translation not simply as knowledge transference but also as knowledge production.

Indigenous bilanguaging—thinking and writing between languages, engaging the politics of their asymmetry within (post)colonial relations—can be more overt than either Losch’s single heteronym or Grace’s repetition of a single adjective. Cross-linguistic association and wordplay can actively display two (or more) languages side by side, so that readers have little choice but to register at least the potential for multiple meanings within gaps in translation and within the fertile interactions among words and phrases originating in different languages and cultures, especially when the languages and cultures in play are part of a (post)colonial hierarchy, as in Aotearoa New Zealand and other settler nations. When languages are presented together, of course, the potential effects of bilanguaging, like those of bilingual punning, are no less dependent on the language skills and cultural and historical knowledge of particular readers.

In Aotearoa New Zealand one encounters texts presented in side-by-side English and Māori versions with some regularity, especially within civic, governmental, and educational institutions. Both English and Māori are official languages of the contemporary settler nation-state, and publicly financed entities all bear two names. The dual name for the National Library of New Zealand/Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa, located in the capital city of Wellington, is a good example. The Māori version, typically positioned either directly below or directly to the right of the English version on official signs, documents, web pages, and so forth, is an approximate but not “equivalent” translation of the English. The English noun library, derived from the Latin for “book,” can be translated into Māori more directly as te whare pukapuka, “the book house.” The Māori phrase Te Puna Mātauranga, in contrast, can be translated into English as “The Knowledge Source” or “The Source of Knowledge.” The primary meaning of the noun puna is a “spring” (of water); in certain contexts it also can carry the connotation of tupuna, “ancestor.” The noun mātauranga, “knowledge,” derives from the verb mātau, which means “to know,” “to be acquainted with,” “to understand,” and so forth. From this reading, we might conclude that the Māori version is a metaphorical gloss for the more mundane English: rather than simply a place for storing the nation’s books (a national “book house”), the Māori metaphor reveals that the building and its textual contents can be conceived as a productive source—a natural “spring” and a generative “ancestor”—for the nation’s collective body of knowledge.¹² In this sense, the Māori-language version serves a complementary function to the English, one often assigned to (subordinated) Indigenous languages within colonial relations: placed in a position secondary to the imposed colonial language and allowed to provide linguistic “flare” and cultural “novelty” but no defining substance. Other, more activist readings of the bilanguaging practices evidenced in the dual name are possible, however, if readers reject the linguistic hierarchy imposed by settler colonialism and do not assume that translation works in only one direction.

A striking example of activist bilanguaging is evident in the signage produced for an exhibit that opened in April 2006 at the National Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, also located in Wellington. Titled Blood Earth Fire/Whāngai Whenua Ahi kā: The Transformation of Aotearoa New Zealand, the exhibit is described in promotional literature as “an extraordinary journey of discovery through the changing landscape of New Zealand” that “tells the dramatic story of how people have interacted with, and had an impact on, New Zealand’s land and resources over the last 800 years.” On the signage displayed inside the museum, in promotional posters, and in images on the museum’s website, the juxtaposition of English and Māori versions of the exhibit’s primary title create multiple visual patterns, including the alignments and spacing of individual words, the relative sizes of their typeface, and the use of contrasting colors. The English version typically is rendered in a larger and bolder typeface than the Māori. Against a black background, the larger English is colored white in contrast to the smaller Māori, colored red. These juxtapositions of size and color can suggest ongoing colonial hierarchies, as well as contemporary demographic realities in which Māori make up approximately 15 percent of the total population of Aotearoa New Zealand. The proximity of the words also can imply that the smaller Māori version is a direct or equivalent translation of the larger English rather than an additional, complementary, or alternative text. None of the English and Māori terms used in the title are either homophones or homographs; they neither sound nor look the same. For audiences limited to reading only the English, the exhibit in effect carries only a single meaningful title, although the presence of Māori language may suggest the possibility of additional or excess meaning.

This is not the case for an actively bilanguaging—bilingual, bicultural, and politically aware—audience. This audience may interpret the sign’s white and red lettering, set against a black background, as signaling visual empathy with the intertwining black, white, and red colors typical of kowhaiwhai scroll painting, often applied to the interior rafters of wharenui (meeting houses), that indicate genealogy as well as connection to the natural world. The combination of black, white, and red is often deployed in contemporary Māori artwork and in contemporary icons for Māori political organizing and activism. For this audience the exhibit carries at least two titles—and possibly three. There is the English title on its own, Blood Earth Fire; there is the Māori title on its own, Whāngai Whenua Ahi kā; and there is a potential third text created when bilingual and bicultural readers move back and forth among the three English-language and three Māori-language terms and their many possible connotations, allusions, and other associations, creating multiple sets and multiple patterns of juxtapositions, translations, interpretations, and situated meanings.¹³

The two versions of the title are not equivalent in any direct sense. The English terms fit the official description of the exhibit, in which the story of Aotearoa New Zealand is about a “changing landscape.” Part of the immediate appeal of these terms is their invocation of well-known, European-derived conceptions of the natural world as composed of primal elements: earth, air, fire, and water. The addition of “Blood” is startling, but it suggests the human drama driving the organization of an exhibit about the transformation of land. The sequence of English terms also invokes language that is specifically biblical—in particular, passages from the Old and New Testaments that describe the manifest power of the Judeo-Christian God to wreak destruction on His creation. Readers may recall, for example, Ezekiel 21:32: “You will be fuel for the fire, your blood will be in the midst of the land. You will not be remembered, for I, the Lord, have spoken”; Joel 2:30: “I will display wonders in the sky and on the earth, blood, fire and columns of smoke”; or Acts 2:19: “And I will grant wonders in the sky above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and vapors of smoke” (emphasis added). Flanked by “Blood” and “Fire,” the centered “Earth” of the English-language title appears distinctly imperiled. The juxtaposed Māori terms also fit the exhibit’s official description. At the same time, for readers fluent in Māori language and familiar with Māori culture, these terms invoke specific conceptions of social relationships and political organization. Whāngai literally means “to feed” or “to nourish” and is used to describe a type of kinship relation expressed in English by the related but distinct concepts of fostering or adopting a child. Whenua means “land,” the physical ground upon which we stand, but also carries the equally primary meaning of “placenta” or “afterbirth,” the nurturing soil of the womb. Finally, ahi kā means “burning fire,” a phrase that suggests human occupation keeps land “warm.” As discussed in relation to “Tangata Whenua,” ahi kā therefore connotes the concept of land rights asserted through continuous occupation.

