Te Moana-Nui-a-Kiwa, Māori in Te Ao Moemoea
Sarah Aroha Rameka Scott / Kōtare (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Kangaru)
This is dedicated to my mother, a Māori woman who was displaced, disenfranchised, and diagnosed with cancer this month.
KIA ORA TATOU!
Greetings all!
KO TE AHUAHU TE MAUNGA
Te Ahuahu is the mountain
KO WAITANGI TE AWA
Waitangi is the river
KO WAIMATE NORTH AHAU
I am from Waimate North
KO MAHANGA TOKU WHĀNAU
Mahanga is my family
KO SARAH AROHA RAMEKA SCOTT TOKU INGOA
My name is Sarah Aroha Rameka Scott
One in five Māori now live in Te Ao Moemoea (The Land of the Dreaming, or ‘Australia’). Most Māori are forced to migrate from Aotearoa (New Zealand) across Te Moana-Nui-a-Kiwa (the Pacific Ocean), specifically Te Tai-o-Rehua (the ‘Tasman Sea’), for economic reasons. Māori have been master voyagers for thousands of years, but the first recorded evidence of rangatira (chiefs) travelling to Te Ao Moemoea was 200-years ago to trade crops in Sydney. Subsequently, Māori were exempt from the White Australia policy and allowed to enter as subjects under British rule, a privilege that allowed them to vote before Nga Iwi Moemoea (The People of the Dreaming–First Nations ‘Australians’), a troubling concept. Increased rural to urban area migrations in Aotearoa in the 1960s reflected the continued pushing of Māori away from their ancestral lands because of imposed colonial structures. The mass exodus to Te Ao Moemoea over the last few decades is an extension of this overall displacement; but the complete removal from Aotearoa often entails a significant loss of cultural connection. Despite prolonged colonial coercion uprooting a large fraction of Māori to Te Ao Moemoea, there is a dearth of political, cultural and academic attention paid to the unique immigrant experience of these Indigenous neighbours. Māori in Australia are yet to establish their own marae (a church or meeting place), and there is no unifying body or leader to represent Māori in Australia.
Among Māori (and other diaspora) there exist common reactions to displacement. Often, people will assimilate into the dominant white Australian culture; while these individuals tend to attract the scorn of more ‘woke’ Māori and activist circles, assimilation is an innate human reaction. Conformity to the cultural practices of a local population is a trait that evolved as a survival mechanism in new environments. It can be granted that there is inauthenticity in this response, as it involves suppression of formative parts of oneself–elements that are unlikely to be fully erased. Being Māori is always something to be proud of. The culture is rich, poetic, emphasises aroha (love), whānau (family), mana (respect), moana (the ocean), and complex symbolic art forms such as whakairo (carving) and kapa haka (performance) that encode deep swathes of scientific and cultural knowledge. The modern Māori has a reputation for an idiosyncratic, self-effacing sense of humour–a positive stereotype many will attest contains a kernel of truth. But this pride can be taken to extremes in diasporic contexts, where people double down on culture, becoming an ‘uber-Māori’ to make up for a strong sense of disconnection or the shame of being a ‘plastic Māori’ in Australia. This condition is likely exacerbated by the global identity crisis we are observing today, whereby globalisation is dissolving previously held identities, leaving a spiritual vacuum to be filled by the strongest candidate. The fantasy of a ‘pre-colonial’ paradise fills the void, but it is an emotional salve ultimately as inauthentic as assimilation. That British colonisers were dehumanising, barbaric and unjustified does not ipso facto imply that everything that came before invasion was self-evidently harmonious. The term ‘pre-colonial’ is applied too loosely and liberally in popular racial discourse–its modern usage is as a general catchall to describe any culture, sometime before colonisation, usually with the hidden assumption that all were a priori utopian, completely in tune with nature, free from oppression and binaries. These generalisations gloss over the devastating but very real and extensive loss of cultural knowledge before colonisation, the manifold differences between societies, dynamic shifts over time, heterogeneity within culture such as between iwis (tribes), hierarchical inequity, the real existence of gender roles (despite the efforts of well-meaning takatapui scholars, there is only limited evidence for acceptance of fluidity–at most it can be speculated as possible given other Polynesian cultures and the importance of whānau), and severe culturally sanctioned violence that we romanticise in the abstract but in reality would find completely unacceptable today.
To embrace one’s ambiguity is a less desirable option, though for diaspora it is an honest representation of an inherent in-betweenness. An ambiguous self can evoke anxiety in its seeming uncertainty or lack of commitment. This is especially so in the current social media-tised hyperpolarised world, where people are searching for political certainty and validation in tribes, and anyone caught in the middle is disregarded as inauthentic, apathetic or the most pejorative label today–‘moderate’.
