Once Were Pacific: Maori Connections to Oceania

Part II. Koura: The Pacific in Aotearoa

. II . Koura: The Pacific in Aotearoa We’ve got a lot in common. . . . You have a malae, I have a marae. You say malamalama, I say maramatanga. Apirana Taylor, ”Pa Mai,” He Reo Aroha This page intentionally left blank · 91 ·· INTRODUCTION TO PART II · Te Papa, New Zealand’s national museum, opened its new exhibition Tangata o le Moana: The Story of the Pacific People in New Zealand in October 2007. Such a major permanent exhibition requires compelling, clear,and“Pacific”branding,andaphotographtitled“DoubleAfro”takenby Glenn Jowitt outside Hillary College in Ōtara during the Māori and Pacific secondary schools dance festival in 1981 seemed to lend itself to the task. A young Polynesian man, with an afro and early-eighties-era clothes, looks straight at the camera with a shy smile and wears a sweatshirt that reads “London Paris New York Rome Otara.” The meanings of the photograph are densely layered. In general terms, it is a rare example of a positive and seemingly candid representation of a young Polynesian man. More specifically ,thesweatshirtsubversivelyjuxtaposestheverylocalplacename“Otara” with major northern hemisphere urban centers, humorously suggesting that despite its apparently peripheral and invisible location from the point of view of the usual centers, New Zealand—and specifically Ōtara—might be a center for some. Another layer is that for a knowing New Zealand audience , Ōtara is not just any local suburb mischievously masquerading as a metropolitan space but a very specific low-income neighborhood marked in mainstream popular discourse by a particular chain of signifiers: large Māori and Pasifika communities, government housing, factory and other manual labor, poverty, crime, gangs, violence, dysfunction. A further layer is that Ōtara derives its name from Tara, who is memorialized in the names of several other features of the landscape around the area. Like the name of the young man wearing the sweatshirt in the photo, Ōtara is simultaneously knowable, known, and unknown. In a September 2007 newspaper item, communications manager Jane Keig enthused, “It will be really lovely to find out who he is—he’s the star of our exhibition.”1 On the strength of their excitement, Te Papa sought 92 KOURA information about the man depicted in the photo, and after the Manukau Courier (the free local newspaper distributed in the broader area that includes Ōtara) ran a piece about the search, Te Papa was put in touch with Daniel Maaka. Born and raised in Ōtara and now working as a telephone counselor, Maaka was as enthusiastic as Te Papa about the use of the image: not for his own sake but for that of his beloved Ōtara. The Manukau Courier coverage of Maaka’s serendipitous identification reports that he was pleased that it “gives a positive outlook on [his] home town.” Maaka continues, “I’ll always be proud of where I’m from. I want people to see good things come out of this place,”2 extending the Ōtara-centric claim of the sweatshirt he wore back in 1981; he is still invested in challenging and countering the negative press Ōtara usually receives. One might imagine that Daniel Maaka would reinforce the spirit of the exhibition Tangata o le Moana. Indeed, Keig responded to the revelation that Maaka had been located by saying that Te Papa was “really looking forward to meeting him. . . . It’ll be great to put a face to the name and hopefully have him join in our celebrations.”3 The plot thickened, however, because on tracking down the real Daniel Maaka, they found that, as TV3 put it (and as some might guess was a possibility from his last name), “the face of the Pacific is actually Maori.”4 Immediately there was a problem. A Pacific exhibition in New Zealand could not be advertised by an image of a young Māori man. Whereas the Polynesian Cultural Centre in Hawai̒i regularly uses the image of an identifiably Māori man as a symbol of the Pacific region, Te Papa apparently cannot.5 Cherokee writer Thomas King describes some people responding to his appearance and activities by claiming he’s “not the Indian [they] had in mind,” and perhaps in this case, Maaka was not the “Tangata” Te Papa had in mind. Maaka is not the right kind of Pacific person either because Māoripeoplearen’tPacificpeopleorbecause,inNewZealandatleast,Māori people aren’t Pacific people in the same way that non-Māori Pacific people are...