Understood in their own linguistic and cultural contexts, the exhibit’s English and Māori titles, along with their immediate connotations, create a stark contrast. In conventional terms, we might say productive gaps exist between the translations; for bilingual and bicultural readers, these gaps create a highly charged intertext. In a 2003 follow-up to Local Histories/Global Designs, Walter Mignolo, collaborating with Freya Schiwy, investigates a specific example of bilanguaging, “a particular kind of translation/transculturation [. . .] in which a dense history of oppression and subalternization of language and knowledge is being unlocked.” Mignolo and Schiwy name this operation a “double translation” (10). This is a form of translation “in multiple directions” in which dominant, colonial thinking is “transformed” and “interpreted” according to the worldview of the subaltern (12). In Mignolo and Schiwy’s examples (speeches and published writing by leaders of the Zapatista activist movement in Mexico), double translation does not result from “first contact” but rather emerges “out of a border space where contact has already been taking place” (15). This context of ongoing contact is similar for the dual-language signage at the National Museum of New Zealand.

The concepts of bilanguaging and the double translation articulate the activist possibilities of the English–Māori intertext created by bilingual and bicultural readers of the museum signage. Consider the matrix in Figure 8 of associated concepts emanating from the dual-language exhibit title, rendered as lists extending above and below the three English and three Māori terms. These lists create distinct but related layers of bilingual and bicultural connotations, allusions, and associations. Reading across and among the English and Māori terms, the patterns of interplay demonstrate complex practices of bilanguaging and double translation that involve not simply linguistic substitutions but also cultural, social, and political reckoning. These practices are necessarily caught up in issues of identity and power. Within the specific context of a Māori response to the Pakeha museum, the patterns of interplay demonstrate a potential empathy with the customary practices of Māori whakapapa (genealogy). Whakapapa means not only “to recite in proper order” but also “to lay one thing upon another.” This empathy with whakapapa creates an additional discourse rhetorically more rich and politically more complex than that of either the sequences of English terms or Māori terms on their own. That is, it creates a double translation situated specifically within the (post)colonial history of Aotearoa New Zealand. Note, for instance, that potential interactions between “Whenua” and “Earth” are placed at the generative center of this matrix of terms. Beginning with the tension of this central juxtaposition, additional relationships can be traced either vertically or horizontally or through multiple combinations of vertical and horizontal “moves.” There are many provocative possibilities, and particular bilingual and bicultural—bilanguaging—readers will produce their own trajectories across and among the terms and their possible connotations, allusions, and associations.

One trajectory might begin vertically. “Whenua” does not immediately evoke the idea of “Earth,” especially with a capital E, which is typically translated into Māori as Papatūānuku (Earth mother). Rather, as noted, “Whenua” more immediately evokes the idea of land, the ground upon which we stand, as well as its other primary meaning, “placenta” or “afterbirth.” “Earth” links to “Whenua” through these connections: Papatūānuku and mother. “Whenua” also suggests the phrase tangata whenua, which translates into English as “land people” or “people of the land” and which, as discussed earlier, carries both the specific connotation of “local hosts,” as opposed to “traveling visitors,” and the more expansive connotation of “Indigenous.” “Earth,” as land and whenua, also suggests one of the Indigenous names for New Zealand, Aotearoa (Land of the Long White Cloud), which can also suggest a more specific Indigenous name for the North Island, Te Ika a Maui (The Fish of Maui). Te Papa, the museum housing the exhibit, is located in Wellington at Te Upoko o te Ika a Maui (The Head of the Fish of Maui).

The trajectory of relationships might then move horizontally. Maui is the Polynesian culture hero. In addition to being credited with fishing up the North Island, Te Ika a Maui, he is credited with harnessing the power of fire (ahi). Ahi suggests the phrase ahi kā (burning fire), a term connoting “continuous occupation of land” and, therefore, “land rights by occupation,” typically designated in Māori by the phrase ahi kā roa (the long-burning fire), a term for land rights that are ongoing so long as some part of the community remains on the land to keep it “warm.” In the stories about his life and exploits, Maui is the first whāngai, the first child to be fed and nourished by other than his own parents. Whāngai, literally “to feed” or “to nourish,” is used to describe a relationship expressed in English by the related but distinct concepts of fostering or adopting. Whāngai thus seems an odd choice to juxtapose with the English term blood, since European-derived cultures often draw a sharp distinction between children related to parents by blood and children who enter families through temporary fostering or permanent legal adoption. The word for literal blood in Māori is toto and can be associated with the story of how Maui fished Te Ika a Maui out of the sea: he used a magical fishhook made from the bone of an ancestor, smeared with blood from his own nose as bait. Blood can suggest the Māori concept of whanaunga (blood relations), which suggests the concept of whakapapa (genealogy). Whāngai relationships (fostering, adoption) place children within the matrix of whakapapa and secure relations.

Other possible trajectories abound. My point is that we can understand this overt juxtaposition of bilingual terms as Indigenous bilanguaging and double translation, related to Losch’s bilingual punning and to works of “trans-customary” art. Through its empathy with the customary practices of tracing relationships through the matrix of whakapapa, the bilingual title is able to provoke multiple messages, at least for certain audiences, including activist messages about land rights. “The changing landscape of New Zealand” is not simply natural but significantly political. As patrons of the National Museum of New Zealand enter the exhibit, they are confronted with the assertion of an enduring Aotearoa still “warmed” by ahi kā, Māori home fires—that is, a continuously occupied and nourishing Indigenous homeland.

It is tempting to return to the National Library’s official dual-language name, as well. For the bilanguaging reader, what kinds of activist messages are possible within its own matrix of juxtapositions? What pressure, for instance, might the Māori noun puna apply to the English adjective national?

Although “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919” contains no obvious bilingual puns, bilanguaging, or double translations, part of the power of the absence of Indigenous language in this text can be described by the concepts of synchral experience and simultaneity. In Momaday’s brief poem the emphasis placed on the sequences of genealogical terms “father’s father’s” and “grandfather, father, I” is suggestive of their equivalence. All of these subject positions—all of these “I’s”—are “beaded” together in the speaker’s experience of apparent paradox (“not here”/“am here”). As noted in chapter 3, in the Kiowa language the same word is used for the first-person singular and first-person plural pronouns, for both “I” and “we” (Boyd, 1:28). The majority of readers will be unaware of this linguistic fact and semantic potential. Yet the patterning of the poem’s English, its puns on words such as “eyes” and the visual and aural empathy created between “father’s father’s” and “grandfather, father, I,” produces a similar effect, especially read within the context of Indigenous responses to the 1992 Columbus quincentenary. Along with the speaker, at least some readers can experience the “I” of subjectivity understood not only in the (settler) singular but also in the (Indigenous) plural.

The idea of a single work creating different kinds of meaning for different audiences through a combination of visual and aural cues brings me to a fifth text and final juxtaposition. Rowley Habib’s poem “When I of Fish Eat” was first published in the September 1962 issue of the Department of Maori Affairs journal, Te Ao Hou, then edited by the Pakeha scholar of Māori language and literature Margaret Orbell. Part of Orbell’s contribution to the long-running journal was to improve the overall quality of its production and the aesthetic quality of its layout. In addition, with the assistance of her husband, the acclaimed Pakeha artist Gordon Walters, Orbell increased the number and quality of illustrations included in each issue.¹⁴ Habib’s poem is accompanied by two illustrations created by the (now) renowned Māori artist Ralph Hotere. Although I encountered Habib’s poem and Hotere’s drawings when I was first working with Momaday’s and Taylor’s poems, I did not see them as especially related until I encountered Upper Hutt Posse’s Māori-language rap and Losch’s Hawaiian–English bilingual pun.

