Artist/writer Lester hall in his home studio

 

 

T A N G A T A W H O?

Concept for a televised program investigating the Concept of Tangatawhenua.

 

Synopsis
A confrontational conversation initiated by a fifty-something white male New Zealand outsider artist asking who is and who isn't Tangatawhenua.

 

 

My idea is to create portraits while enlisting the ideas of ten pertinent Kiwi such as Tame Iti and Colin Meads, John Minto and Jenny Shipley, about social unity in a colonised nation.

 

Theme and style - retro into today.

Opening to camera.
Speaking from where Marion Dufresne was killed in 1772.

"The pohutukawa tree behind me is said to be the very same that Marion Dufresne died under before he was ritually consumed by several local chiefs. I am in Te Hui in what Cook called this Bay of Islands where Maori/European contact was truly first experienced."

"The different cultural paradigms of the New Zealanders and the French who sailed into these waters over two hundred years ago meant that Marion Dufrezne must be killed...and eaten!"

"His short but enthusiastic stay had threatened to topple the security, finance and spiritual structure of the local society after only 5 weeks of interaction".

"The simple act of sharpening ships nails and trading them for some fish had changed the very nature of time for local iwi. What might have taken months of laborious work to create could now be traded for something that took a morning to catch and deliver."

"Fresh from the tables of France where the Age of Enlightenment had filled his head with the ideas of the Noble Savage, Dufresne had no real understanding of the way in which tapu bound the societies around him in matters of public law and behaviour. He was more of an adventurer than the more studious explorer James Cook and a quick demise was the price for a passionate heart."

"Dufresne and his men were making serious transgressions on a daily basis."

"Ships logs and local oral history tell us the Maori enjoyed Dufresne and wanted what he had to trade but they did not want the continuing erosion of the rule of law and economic stability in the region."

"So where are the two paradigms 240 years later?"

 

"Back then the difference meant conflict, cannibalism and violent retribution. Of course there has been a convergence but will they keep doing so or are we headed to ongoing misinterpretation of each others ideals?"

Fade to Ted Papa and the 1950s/60s social displays there.

1. First question to addressed is on the 50s/60s mind set and how they viewed it.

My to camera is from the European 1960s living room where I was brought up.

"This is where I entered the New Zealand social landscape, born white, in Island Bay, Wellington in 1956."

"I stared up at this woman every day as a youngster and my dad bought a red and white Mk. II Zephyr brand new."

"The history of NZ I got was delivered by Catholics after they informed me I was to die and go to hell. So I had bigger things on my mind than any gripes people I did not even know were experiencing in a suburb other than my own"

"England was our mother and the United States our saviour and ally. We were Gods own country and part of the most civilized sect of nations called "The West" and we saved the Jews from those dreadful Nazis."

"If I was good I would go to Heaven."

"Summer was beautiful and life was about chasing white butterflies and shooting them with the hose and winter was fireside watching "Disneyland" on Sundays."

"I was in touch with the "Happiest Kingdom of Them All".

"We white people saved the Maori from extinction but they were thankless and wanted us gone! My sensibilities were shocked and my fears focused on this last point at the tender age of 7 or 8! In those young years I was sure of two very frightening things."

"I did not want to go and live in England and I did not want to go to mass on Sundays so It was just a matter of time before I was cooked and eaten"

"Then suffered eternal flames in Hell."

"Suddenly life was an uncomfortable thing, not the harmless playground I had been thinking. A confusing addenda to this time was the magical afternoon we spent as a family, on holiday, to a Maori village where the children were diving for pennies."

"I was enthralled by the children's smiles, courage and skill as they dived off what looked like a fall to their death. I liked them...but they wanted me gone!"

"Apart from being "arty" I was a normal Kiwi boy who played rugby and wanted a V8 car

and hoped I would someday I come across a stray "Playboy" or "Man" magazine."

"My mother was angry when my clothes were torn playing bullrush at playtime and I went to the "murder house" to get my teeth drilled like a colander. "

"In this next hour I will try to address my issues as fifty-something white male New Zealander through my Hories and Whities diary page paintings. The work of Sir Edmonds Hillary with TANGATAWHENUA tattooed up the side of his face became a clear beacon to me of the burning question. If Ed is not Tangatawhenua, then what "Whitie" can be?"

"If he is not Tangatawhenua, then why do Maori insist on running up and putting cloaks on any dignitary or bright light? And if the unseen Pakeha in their Remuera living rooms are angry that I would suggest Sir Ed is Tangatawhenua the divide is complete. Maori do not want Pakeha to be Tangatawhenua and the right wing white certainly do not want to consider themselves such! So where is the problem in that? Nothing, if we all desire to remain separate and aloof but a nation does not work well when fractured."

"Well, I think I am Tangatawhenua and I think it is my prerogative to decide that, it is a spiritual concept after all. I have asked some very special New Zealanders to help me find what they think about the word and where the nation might go from here."

We then start to overlay the interviews. There is some indication that artworks might be done by cutaways to my using a pencil and pad but not seeing the work in interview segments. Music and little clips of the times past and Utopian vision vs not are also cut in.

