In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Once Were Pacific: Māori Connections to Oceania by Alice Te Punga Somerville
  • Brendan Hokowhitu (bio)
Alice Te Punga Somerville. Once Were Pacific: Māori Connections to Oceania. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012. ISBN: 978-0-8166-7756-6. 265pp.

Once Were Pacific sets out to make disingenuous the epistemic constructions surrounding Māori and other Pacific peoples, particularly as they ascertain to the settler colonial nation-state of New Zealand and its simultaneous location within and disconnection to the Pacific. As a literary studies scholar, Te Punga Somerville reveals her project primarily through texts of Māori writers and their connections to Pacific paradigms incomprehensible to the New Zealand nation-state. Of note, however, is the author’s use of nonliterary sources such as music tracks, historical figures, dvds, performance centers, theatrical groups, paintings, tv series, and tapa cloth, all of which help illustrate a powerful methodology for Indigenous scholarship that moves beyond Western disciplinary confinement. In part 1 of 2, tapa cloth is used metaphorically as that which binds Pacific people across distances. Here the author examines Pacific ontological proximity through three chapters that interrogate Māori within Pacific spaces, explore Māori writers who write beyond New Zealand’s nation-state, and begin to comprehend how Māori writers beyond Aotearoa’s shores position themselves as writers of the Pacific. Framed by largely historical accounts drawn from archival research, chapter 1 if nothing else demonstrates the complex nature of Māori postcolonial diasporic culture, academia, and people. From the fraught nature of the racial taxonomies of Te Rangihiroa (Sir Peter Buck) while domiciled on O’ahu to the intricate relationship between Māori [End Page 94] performative labor and the Polynesian Cultural Center (pcc, [also on O’ahu]), the author demonstrates the paradoxical nature of Indigenous peoples leaving home to return home. pcc, for example, is ultimately framed by the imperial desires of the Mormon Church throughout the Pacific, yet in many ways the church enables Pacific communities to move outside the state. Chapter 2 thematically examines the works of Māori writers who began writing in Aotearoa but who later find themselves writing from the Pacific. Here, Te Punga Somerville concentrates on the poets Vernice Wineera, Evelyn Patuawa-Nathan, and Robert Sullivan, outlining how their writing from the Pacific asserts a non-nation “re-remembering” derived via a “returning” ontology: “the Māori person venturing to the Pacific is retracing migration routes, seeking genealogical and cultural sources and tributaries. In this way, the Māori person returns to an originary home” (58). “Aotearoa-Based Māori Writers,” the title of chapter 3, looks at the fragmented efforts of Māori to write in relation to the Pacific from New Zealand, particularly focusing on Witi Ihimaera’s 1987 Novella The Whale Rider and Hinewirangi’s collection Kanohi ki te Kanohi. Te Punga Somerville discusses the texts in terms of their demonstration of increased ontological depth; of a sense of being Māori with a profundity of genealogical and cultural mobility. What would have further helped the reader in this regard was a chapter devoted to explaining why Māori, in many ways, were complicit with the formation of the settler colonial nation-state in that we readily divorced ourselves from “being Pacific,” imagining waka as one-way tickets “home” from Hawaiki, as opposed to vessels vacillating between the sea of islands.

Grounded in the concepts of tangata whenua and manuhiri (in this case Māori as “Pacific hosts” and “Pacific guests,” respectively), part 2 examines the intersections between Pacific (i.e., both Māori and Pasifika) communities within the borders of New Zealand as a nation-state, looking at collaborations and particular texts that effuse such relationships. In the first chapter of part 2, “Māori-Pasifika Collaborations,” Te Punga Somerville gives an account of various alliances fostered by common genealogical and social parameters. Chapter 4 resembles more a historical genealogy of seemingly heterogeneous historical and contemporary enunciations, such as the program notes to a 1943 performance fund-raiser aptly named “South Sea Festival,” a 1970s political magazine, Rongo, invested in disclosing Māori and Pasifika social problems [End Page 95] and activist unrest...

pdf