Similar to “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919” and “Sad Joke on a Marae,” “When I of Fish Eat” stages a scene of emotional, psychological, and, especially, spiritual connection between the speaker and his Indigenous ancestors (see Figure 9). In Habib’s poem the connection between the contemporary and the ancestral is effected not through contact with ceremonial grounds but through the speaker’s act of eating fish “with knife and fork.” Through a series of explicit linguistic associations in English, the poem links the “sensual” act of eating fish to the “sacred” experience of “revelation.” The speaker experiences a vision of the Māori past, as well as a deep understanding of how that past exists in the present. Like Momaday’s poem, Habib’s is written entirely in English, but it, too, offers the potential of a synchral experience of English and Indigenous languages and cultural connotations. Hotere’s modernist line drawings, positioned above left and below right of the printed text, actively contribute to the poem’s ability to provoke, for certain readers, bilingual punning and Indigenous bilanguaging. More than illustration, Hotere’s pictorial frame offers a visual, perhaps pictographic interpretation of the poem’s dominant theme. For the actively bilingual and bicultural reader/viewer, these configurations of lines and shadows point toward Māori linguistic puns on the poem’s key English-language words and concepts.

The poem’s distinctive syntax and careful use of punctuation and line endings, along with several internal rhymes, alliterations, and repetitions, create formal rhythms and verbal patterning suggestive, foremost, of ritual recitation. Notice, for instance, the balanced and nearly palindromic sequence created across the poem by the purposeful placement and repetition of the rhyming adverbs of time “when” and “then” and their near rhyme, the comparative conjunction “than”—“when,” “when,” “then”; “than,” “than”; “then,” “then,” “when.” Notice, too, the strategic placement of the poem’s five semicolons and single colon. That the body of the poem is printed in italics only adds to the effect of speech that has been set apart. The poem’s specific content creates a chain of associations that resonate with the particular ritual of the Christian sacrament: “fish” is associated with “flesh,” which in turn is associated with “revelation” and “sacred,” and finally with “a parent.” The consumption of this flesh made sacred facilitates a communion with the spiritual father. At the same time, the poem resists reduction to a Christian formula. The explicit chain of linguistic associations that begins with “fish” also includes “forefathers,” “shores,” and “the sea.” While the act of eating the flesh of fish is explicitly named a “revelation,” it is the “sea” that is explicitly described as “something sacred,” “like a parent to me,” and “my forefathers’ very existence.” Although these “forefathers” are described as “fishermen,” linking them to Christ as a fisher of men, this act of communion connects the speaker with the sea god Tangaroa as much as with the Christian father.

Looking closely at the content of the poem, we realize that it does not, in fact, describe the speaker’s actual consumption of fish, but rather the moments between his act of breaking into segments the flesh “within my plate” “with knife and fork” and his act of “lift[ing] a morsel of fish to my mouth,” also with “knife and fork.” The poem describes and, in a sense, enacts the significant pause between the acts of breaking and consuming flesh. And it is within this pause that the speaker experiences his “revelation” of a spiritual connection to the ancestral. Positioning draws attention to the concrete details at the ends of the two opening and two closing lines that describe these acts of breaking and lifting: the “knife and fork,” which are the instruments of both the breaking and the lifting of flesh; “my plate,” which is the site of both the breaking of the flesh and its contemplation during the speaker’s revelation; and “my mouth,” the human aperture for ingestion, which is distinctly unlike the inanimate objects that precede it in the poem. Within the colonial history of Aotearoa New Zealand, knife, fork, and plate can be read as symbols of the European “civilization” brought by settler-invaders. In this reading, local nature, represented by the fish, is subjected to a colonial “civilizing” process that can connote not only the conventions of European-derived table manners but also the conventions of European-derived aesthetic display (the plate suggesting the white space of the gallery wall or museum case) and scientific study (the segmenting of flesh suggesting a form of dissection). Over the course of the poem, European processes of eating/displaying/dissecting are reconfigured as Māori customary practice, as ritual for remembering history.

The repetition of the phrase “with knife and fork,” which appears at the ends of the first and penultimate lines, emphasizes the European convention of holding the knife in the right hand and the fork in the left hand; the repeated phrase can be read “with right and left.” Here, we have the potential for a type of bilingual punning and for bilanguaging, thinking and writing between English and Māori languages and engaging the politics of their asymmetry within Aotearoa New Zealand. In Māori, right and left, matau and maui, carry multiple ritual connotations, including the idea, on the marae, of taha matau (the right side, usually designated for manuhiri, visitors) and taha maui (the left side, usually designated for tangata whenua, hosts). The emphasis on right and left, in other words, suggests a marae setting. We can now read the “plate” as suggesting a marae atea, the open space in front of the meeting house that is used during ceremonies where visitors (positioned on the right side) and hosts (positioned on the left side) formally encounter one another and exchange words and song before entering. When the connotative potential of the poem’s associations are combined with the connotative potential of these bilingual puns on “knife and fork,” a scene whose form is multiply recognizable as Pakeha can be reconfigured as the site of a distinctly Māori practice.

This potential reconfiguration of the European plate as a marae atea resonates with Jahnke’s analysis of contemporary Māori art installations. Jahnke argues that European-derived spaces for the public display of art, such as galleries or museums, are often reconfigured by Māori artists and curators to conform to Māori cultural practices and cultural conventions, such as those enacted on the marae or within the meeting house (“Voices,” 199). Similar reconfigurations of public spaces for display also occur in the staging of Māori theater, dance, and other performances. Jahnke names this reconfiguration of significant cultural spaces “the ritual seizure of site” (199). In a different context, I analyze the Indigenous appropriation and redeployment of the conventions of dominant discourses, such as the discourse of treaties, as an “activist occupation of significant sites of colonial discourse” (Blood Narrative, 21). Habib’s poem can be read as operating in this activist vein, performing what Jahnke calls an “act of cultural seizure” (197) in its movements to realign the mundane act of eating the flesh of fish, first, with the spiritual context of Christian communion and, then, with the customary paradigms of Māori rituals of encounter. In a sense, Habib’s associations make the speaker’s act of eating the flesh of fish doubly significant. These connotations of different kinds of ritual encounter also link Habib’s poem to similar encounters in Momaday’s and Taylor’s poems.