2: Second question is about the rise of activism and how that was viewed.

"My father shouted and wailed at the television at the sight of the Maori invading Bastion Point."

"Along with pinko, lefty

students in our universities these bloody Maori were going to deliver our perfect little country to hell in a handcart. Dad was diehard Muldoonist and the law and order tack Muldoon was so good at splitting the country with, had him hook, line and voting ballot."

"Like almost every other New Zealander I remember those long lines of police in their white helmets marching in to take the protesters away very well. I also remember and witnessed an underlying "serve them right attitude" about the young girl who died there."

"Hard hearted indeed! It took me a good deal of working through the facts of this land protest and the Raglan golf course issue to make any informed decision about what are on the surface of it very simple principles. "

"The actions of successive government agencies and councils had blatantly over a hundred years, taken through many shameful and unjust mechanisms the Ngati Whatua lands of Orakei,

reducing some of Auckland's best to one small section. It was over the last parcel of open land that the protest was initiated."

"This unlawful act was the first illegal protest in over a hundred years of protest by this tribe. But these facts were hard to discern in the media reports and the tut-tutting of White conservative elements to whom public disobedience was an anathema."

"Same with Raglan golf course, developed on land which was taken from Maori for an airfield in the war, it was never returned and then fell into private development of a golf course!"

"I think Eva Rickard was vilified by the press and in white living rooms all over the country for doing nothing but standing up for what was right and fair. My uncle suffered the taking of his land by the Wellington City Council. They took over 3,000 acres for a "landfill" and they paid him a pittance of their choice and it broke his heart. They used maybe 40 acres of the land and the rest is just as it was when dear old Boz owned it. Seems simple to me, once the original claim is terminated for government use it is only right and just to give it back to the owners so what was all of the fear and anger about?!"

"I have been around conservative white people all my life and believe them for the most part to be decent people and I can only assume that they have not taken the time to actually assess the facts in the matter of repatriation of confiscated lands."

"The old "they want to be paid twice because they sold it for blankets but that's tough, blankets were what they wanted" line is too ignorant and is quite frankly shameful in a modern day."

"This ignorance is not and has never been an excuse to be so blatantly biased against the Maori degradation.

While the middle class might work the justice system as hard as they could to get off a speeding fine and keep their license or hide their money away in trust when business fails they hate the idea Maori have used that same judicial mechanism to seek redress for wrongs done."

At this point in the program I would be seen doodling the different faces of the people I am tlking to.

3: Is Maori language and culture/art/style important or worthwhile in the context of New Zealand as a sovereign nation in the World scene?

From the main hall of the Auckland Museum.

"At 28 years of age I entered these halls as a design and display technician, hired to help with the redevelopment of the Maori displays."

"The 18 months following changed my view of my country and the Maori forever. It took no time to notice that the carvings had all been painted with the same brush so to speak."

"They were all rust red and I could see splashes of the red up the walls behind the paintings such had been the abandon with which the national heritage had been settled into one display colour! When I was there work started to take some of the paint back to original."

"Of course once the underlying text of the carving was revealed again it made it all the more stunning that they were painted over in the first place. "

"It delivered some understanding to me just how thoughtless the mainstreams attitudes were and gave me a place from which to see the Maori perspective. I discovered that some of the Maori weaving was as delightful to the touch as any fabric I had learned to appreciate in shops such as Saks, on Broadway and that stone-age did not mean stupid. "

"I learned that a finely crafted pre-European mere was a much more perfectly balanced killing tool than a ridiculously oversized version in greenstone for the tourist market. I saw that the learned "oligists" hidden away in their dark little empires of personal power in back of these walls were constantly having to re-appraise the facts they espoused and the dramatically superstitious Maori trying for their part of the empire."

"From time spent with these academic sorts and Maori would-be's I realized that there is no replacement for actually thinking and forming ones own opinion."

"Out in the real world the Waitangi tribunal was starting to bite and the "fiscal cap" and "Tangatawhenua" became media shuttle cocks. This was the time our nation needed to discuss the value of Maori culture and language to our Westernised society. Did we really think about it?"

"Because my memory is of the old Whitie arguments "but Maori ate the Moriori!" and "if they get a reimbursement they should never get social welfare again!" being yelled in the hallways of Remuera and Paratai Drive."

"I do not mean to say that silly babbling's of racial put down were a one way street as while in the museum I also had to put up with nonsensical ideas such a Maori were a warrior race and Whities were all pasty wimps who could not cope with Maori in a physical sense."

"My thoughts go to two ideas when confronted with this nonsense, first the dour nature of a people who would continue to immigrate to a land where over a hundred of their early number were taken off a ship and slaughtered for dinner in one night."

"Hardly a spiritual feed while I am on the subject of racial myth and Hongi Hika, the most gunned up chief of his day, a man who shaped himself after Napoleon was clear that to oppose the Whites militarily was folly."

"So aside from these racial tit-for-tats, where was the real value of the Maori legacy to a now sovereign nation in a 20th century social context? Did we address it at all outside the academic sandwich mornings?"

