Once Were Pacific: Maori Connections to Oceania

Notes

· 217 · Introduction Māori is used by New Zealand Māori and Cook Islands Māori communities. I acknowledge that the unmarked Māori could refer to either of these communities; however, in this book, Māori should be understood as New Zealand Māori, unless otherwise indicated. Please note that the Māori language (and several other Polynesian languages) uses the macron to indicate a long vowel (ā, ē, ī, ō, ū). Because this convention is not used universally (it is rather recent and does not appear in older sources but also does not always appear in contemporary texts), throughout this book, the Māori language is left in direct quotes as it appears in the original and in names as the person would have spelled his or her own name: Te Rangihiroa instead of Te Rangihīroa, for example. (This also applies to the names of organizations; I have left Nga Tamatoa without a macron because this is the proper name of a specific group, and the macron was not used at the time.) Also, where words have been Anglicized by adding a suffix not present in the original language (e.g., the n at the end of Sāmoa to create the word Samoan), I follow the convention of recognizing that the word has become English and therefore has no macron. Also note that the Māori language does not identify the plural in the noun or adjective itself, and so it is accepted convention to avoid adding an s to indicate a plural. For example, Māori could refer to the singular or plural, as inferred from the surrounding sentence. The plural can also be indicated by a shift to a longer vowel: tangata whenua is singular, whereas tāngata whenua is plural. The convention of italicizing foreign words is tricky in the place of Indigenous languages, and there are various schools of thought around whether Māori should be italicized in this kind of English-language text. Although I recognize the argument that italicizing Māori prevents it from being incorporated into the English language as a set of loanwords rather than retaining its integrity as a quotation from a distinct language, I prefer to follow the convention of leaving the Māori language in roman type as a recognition that, for this writer, and for many of the readers of this book, Māori is not a foreign (or to use the term of the Chicago Manual of Style, Notes 218 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION “unfamiliar”)language.Inthisway,theMāorilanguageisunmarkedinthesameway as, for example, Latin is unmarked in other predominantly English texts. English and Māori sit side by side as center languages in this book, neither capable of fully rendering the other as Other, foreign, or unfamiliar. Finally, three original poems appear in this book (in chapter 1, chapter 6, and the conclusion), which were written by the author. These are intended to extend the critical engagements undertaken in the prose text and therefore are not themselves critically analyzed or discussed. 1. Ra’iatea is known in the Māori language as Rangiātea and is referred to in the epigraph: “e kore au e ngaro; he kākano i ruia i Rangiātea,” literally, “I can never be lost for I am a seed sown at Rangiātea,” which confirms that any descendent of the voyages from tropical Polynesia can never be extricated from her place in the networks of Māori identification and relationship. Because this whakataukī, or “proverb,” asserts the impossibility of absolute separation from whakapapa, it is often mobilized in contemporary times as an affirmation for Māori whose knowledge of their own genealogies, language, or tikanga has been lessened or ruptured by the impact of colonialism. Rangiātea is also the name of a spiritual realm (one of twelve heavens). 2.NicholasThomasspendssometimereflectingonthismapinhisintroductionto OnOceania:Visions,Artifacts,Histories(Durham,N.C.:DukeUniversityPress,1997). 3. In North America, lobster. 4. Harold B. Carter, “Note on the Drawings by an Unknown Artist from the Voyage of HMS Endeavour,” in Science and Exploration in the Pacific, ed. Margarette Lincoln (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 1998), 133–34. Carter identified this as Tupaia’s work in 1997 on the basis of a letter written by Banks to Dawson Turner dated December 12, 1812. Banks (1743–1820) was a scientist who traveled extensively in regions we now know as the Americas, Africa, and the Pacific. He desired to take Tupaia to London “as a curiosity, as some of my neighbours do lions and...