Hotere’s illustrations, in their potential to provoke further bilingual punning and bilanguaging, advance these kinds of realignments. The first drawing, a skeletal fish positioned above the title of the poem, emphasizes the horizontal line of the fish spine, which supports a string of intersecting, perpendicular bones, as well as the skeleton’s large, empty head and vacant eye. The second drawing, positioned below the text of the poem, represents a teeming mass of living fish. Each fish is formed by two intersecting arcs, in the style of the fish symbol for Christianity.¹⁵ The mass of fish is divided by a vertical line that suggests the act of fishing. This drawing emphasizes life and abundance, as well as vertical and horizontal movement. Both drawings emphasize intersections and the crossing of boundaries, again linking “When I of Fish Eat” to “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919” and “Sad Joke on a Marae.” Taken together, the drawings suggest the Christian idea of resurrection and illustrate a central paradox of Habib’s poem: consumption leads not to depletion but to increase. More specifically, this consumption leads to an increase of knowledge and a spiritual connection to the past. It is a version of the idea that life follows from death in a natural cycle. But Hotere’s visual frame does more than simply illustrate this aspect of Habib’s poem. For actively bilingual and bicultural readers/viewers, the drawings direct attention to specific words and concepts. These juxtapositions of graphic images and alphabetic writing signal specific bilingual puns and specific acts of bilanguaging that add additional meaning and aesthetic power to the experience of the poem.

The first drawing focuses attention on specific words in the first half of Habib’s poem, especially “fish,” “segments,” “flesh,” and associated concepts. The most common Māori word for “fish,” as both noun and verb, is ika. As a noun, ika can also be used figuratively to refer to any prized possession. (Historically, this includes warriors slain in battle or other kinds of victims.) In addition, ika is suggestive of Te Ika a Maui (The Fish of Maui), which is commonly used to refer to the North Island of Aotearoa and also can be used to refer to the group of stars known in English as the Milky Way. The poem’s “fish” is thus a prized possession linking the speaker not only to the sea but also to the land and cosmos.¹⁶ The drawing emphasizes not simply the fish, however, but more precisely the skeletal fish, that which is revealed when the speaker “break[s] the tender segments of fish within my plate”: it emphasizes the bones. In English this emphasis supports the paradoxical theme of life following death. In Māori the word for “bones” or “skeletal remains” is iwi, which also carries a primary meaning of “people” or “tribe” and, by extension, “nation.” A familiar Māori pun, e nga iwi o nga iwi (“the bones of the people” or “the people of the bones”), exploits the potential of these multiple meanings. Māori writer Keri Hulme draws on the connotative power of this pun in the title of her 1984 novel, The Bone People; the pun emphasizes the connections between the living community and the ancestors whose remains are buried in their homeland.

In “When I of Fish Eat,” the pun on iwi is highly productive of additional meaning. As the speaker segments the flesh of fish, he reveals the iwi, in the sense of the bones of the ancestors, and he is “pull[ed] back,” similar to the speakers in both Momaday’s and Taylor’s poems, to the iwi, in the sense of the ancestors, and to the land itself, the whenua—and, in the case of the North Island, the ika, the fish—that holds their remains. (As noted above, whenua carries the additional primary meaning of “afterbirth” or “placenta,” linking the land not only to ancestors and to Te Ika a Maui but also to the womb and, thus, regeneration.) We may infer that as a result of this revelation, the speaker is subsequently “pull[ed] back” to the iwi in the sense of the living community. Hotere’s drawing emphasizes this aspect of iwi in the way its components correspond to the parts of a meeting house, which is both the literal embodiment of the principal ancestor and the contemporary community’s meeting place. The central spine of the drawn fish can be read as the ridgepole (tahuhu) of a house, the backbone of the ancestor and his or her main line of descent; the intersecting bones can be read as the rafters (heke) of a house, the ancestor’s ribs and descent lines; the large head can be read as the front porch (mahau) of a house, with the mouth representing the doorway (kuwaha) and the eye the window (matapihi), the ancestor’s brains, mouth, and eye. Through this visual empathy, Hotere’s skeletal fish unites the primary meanings of iwi.

“People, tribe, or nation” is not a precise equivalent for one of these primary meanings of iwi, however, since the English words carry specific connotations of European-derived political and economic structures that do not convey the genealogical imperatives that underpin Māori customary concepts of social organization. As Jahnke explains:

The holistic union between the body as a critical notion of regeneration and nature as personification of being is often absent from contemporary translations of “iwi.” “Iwi” is more than “people” or “tribe.” It is the essential component of the spine, the fulcrum that articulates the nerve centre of Maori culture. It is the “bone” that protects the marrow of culture. It encompasses hapū [subtribe; to be pregnant] and whānau [extended family; to give birth or to be born] as sustenance for the regeneration of iwi. It exists as a cultural backbone whose strength and durability carry the essential ingredients of culture. The concept of nurture within the womb has been trivialized in the translation of “hapū” as sub-tribe. “Whānau,” in its colonized translation as “extended family,” is rendered as an economically viable unit. Unfortunately, the erasure of the inseparability of genealogy and birth in the latter translation epitomizes the imposition of Pakeha terms of reference. As such these colonial categories of capture attempt to render the metaphysical as illogical or human potential as capitalist units of production or servitude. (“Voices,” 196)

Jahnke’s explanation points up both the inadequacy of these common English translations for key Māori concepts and their potential for colonial distortion and appropriation. For the purposes of the present discussion, Jahnke’s explanation also points up the centrality of the theme of regeneration in Habib’s text and Hotere’s drawings, which work together to link the idea of the regeneration of the human body and human community to both natural and spiritual worlds. Indeed, as the above juxtapositions demonstrate, complex understandings of regeneration are central not only to the texts produced by Habib and Hotere but also to those produced by Momaday, Taylor, Upper Hutt Posse, and Losch.

Hotere’s second drawing is linked thematically to the first—both evoke ideas related to “fish”—but the mass of living fish also can direct attention to the specific word “aboundingness” in the second half of Habib’s poem. This word already draws attention as a neologism in English. If the reader has knowledge of te reo Māori, this joining of the adjective abounding with the noun suffix -ness can be read as following a similar pattern for creating new nouns in Māori by adding the noun suffix -tanga. In addition, linking “fish” and “aboundingness” in Māori is suggestive of an alternative word to ika. Among Hotere’s Te Aupouri iwi (tribal group), ika is often avoided as a word for “fish” because Te Aupouri venerate a famous ancestor named Te Ika Nui (The Great Fish). In place of ika, Te Aupouri may substitute ngohi, which carries the connotation of “hundreds” or, more generally, “abundance,” alluding to the experience of generous fishing grounds off the coast of the Te Aupouri homeland in the far north of the North Island (the Tail of the Fish of Maui).¹⁷ In H. M. Ngata’s English–Maori Dictionary, the first Māori translation given for abound is “hāwere” (plentiful, prolific; a variety of kumara [sweet potato]). Ngata gives the following example of its use: “I te ūnga mai o Kupe ki konei, hāwere ana te ika i te moana” (When Kupe landed here, fish abounded in the sea). In the association of hāwere with a variety of kumara, a staple food, fishing is linked to horticulture, the abundance of the sea to that of the land, emphasizing the sustenance of the community.

