Once Were Pacific: Maori Connections to Oceania

The Realm of Tapa

· 81 · The Realm of Tapa Chantal Spitz’s L’IleDesRevesEcraseswasthefirstnovelpublishedby an Indigenous writer from Polynesie Francais (French Polynesia), and sixteen years later, in 2007, the Māori publishing company Huia launched Jean Anderson’s translation of the novel as Island of Shattered Dreams.1 Of the several characters in the novel, Tetiare is the most creative and least easily shaped by the colonial institutions of schooling, militarism, and patriotism . She drifts for some time before going overseas, and the narrative of her return to Tahiti is worth quoting at length: Tetiare has finally come home, after years of wandering round the Pacific, in a vain attempt to heal the wound in her soul. She has met the cousins who came with them long ago in their big canoes, born of the same dream of freedom, but who stopped where the wind had blown them on tiny hopeful islands, over the centuries forgetting the ones who journeyed further. She has found them again, so similar in body and soul, yet made different by the various foreign governments that have been squatting on their land. She has discovered them, peoples of the first people, attempting through little disorganised movements to shake off the Foreigner and immerse themselves again in their origins, to be themselves, the lost children of this huge family in search of one another.2 Tetiare “wander[s] round the Pacific” to grapple with violence and loss; individually, she is “attempt[ing] to heal the wound in her soul,” and yet her travels fit into broader contexts of movement in the region, including the historical migrations (“long ago in their big canoes,” stopping on “tiny hopeful islands”) as well as more recent attempts to reconnect. Indeed, Tetiare meets many “cousins” who are themselves engaged in 82 THE REALM OF TAPA reciprocalprojectsof reconnection.Giventhe“forgetting”thathasoccurred “over the centuries” in the various specific locations of the Pacific, however, how does one remember someone whom one has already forgotten? For Tetiare, recognition is multilayered: there are shared physical and cultural characteristics (“so similar in body and soul”), shared political positions (“peoplesof thefirstpeople”),sharedpoliticalpredicaments(“attempting . . . to shake off the Foreigner”), and shared kaupapa3 and aspirations (“to be themselves,” “in search of one another”). Importantly, while the “cousins” may all be “members of this huge family,” they are deeply inflected by their various and specific experiences of colonialism: “made different by the various foreign governments that have been squatting on their land.” Perhaps oneof themoredifficultdimensionsof articulatingaregionalconsciousness is that privileging a genealogical or migratory basis for regionalism can risk either demanding refusal of real difference or paying attention to difference to the extent that it obstructs meaningful (or indeed any) engagement. If we once were Pacific, then as well as seeing Tongans in Tonga and Niueans in Niue, one might look at Aotearoa New Zealand and see Māori, look at Guam and see Chamorros, and look at Hawai̒i and see Hawaiians, reversing the Western gaze that sees these places in terms of their occupying nation-states. Certainly Māori need not be included in every single Pacific thing; Pacific places other than Aotearoa and Hawai̒i (and perhaps Guam) have similarities and shared issues that pertain only to them and their social, political, cultural, ecological, and environmental conditions. Conversely, Niue,Tonga,Sāmoa,Vanuatu,theSolomonIslands,andTokelauhavethings in common that they don’t share with Aotearoa. Many Pacific people go to New Zealand (or Hawai̒i, or perhaps Guam) because it is a first world metropole, and from this perspective, Auckland is more similar to Los Angeles than it is to Nuku’alofa. Aside from Aotearoa’s physical location farther south than any other Pacific people, Māori have been “made different by the . . . foreign government[ ] that ha[s] been squatting on their land.” And yet how do we account for the idea that when people move to Auckland (or Aukilani or Okalani4 ), they also move to Tamaki-makau-rau?5 The remedy is to be vigilant: to explicitly clarify whether and how particular groups are included in each configuration of the Pacific. Perhaps the main way in which Māori currently practice Pacific regionalism is by connecting with Hawai̒i. We need to note, for example, that in this partof OnceWerePacific,MāoriidentificationsandnetworkswithHawaiians predominate; consider that Te Rangihiroa, the Polynesian Cultural Centre, THE REALM OF TAPA 83 Wineera, Sullivan, and Hinewirangi all write from or about Hawai̒i. Writing reciprocally from...