Ko Mitimiti ahau, I Am (of) the Place, Mitimiti

In February 2015, I participated in a major physical renovation of our wharenui, our tribal meeting house, at Matihetihe Marae, part of a four day television makeover show, Marae DIY.

Mitimiti, an isolated rural Māori village (on the West Coast of the Upper North Island of New Zealand), converged with urban-based relatives who joined with locals to restore the heart of the community. My dance company, Atamira, also journeyed from Auckland to support this transformation. We painted, sanded, scraped, planted, dug holes, and lived this collective tribal effort. These experiences formed part of our cultural preparations towards the making of our dance show, “Mitimiti” for Tempo Dance Festival.

A significant moment during the DIY came when a new tekoteko (wooden carving of our ancestor) Tumoana, was placed atop a central pou (pole) at the entrance to the wharenui (for the first time in decades). Stories were shared as we huddled around witnessing, reflecting on how and why our meeting houses from the North (unlike other marae around the country) were atypically carving free, and how non-Catholic Māori were (at one time) unable to be buried at our ancestral grounds because of spiritual differences. Contemplating moments like this, restoring mana (presence, authority) in our present day is uplifting to me, a descendent of generations before, who left rural areas like Mitimiti en masse, in search of urban opportunities after World War 2.

Photo 1.

A post-DIY Marae aerial view of the freshly completed wharenui, Tumoana at Matihetihe Marae, Mitimiti in February 2015. Photo credit: Connie Graham (aunt, DIY painter).

I grew up in Auckland, Aotearoa (New Zealand)’s most populated city. Compare Mitimiti’s population of 60 (on a good day) to Auckland’s 1.4 million, and it’s understandable to see the distance between them. The Māori name for Auckland (Auckland was named after a British Governor General to India in 1840) is “Tamaki Makaurau,” isthmus of a thousand lovers. A Matariki (Māori New Year) event I attended included stories about this area’s famed voyagers who remind us now of our customary relationships to bird migrations, changing seasons and landscapes, recounting the ways we fished, hunted, fought wars, arranged marriages, hid in caves, carried large canoes overland.

As a child I was drawn toward learning Māori language through songs and dances, and as a young adult, captivated by the beautiful black voids of artist Ralph Hotere’s paintings, where my imaginative expression surfaced through the use of contemporary dance. I founded Atamira Dance Collective as a platform for Māori Contemporary Dance artists to create new work in 2000. Ten years later, I reconnected with my tribal genealogy (after my Grandmother’s death) only to discover Ralph Hotere was from Mitimiti too.

Looking back at my practice-making in dance, I can say that my research is continually about the same things. Manaakitanga - the artful practice of relational making.

Through my dance research with Atamira, I have explored different ways of relating to Mitimiti the place over the past five years. I develop choreographic portraits with different dancers and visit my tribal lands at least once a year. I travel abroad yearly to North America to exchange Indigenous knowledge as a writer, teacher, performer and facilitator, and return to New Zealand to cultivate this process, deepening the work we might do and increasing impacts it might have. It is by no coincidence that the godwit’s flight from New Zealand to Alaska is the longest non-stop flight of any bird.

These journeys and seasonal migrations have evolved through continual dialogue with others, influencing how we might contemplate and engage practices of Indigenous collectivity. I developed a series of week-long activations called Cultural Informance Lab (Bay Area, California, 2014) and Transformance Lab (Lenapehoking and Ohlone Territory, 2015), whereby Pacific, Indigenous, Native and American dancers, artists, scholars and community members were invited to participate in series of free and curated talks, discussions, workshops, performances, lectures, presentations, think tanks at Universities, dance studios, Museums, art galleries...