The vertical line dividing the mass of fish in Hotere’s second drawing suggests a fishing line (hī ika, to catch fish with a line and hook), although neither the fisherman nor the hook is represented on the page. These absences, in other words, are productive. Like Momaday’s absent Indigenous language in “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919,” the absences at the ends of Hotere’s vertical line can produce meaning and aesthetic power, but such production depends on the specific knowledge of particular audiences, including the knowledge of other texts. Two “other” texts are immediately available to help interpret these absences: Habib’s poem, which explicitly invokes images of fishermen and fishing, and Hotere’s first drawing, which implicitly emphasizes the horizontal fish spine. The spine of the skeletal fish suggests not only a ridgepole in a meeting house but also a horizon line. Note that either end of this line extends beyond the perpendicular lines of the intersecting fish bones. Similarly, the vertical line in the second drawing suggests a border that extends beyond the immediate, visible scene. This border is actively crossed by the mass of fish. Their movement is oriented from the right (taha matau, the side of visitors on the marae) toward the left (taha maui, the side of hosts). At this point in the analysis, we may suddenly notice that in the first drawing the skeletal fish is oriented so that it faces toward the right.¹⁸

The spatial arrangements and specific orientations of Hotere’s line drawings thematize interpretive movements in multiple directions and argue for their productiveness for multiple audiences. Both the individual drawings and the graphic relationships between them signal the potential for bilingual punning and Indigenous bilanguaging in Habib’s English-language poem. For bilingual and bicultural readers/viewers, these multiple interactions among graphic and linguistic elements add complexity to understandings of the written text’s “meaning” and depth to experiences of its aesthetic power. Hotere’s drawings provide something of a Māori-language gloss for Habib’s English-language text. Although that characterization does not feel fully adequate, it is interesting to note that, in 2006, when Habib reprinted this early poem as part of the first volume of his collected works—on its own, without Hotere’s evocative drawings—he revised its title from the original, monolingual “When I of Fish Eat” to the overtly bilingual “Ika (Fish)” (73).

At first glance, Habib’s revision simply rehearses a typical scene of (post)colonial translation. Positioned on the left side of this conventional juxtaposition, the unmarked ika indicates the priority of the Māori term’s role as exotic object, as a “source” language in need of explanation; positioned on the right side, the English term fish, marked by punctuation, indicates its complementary role as the “target” language that not only explains the exotic term preceding it but also contains the potentially multiple meanings of that term through the juxtaposition’s suggestion of equivalence and substitution. In the conventional practice, monolingual readers of English are invited to equate ika with fish. Similar to Hotere’s drawings, though, the spatial arrangements and use of punctuation in the bilingual title also enact practices of Indigenous bilanguaging. For bilingual and bicultural readers, the juxtaposition of Māori and English terms can be seen as binding them together in a productive tension. The curved brackets of parentheses not only suggest translation as a process of substitution but reveal the direction of that substitution and engage its particular politics within the (post)colonial context of Aotearoa New Zealand. The placement of the unmarked—or, more precisely, the unenclosed and unrestricted—Māori term on the left side of the bilingual title not only indicates its role as a “source” language for (post)colonial translation but also suggests its enduring occupation of taha maui, the side of tangata whenua (hosts) on the marae. Similarly, the placement of the marked—enclosed and restricted—English term on the right side not only indicates its role as the “target” language of (post)colonial translation but also suggests its assigned position of taha matau, the side of manuhiri (visitors) on the marae. We might note, too, that parentheses are conventionally used to indicate not only the process of translation but also the source of quotation, paraphrase, or summary, as in an academic citation. In this way, Habib’s bilingual revision acknowledges its monolingual source, again enacting practices of bilanguaging.

More subtly, Habib’s revised title suggests key aspects of Hotere’s second drawing, the teeming mass of fish that cross the seemingly infinite border of the drawing’s central vertical line i matau ki maui, from right to left. The intersecting arcs that form the fish symbol for Christianity, repeated over and over in Hotere’s drawing, have been separated, rotated, and further abstracted into the mirrored brackets of the parentheses placed around the English term fish. The recognition sign for belief in the Christ who died on the cross is remade into a recognition sign for the asymmetrical process of (post)colonial translation, in which “to carry across” often meant—and often continues to mean—“to carry a cross.” In these ways the revised title points to the power of Hotere’s original graphic gloss, how it can highlight the poem’s participation in an ongoing Māori negotiation with the colonial power of English-language, European-derived Pakeha culture and, perhaps especially, imported Christianity. The poem’s explicit Christian symbolism is reconfigured—but not erased—through visual and aural empathy with Māori customary practices. That symbolism becomes multivalent and more complex. Along with the poem’s speaker, bilanguaging readers are invited, perhaps provoked, to contemplate various “shores”—horizons, borders—“not yet trodden by white men.” For these readers “(Fish)” contextualizes and complicates but cannot contain “Ika.”

The series of juxtapositions among texts by Momaday, Taylor, Upper Hutt Posse, Losch, Habib, and Hotere highlights the ability of English-language poems to resonate with meaning and aesthetic power that can be marked as specifically Indigenous. Although radically diverse in many respects, these contemporary compositions offer up mutually recognizable symbols of Indigenous persistence and renewal—Momaday’s gift horse, Taylor’s ancestral tongue, Upper Hutt Posse’s tribal acoustics, Losch’s birthing sands, Habib’s and Hotere’s fish—as well as mutually empowering poetic strategies for articulating their activist claims. These juxtapositions also suggest that reading across texts offers a number of avenues for Indigenized methodologies of literary analysis and interpretation. Paradigms for juxtaposition, which I describe throughout this book as trans-Indigenous, do not obligate scholars to force diverse Indigenous texts from distinct Indigenous worldviews and from distinct Indigenous histories into categories of sameness. On the contrary, radical literary comparison through Indigenous juxtapositions can provoke more complex analyses of specific texts. “Moving differently” will not produce definitive readings, but it will place a more consistent and productive emphasis on the intellectual and artistic sovereignty of Indigenous writing (primarily) in English.

To bring the diverse engagements and “different” movements of this chapter to closure, I conclude with a final set of Indigenous juxtapositions that trace the process through which a “local” Indigenous text was revisioned as self-consciously “global.” In this process, linked as it is to the pursuit of international audiences and global capital, we can discern a (not so) surprising movement away from privileging the practices of Indigenous bilanguaging and multimedia expression toward the primacy of English translation, substitution, and representational simplification. This set of juxtapositions involves the several editions of The Whale Rider, Witi Ihimaera’s humorous, politically savvy, and highly engaging novel for young adults. Although first published in Aotearoa New Zealand in 1987, Ihimaera’s story of a young girl destined to become a leader in her rural community is best known in the United States (and elsewhere) in its adaptation to the internationally financed feature film Whale Rider, directed by the Pakeha filmmaker Niki Caro and released in 2003.¹⁹ This circuitous route to a U.S. audience is ironic, since Ihimaera drafted the original version of the novel in New York City while on diplomatic assignment for New Zealand. As he writes in his 2003 author’s note, “In this American edition, The Whale Rider makes a return visit to the country in which it was written” (n.p.). I leave it to others to trace the considerable changes Caro and her production team made in adapting and updating Ihimaera’s representation of East Coast Māori culture, history, politics, gender relations, and spirituality into a film for global and, perhaps especially, U.S. consumption. Instead, I focus on the changes Ihimaera himself made for the U.S./international edition of his novel, released as a marketing tie-in for the film’s U.S. distribution.