But, acceptance of ambiguity and change is overlooked as a crucial part of what it means to be Māori itself. A major clue lies in the construction of pepeha, which is the primary way of identifying oneself (see above). A pepeha lists not only stable entities such as one’s name, whānau, marae, maunga (mountain), waka (ancestral canoe that arrived in Aotearoa), but also less fixed entities like an awa (river) that flows into moana (ocean or water). The cultural expression of fluidity globally unites all Māori. For Māori identity, having an expansive sense of self and being interminable with the ocean is a historical truth. Māori have always been an adaptive, seafaring people. Māori share the same whakapapa (ancestry) as the rest of the Pacific (despite commonplace separation of Māori from Pasefika or even Polynesia–a critical topic warranting its own essay), having sailed Te-Moana-Nui-a-Kiwa from Taiwan to Hawaiki (Tahiti) to South America for millennia before settling in Aotearoa. To travel to Te Ao Moemoea is yet another chapter in the story of Māori, a continuation of their tupuna’s (ancestor’s) voyage (except in this part of the narrative they must recognise the already present Nga Iwi Moemoea). The ocean is a powerful part of what it is to be Māori, flowing into aspects of Māori life still significant today, from waiata (songs, the etymology of ‘wai-’ pertains to water) to kaimoana (seafood), to the Maramataka (Māori lunar calendar) that acknowledges how the moon affects the ocean and people (who are 60 percent water), to the concept of time itself as relative to different iwi. To be Māori is to be water.
Along with traditional aspects, modern Māori have enthusiastically exhibited cultural flexibility and reciprocity. This is demonstrated in the major success of hybridising pop culture with Māori culture, from Poi E by Patea Māori Club in 1982 using electronic sounds as they visually represent the reality for modern Māori at the time – like roller skating while using poi in an urban area, driving in groups in old cars past McDonald’s, dancing like Michael Jackson, imitating Boy George, and even featuring pakeha at parts – through to Taika Waititi’s iconic Māori-fication of Michael Jackson’s Thriller in his hit movie Boy (by the way, the fall of MJ will leave a tragic hole in modern Māori consciousness). These famous instances of modern cultural output reflect both the new Māori experience and a willingness to selectively engage in new influences, without sacrificing pride in a shared cultural history.
These examples also subtly capture a Māori sense of playfulness that is consistent with the properties of the ocean. Just as play is related to spontaneity and well-springs of creativity, the Māori view the ocean as a life-giving, shapeshifting energy with myriad characteristics. This force is called Tangaroa, the God of the Sea, and Māori knew that he could deliver halcyon days then, in an instant, waves of disaster. Tangaroa encapsulates the absurdity and uncertainty of life, and Māori choose to laugh not at him, but with him. Far from trivial cultural oddity, Māori cheekiness is most likely the manifestation of a complex response to an unconscious, intergenerational awareness of the contingencies of existence in the river of time. Humour is a protective factor upon which Māori draw strength in the face of colonial adversity.
The ocean is not merely a metaphor that captures a malleable energy specific to Māori identity; the boundary-less changeable self is an ontological fact for all humans. As voyagers, Māori are lucky in that they have had circumstantial proximity to this truth. Contrary to Descartes’ view, the human is not a fixed, isolated mind cut off from the external world. The Māori worldview is more Heideggerian–seeing the human being as fluid and permeable with one’s environment. The understanding that the human being flows in and out of each other as well as its surroundings is central to deconstructing the climate crisis today. Since at least Socrates’, resurfacing in the Enlightenment and continuing to the 21st Century, Western thought tends to configure a self that is separate to the external world. This egocentric system of thought has led to the degradation of the environment (as well as an obsession with the personal essay form), for if the Earth was to be granted basic human dignity, it is unlikely ecological abuses would occur. Indeed, in a landmark case, in 2017 the New Zealand government granted the Whanganui River legal status as a human person. The Whanganui Iwi recognises the spiritual status of the river as a living soul and sought to protect its health and wellbeing.
Given that Aotearoa was one of the last settled places in history, Māori are privileged to be closer to the underlying truth that humans are still evolving. If one is to zoom out and observe humanity from the Earth’s perspective, the fact that Homo sapiens have evolved from Homo neanderthalensis, Homo erectus, Habilis, shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees about 6-8 million years ago, and all the Great Apes about 25 million years ago, and that Homo sapiens had massive migrations out of Africa 200,000 years ago–should all be taken as evidence of the very protean nature of human beings. While civilisation is coming to terms with how globalisation threatens previously held identity categories, clinging onto the security of echo chambers online, with right AND left extremist groups ineffectually attacking each other while inequality rises and the Earth is dying–Māori, especially Māori overseas, can lead the way in showing the world that to be human is to be water, a body suffused with a free energetic flow, imbued with a soul and inalienable rights, but at the same time with the knowledge that everything is a bit unpredictable, maniacal, prone to flux, so it’s kind of tragi-comic, and that’s actually very, very funny.
Kōtare (fka DJ Sezzo) is a proud Ngāpuhi woman, DJ, writer and curator. She is interested in what it is to be modern Māori and the magic of the club. In 2018, she created the experimental art club night Precog, and in 2019 founded the Māori-Australian art collective Ngāti Kangaru. Kōtare has played at Palais de Tokyo Galerie (Paris, Fr), Dark Mofo, MONA FOMA, Next Wave Festival, GoMA, Mardi Gras, MCA, IMA, Firstdraft, Falls Festival, and has supported the likes of Moor Mother & Black Quantum Futurism, Klein, Le1f, Cher, Coolio and Charli XCX. Kōtare lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne.
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway Journal is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Runway Journal receives project support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway Journal is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Runway Journal receives project support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.