The changes to the print text are more difficult to chart than are the more dramatic changes made for the film. For example, Caro all but eliminates the several scenes in the novel written from the perspective of a pod of migrating whales, which in the original text accentuate the mythic dimensions of the story and voice protest against nuclear testing in the Pacific and its devastating impact on the environment. These scenes would have been difficult to re-create on screen without breaking the film’s predominantly realistic conventions. In place of Ihimaera’s original five brief chapters of contemporary description, memories, and dialogue from the whales’ perspectives, Caro substitutes documentary footage of whales at sea, overdubbed with haunting, ethereal music. In contrast, the U.S. edition of the novel retains Ihimaera’s original chapters but revises their diction. Although subtle, these changes to the language of the U.S. edition are nonetheless significant in their effects. While international audiences of Caro’s film can assess the merits of her work as an audio-visual “version” or “translation” of the novel The Whale Rider, the U.S. audience has little choice but to read the U.S. edition as an accurate representation—a verbatim copy—of Ihimaera’s original. Since no version of the novel was widely available outside Aotearoa New Zealand until 2003, few U.S. or other international readers will have access to the New Zealand edition, and few are likely to make comparisons. For most it will be as though the New Zealand edition never existed. It is only when the several editions are placed side by side that the full extent and impact of Ihimaera’s translations, substitutions, and deletions become evident.

Similar to Patricia Grace in her 1986 novel Potiki, in the original 1987 edition of The Whale Rider Ihimaera employs Māori-language words and phrases without italics (a common practice in Aotearoa New Zealand), mostly without direct translation in the text and without a glossary. This first version of The Whale Rider also includes six grayscale illustrations by the Māori artist John Hovell. In each of the novel’s six sections, the section title appears on its own page, followed by its corresponding grayscale illustration printed across two open pages, followed by the numbered chapters of the section. Hovell’s evocative illustrations are “trans-customary,” following Jahnke’s definition, in that they demonstrate visual empathy with the curvilinear patterns of Māori carving in wood, stone, and bone, evoking koru (spiral) and matau (fishhook) designs, especially in their stylized depictions of adult whales and calves. Several demonstrate empathy, as well, with broader Polynesian visual art practices, such as the distinctive geometric patterning of tapa (bark cloth) and the distinctive floral patterning of other textiles and with European visual art practices, such as the distinctive patterning of stained-glass windows in Christian churches.

In 1995, in the wake of successful Māori-language activism in the 1980s, a Māori-language edition of The Whale Rider was published in Aotearoa New Zealand under the title Te Kaieke Tohorā, translated by the Māori language and culture specialist Timoti Karetu. This version is faithful to Ihimaera’s original, and it reprints Hovell’s six grayscale illustrations. However, Karetu’s monolingual Māori translation is unable to maintain at least one defining aspect of Ihimaera’s original. In the first edition Ihimaera repeatedly juxtaposes Māori and English words and phrases. These juxtapositions of language systems are productive throughout, but they are especially central to chapter 19 in the epilogue, the final section written from the perspective of the whales, since the whales’ dialogue is rendered exclusively in Māori without translation. The potential aesthetic and, importantly, cultural and political effects of these juxtapositions are necessarily lost in Karetu’s monolingual translation to Māori.

In 2003, the novel was published for the first time in the United States, again in the original English, as a marketing tie-in for the award-winning international film Whale Rider. In this third version, published under the original title, Ihimaera translates a significant portion of the Māori language included in the New Zealand edition into English; he deletes certain Māori passages altogether; he places the novel’s remaining Māori in italics, following U.S. rather than New Zealand publishing conventions, marking Māori language as “foreign”; and finally, he creates a glossary of English translations for the remaining eighty-six “foreign” Māori words and phrases.²⁰ Not surprisingly, the U.S. edition replaces New Zealand (British) spellings with American spellings. And perhaps understandably, as part of its marketing function, the U.S. edition features photographic stills from the film Whale Rider on its covers. Less expectedly, this third edition deletes Hovell’s grayscale illustrations and does not replace them with either new illustrations or film stills. Instead, the first page of each section and the first page of each chapter feature a less evocative graphic of a faded koru (spiral figure).

It would require an additional chapter to fully juxtapose these three editions of Ihimaera’s novel and explicate the different effects created by each version’s specific deployments or deletions of English and Māori languages and Hovell’s illustrations.²¹ To close this chapter, I juxtapose three brief passages to demonstrate how the different versions privilege—and thus acknowledge—different categories of readers. Similar to Habib’s “When I of Fish Eat” and Grace’s Potiki, the first edition privileges bilanguaging readers of Māori and English. These actively bilingual and bicultural readers have access to more of the novel’s potential meaning than do monolingual or monocultural readers of English. In an obvious contrast, the second edition, the Māori-language translation, privileges bilingual readers of Māori and English. In 1995, as well as today, few if any potential readers in Aotearoa New Zealand (or elsewhere) will be monolingual readers of Māori. The most likely audience for the second edition is current or former students of Māori language, who will likely have access to the original edition for comparison. Finally, the third edition privileges U.S. (and international) readers with limited or no knowledge of Māori language or culture. This audience is unlikely to have access to the original edition and may be unaware of its existence.

Many of the differences across the three editions reflect relatively minor changes, especially when considered separately. Their individual effects are often subtle. Consider, for instance, the opening sentences from the novel’s prologue. In the 1987 New Zealand edition, the prologue is titled “The Coming of Kahutia Te Rangi”; in the 1995 Māori-language translation, it is titled, similarly, “Te Haerenga mai o Kahutia-te-rangi”; in the 2003 U.S. edition, it is revised as “The Whale Rider.”²² Kahutia Te Rangi is the name of a legendary ancestor, also known as Paikea, who journeyed from central Polynesia to the east coast of Aotearoa riding on the back of a whale. His mythic story and its cultural symbolism underpin the novel’s contemporary conflicts and resolution. In the juxtapositions below, I have added italics to draw attention to elements that change across the three versions:

In the old days, in the years that have gone before us, the land and sea felt a great emptiness, a yearning. The mountains were like the poutama, the stairway to heaven, and the lush green rainforest was a rippling kakahu of many colours. The sky was iridescent paua, swirling with the kowhaiwhai patterns of wind and clouds; sometimes it reflected the prisms of rainbow or southern aurora. The sea was ever-changing pounamu, shimmering and seamless to the sky. (1987, 4)

I ngā rā o nehe, i ngā tau o mua noa atu i a tātou, e kuatau ana te whenua me te moana, i te hematanga o te rangi me te whenua. Ko ngā maunga i rite tonu ki te poutama, te ara piki ki te rangi, ā, ko te ngahere e matomato ana, e mata ana anō nei he kākahu tae huhua e hāki ana. Anō nei he kākara pāua te rangi, i reira e koromiomio ana te hau me te kapua, pēnei i te kōwhaiwhai, he wā anō whakaatatia ai ngā mata tīhoi o te kōpere, o te hīnga ake rānei o te rā i te tonga. Ko te moana anō nei he pounamu e rite tonu ana te huri o te āhua, e ārohirohi ana, e maurua kore ana, ā, tae noa ki te rangi. (1995, 10)

In the old days, in the years that have gone before us, the land and sea felt a great emptiness, a yearning. The mountains were like a stairway to heaven, and the lush green rainforest was a rippling cloak of many colors. The sky was iridescent, swirling with the patterns of wind and clouds; sometimes it reflected the prisms of rainbow or southern aurora. The sea was ever-changing, shimmering and seamless to the sky. (2003, 3)

In the original New Zealand edition, Ihimaera’s imagery evokes the customary practices of Māori arts, several of which are typically associated with the wharenui (meeting house), as well as artistic materials indigenous to Aotearoa and the waters off its coasts. The poutama, “stairway to heaven,” is a pattern often used in woven tutkutuku panels placed between carvings on the interior walls of meeting houses. Similarly, the exposed rafters of meetings houses are often painted with highly stylized kowhaiwhai patterns, which reference elements of the natural world and indicate whakapapa (genealogy). The shell of the pāua, a species of abalone, is often used to decorate the eyes of ancestors carved on the meeting house’s exterior and interior walls; pāua also is used to decorate other types of carving. A kakahu can be described as a “cloak” or “cape,” but in the context of “a rippling kakahu of many colours,” it suggests, more specifically, a customary and highly prized Māori garment decorated with the bright feathers of birds. Pounamu refers to nephrite jade or “greenstone,” which is indigenous to the South Island of Aotearoa (in Māori, Te Wai Pounamu, “The Greenstone Waters”); this stone occurs naturally in many color variations, from dark to milky green, and is highly prized as a medium for carving. Traditional stories link pounamu’s creation to the sea.

Taken together, these elements from the opening sentences of the 1987 edition situate Ihimaera’s story within a world distinctly Māori. The passage is preceded by the prologue’s title, which invokes the name of the Māori ancestor who became “the whale rider,” as well as by Hovell’s first grayscale illustration, which depicts this ancestor riding the famous whale across the sea. In Hovell’s stylized image, the face of the ancestor features prominent moko, distinctive Māori tattooing. The whale he rides demonstrates visual empathy with the customary practices of Māori carving; unlike the face of the ancestor, which is highly representational, the head of the whale has been abstracted into a series of interlocking koru (spirals). The waves of the sea are similarly abstracted, creating the suggestion of vitality and movement. Not surprisingly, all of the above elements are carried over in the 1995 Māori-language translation, with the exception of Ihimaera’s original juxtaposition of Māori and English. (Karetu even maintains Ihimaera’s explanation of the poutama as “the stairway to heaven”: “te ara piki ki te rangi.”) In stark contrast, all of the specifically Māori elements from the first edition are either deleted from the 2003 U.S. edition or translated into a less specific English-language term or phrase. No Māori terms remain in the passage, and thus, no juxtapositions remain of Māori and English. This edition deletes Hovell’s illustration and its trans-customary visual effects. The overall impact is to make the passage less distinctly Māori and less rich in terms of its imagery and symbolism. Arguably, though, these changes do not significantly alter the narrative or its impact.

Now consider the three versions of a brief passage taken from the final paragraphs of the prologue, which provide information essential to the novel’s main plotline and eventual resolution. Again, I have added italics to indicate elements that change:

He [the whale rider] saw far off the land long sought and now found, and he began to fling small spears of mauri seaward and landward on his magnificent journey toward the land.

Some of the mauri in mid flight turned into pigeons. (1987, 6)

Ka kite atu i te whenua i tawhiti, kua roa e kimihia ana, ā, i nāianei kua kitea ka tīmata tana hōreke tao iti, tao mauri ki uta, ki tai i a ia e rere whakahirahira rā ki uta.

Ko ētahi o ngā mauri i te wā e rere tonu ana i huri hei kererū. (1995, 12)

He [the whale rider] saw far off the land long sought and now found, and he began to fling small spears seaward and landward on his magnificent journey toward the land.

Some of the spears in midflight turned into pigeons. (2003, 6)

Although these changes are similar to those in the first passage, the effect of deleting the Māori term mauri from the 2003 U.S. edition is far more significant than the earlier deletions of poutama, kakahu, paua, kowhaiwhai, and pounamu. Mauri is typically translated into English as “life force” or “life principle.” (Recall the discussion of the formulaic phrase Tihei mauri ora, “the sneeze of life.”) Mauri also can mean a material symbol of a specific life force. In Ihimaera’s original version, one of the whale rider’s “small spears of mauri” represents the specific life force of pigeons; he carries this force to Aotearoa to animate its forests. As the passage continues, another mauri flung by the whale rider toward the sea represents the specific life force of eels, which then animates the surrounding waters. In the original edition, “spears” describes the shape of the mauri, these material symbols of animating life force brought from central Polynesia to Aotearoa. This adjectival use of “spears” carries over in the 1995 Māori translation. In the U.S. edition, however, “spears” becomes the significant noun, which for U.S. (or international) readers with limited or no knowledge of Māori language or culture, cannot signify “animating life force.” In the revised passage the whale rider flings “small spears” toward the land and sea; readers are left to wonder why these inanimate objects, typically associated with violence, magically transform into pigeons and eels. As the novel develops, the deletion of the spiritual and philosophical concept of mauri affects the audience’s ability to make sense of the narrative’s central conflict and ultimate resolution, which hinges on understanding that the contemporary whale rider, a young girl, is connected to one of these “spears of mauri” brought to Aotearoa by her ancestor, the original whale rider. The specific animating life force of this mauri has been held in reserve until needed by the community.²³

Finally, consider the three versions of a passage that occurs in the epilogue, the full understanding of which also depends on the spiritual and philosophical concept of mauri. The epilogue includes chapter 19, one of five written from the perspective of the whales at sea; like the others, chapter 19 is printed in italics in all three editions, which I have omitted for ease of analysis. As in the previous examples, I have added italics to highlight elements that change across the versions:

The kai karanga saw the toa taiaha preparing to give her a sharp nip in the behind. She moved quickly toward the koroua and let a fin accidentally on purpose caress the place of his deepest pleasure. “Engari,” she told the koroua, “i titiro ahau i te tekoteko, aua.” She gave her head two shakes to emphasise that when she had looked at the tekoteko it didn’t look like Paikea at all. Instead, the tekoteko looked like a human girl. “He mokopuna na Paikea, pea?” she asked modestly. “He mauri no Paikea?” Her song inflected the questions with graceful ornamentation. (1987, 114)

Kua kite atu te kaikaranga i te toa taiaha e whakatika ana ki te wero mai i a ia ki te tou. Tere tonu tana neke atu ki te koroua ka tuku i tētahi o ana pakipaki kia pā noa tau ki te wāhi o te koroua e tino rongo ai ia i te reka, anō nei i tūpono noa engari he mea āta whakapā atu e te kaikaranga. Ka kī atu ia ki te koroua, “Engari i titiro atu ahau ki te tekoteko, aua.” E rua ngā rūrūtanga i tōna māhunga hei whakaū noa i tāna kōrero i a ia i titiro atu ai ki te tekoteko kāore i rite ki a Paikea te āhua. I rite kē te tekoteko ki te kōtiro, tangata nei. Ka pātai ia me te paku whakamā anō, “He mokopuna pea nā Paikea? He mauri nō Paikea?” Ko tana waiata i pātai i ana pātai me ngā whakapaipai i te taha. (1995, 135)

The old mother whale saw the warrior whales preparing to give her a sharp nip in the behind. She moved quickly toward the ancient bull whale and let a fin accidentally on purpose caress the place of his deepest pleasure. “But,” she told him, “I can see the rider and it’s not who you think it is.” She gave her head two shakes to emphasize that when she had looked at the rider, it didn’t look like Paikea at all. Instead, the rider looked like a human girl. “Perhaps it’s a descendant of your lord?” she asked modestly. “Think back, husband.” Her song inflected the questions with graceful ornamentation. (2003, 140–41)

Similar to the first example, the 1987 New Zealand edition resonates with specifically Māori imagery and deploys Māori language that is either revised or deleted in the 2003 U.S. edition. The “tekoteko” of the original, for instance, is not equivalent to the “rider” of the revision; rather, as discussed in relation to “Sad Joke on a Marae,” tekoteko refers to a carving of an ancestor, such as that placed on the gable of a meeting house. Thus, the imagery of the original aligns the young girl riding the whale with her significant ancestor, Paikea, whose carved likeness sits atop the community’s house. This alignment is emphasized, as well, in Hovell’s final grayscale illustration, which precedes the epilogue in the original and Māori translation editions. The girl riding the whale is positioned as a mirror image of her ancestor riding the whale in the first illustration. The head of the whale she rides is similarly abstracted into interlocking koru (spirals). Where her ancestor is depicted amid abstracted representations of waves moving in the sea, indicating perhaps his isolation during migration, the girl is depicted amid stylized representations of other whales, which demonstrate visual empathy with matau (fishhook designs) and other customary Māori icons and which indicate the girl’s integration within a vibrant community.

The language of the original version, moreover, evokes a specifically Māori familial and social world, creating parallels between the individual whales and members of the human community. The Māori “kai karanga,” for example, does not translate into English literally as the “old mother whale,” as the U.S. edition suggests, but rather designates the senior female elder responsible for performing the karanga (call) that brings visitors onto the marae, aligning her with Nanny Flowers, the young girl’s great-grandmother, and emphasizing less her age or role as a mother figure and more her gendered social power within the community. Similarly, “toa taiaha” does not translate literally as “warrior whales” but designates a warrior (toa) skilled in the martial art of the taiaha (fighting staff), a traditional weapon, aligning him with the young men of the community who work to maintain Māori traditions. And “koroua” does not translate literally as the “ancient bull whale” but designates a male elder, aligning him with Koro Apirana, the young girl’s great-grandfather, and emphasizing his genealogical relationships to the larger community and his social, political, and spiritual responsibilities as its leader.

In addition to these changes, the U.S. edition again deletes the significant concept of mauri. In the first and second versions, the wise kai karanga asks the koroua, who mourns the loss of the original whale rider, not one but two distinct questions: first, if the person riding the koroua’s back might be a descendant (mokopuna) belonging to Paikea and, second, if this person might be a mauri belonging to Paikea. The grammatical construction of the Māori-language dialogue both in the original and in the Māori translation distinguishes between two categories of “belonging to.” When the kai karanga refers to the possibility that the rider is a mokopuna, she uses “na,” indicating Paikea’s dominant possession of his possible descendant—that is, indicating that ancestors are dominant in relation to their descendants. When she refers to the possibility that the rider is a mauri, she uses the contrasting “no,” indicating Paikea’s subordinate possession of this possible animating life force—that is, indicating that all humans, including illustrious ancestors, are subordinate in relation to spiritual forces. Thus, in the concise grammar of the original dialogue, the kai karanga suggests that the contemporary girl riding the koroua occupies a complex position vis-à-vis both the whale pod and the human community—as well as vis-à-vis both the past and the present—a mediating position that is socially and spiritually potent. This meaning is lost in the Māori deletions and English substitutions of the U.S. edition.²⁴

These brief examples indicate the kinds of changes Ihimaera made in revising The Whale Rider for U.S. and international audiences. Most of these readers likely came to the novel through its association with the international film Whale Rider rather than through its association with Ihimaera, Māori language, or Māori culture. Part of the activist potential of Ihimaera’s original version lies in its visible—and, read aloud, audible—process of bilanguaging, its Indigenous intervention within New Zealand English, its production of meaning from within the linguistic and cultural space between Māori and English languages, and its active engagement with the politics of their asymmetry in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand. The 1987 edition privileges—and thus acknowledges—a bilanguaging audience. The 1995 Māori-language translation declares its own activist potential: its very existence argues for the ongoing vitality of te reo Māori, its ability to adapt to alphabetic writing and to the conventions of longer works of prose fiction. It asserts an audience of readers of te reo. In practice, the majority (if not all) of these readers will be bilingual readers of Māori and English rather than monolingual readers of Māori. They will have access to the original as a resource, making the two versions an excellent pedagogical tool in the ongoing activist promotion of Māori-language literacy. One can imagine a future, fully bilingual edition that maintains the original’s practices of bilanguaging by juxtaposing the two versions on facing pages. The U.S. edition, however, in both its minor and more significant changes, revises or deletes much of the original version’s potential for Indigenous bilanguaging. In the process, these changes undermine much of the novel’s potential to contribute to Indigenous activism abroad, especially its potential for specifically literary assertions of artistic sovereignty.

The trajectory of Ihimaera’s revision process represents one possible, perhaps unanticipated result of attempting to revision the Indigenous “local” as the self-consciously Indigenous “global.” Although successful in its wide distribution for bringing attention (and, no doubt, tourism) to New Zealand, the U.S. edition of The Whale Rider is less successful as a distinctly Māori text. The contrast with Momaday’s trajectory in producing “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919” from “The Gourd Dancer” and The Names is instructive. Whereas Momaday moves toward condensation, Indigenous aesthetics, and situated exposition in the several versions that he authored, from the mid-1970s into the 1990s, of the story of the giveaway that honored his grandfather, Ihimaera moves toward expansiveness, globalized aesthetics, and situated opacity (those unexplained “spears”) in retrofitting his 1987 novel for the world market in 2003. Where Momaday asks audiences to work harder at Indigenous interpretation and, in essence, to understand more in order to fully appreciate and enjoy his work on its own terms, Ihimaera invites audiences to assume they already understand everything they might need or want to know.