Some artworks are starting to appear as studio shots for example a Colin Meads/All Black facial tattoo and Tame Iti in a dinner jacket. The artworks are now small flashes set into the conversation as they begin to look like the people spoken with. Watchers are now invested in what the discussion will drive to as a result but also how each of the people will look.

4 Are Maori losing the real meaning of Tangatawhenua in the nasty battle for political momentum? Has the very fight to retain their heritage isolated them and forced them away from the core values?"

"I present here the artwork of Gottfried Lindauer and Charles Frederic Goldie. As a boy I always wanted to have the mastery over light that Goldie had but after my museum experience I started to prefer the works of Lindauer who obviously was much more laboured in his craft."

"I recall arriving at a major Goldie exhibition at the Auckland art gallery some years ago and being confronted with one room full of Lindauer paintings and the other of Goldie and one room was a powerful place full of keen, vital faces of a race of people who clearly had an investment in daily life and the other of a sad group of beaten, tired people, posing for what money they might make from a man pushing the romance of a race and culture dying out. The difference in these two artists apart from the European schooling Goldie had received was the land wars."

"While it is fair to say Goldie ignored some strong young Maori in the political arena his idea that Maori moku and culture was going forever was reasonable. He lived in a time when White was right and the Empire was everything and the lesser understandings were not to be tolerated because of their lack of real use to society at large."

"So it seems pertinent to ask, after the resurgence New Zealand has experienced from those depths of the early 1900s in things Maori such as Te Reo and Kapa Haka, Whakairo and political power if that resurgence itself is a powerful statement of our countries direction in its own right. While it has been easy to bitch and rail against the pesky buggers cutting trees down,

packing a haka at the drop of a hat,

occupying land and taking the rest of us outside our comfort zones

I find myself endlessly grateful that they have worked within the parameters of peaceful protest and our legal system for the most part."

 

"I am clear I would be far less reasonable if the shoe was on the other foot and knowing the attitude of most Whites I think that the experience of "The Troubles" in Ireland would have been much more like it."

"I still do not understand the outrage expressed about that mangy old tree in Auckland. It was just a tree,

not two children blown up in a bus stop and the statement of attacking a tohunga is so old school Maori, I love it. I think that the way Maori have created and stood for their renaissance is remarkable as is the society in which it has been able to occur. I was so impressed when Tainui expected an apology from the crown along with compensation for lands confiscated but a day later was so disappointed that we chose as a nation to celebrate the winning of some boat races over the settling of a more than hundred year fight for justice! "

"Like Mohammad Ali refusing to fight people "who never called him a nigger" the Maori have sustained a lot of derision for simply standing up for their rights in their own land. Would it be so hard to recognize the tenacity?"

So at the end of this section we want the possibility of all NZ people being Tangatawhenua in the air. Balanced either way as it has been as much as we can make it throughout but with a feeling of resolution as a possibility.

5 Who are Tangatawhenua and who is not? Are Maori losing the spiritual to the political?

"It was here in the Mercury Theatre bar I first became cognizant of the word Tangatawhenua and what it might mean. A talented Maori actor from the North was leaning against the bar and chatting to me as he had a habit to do when he, in a drink driven tirade spoke of his anger about the use of the term Tangatawhenua. He was furious that it was being "cheapened and bastardised" by some Maori in an effort to make political point and to suggest that only Maori were welcome to this status. He said it was a precious spiritual concept that applied to all people who took their material sustenance and gained life because of their connection to this land. He went on to say that even if one was not born here but settled here that that person was part of the Tangatawhenua. I was not so interested in his diatribe as I would rather have been passing comment on the directing style of the new play or the physical style of the new actresses in it but some time later this conversation would pop back up into my mind."

"While I am an outsider artist and have little time for the art world as such I soon ran into the concept of "appropriation" once earning a living from painting. Appropriation might be to take the Maori style and use it for my own advantage or to make comment of Maori while not being one."

"I did not really care as I was painting bi-cultural works at the time on Tapa cloth and the Island community had no reservation about what I was doing."

"But then this question of Tangatawhenua arrived and from the very depths of my subconscious. I was doodling in my diary while chatting on the phone. When I hung up and looked down at the page a detailed, stylised tattooed face looked out at me. I knew immediately it was that tattooed rat-bag from my youth Hone Heke and underneath the visage I instantly wrote. "Pssst...Hone Heke was a tattooed savage, pass it on, Whitie!" "

"As I looked into the eyes of the "noble savage" on the page I realized it was time, through my paintings for me to form my philosophy as to who I was in my own land. So started my "Hories and Whities" diary page artworks and my exploration into Maori/European contact."

"I do not paint to be good at art, I paint to find my way and to decide what I think. The artworks, especially in this case are incidental to a process of understanding. They are my map into my subconscious and back out through the historical narrative that lies just beneath the veneer of our daily life."

At this point the images I have created would work more and the replies of those interviewed would be voiceover's to the art. There will be a oneness implied by these works all having such a strong stylistic statement. The Iphone screen representing modern day living and imperatives and the art style speaking to the cultural heritage.

"Language is a major part of how we will find our path and that we now have two languages to create our full potential is a bonus in a World where the indigenous language could easily have been dead by now. I was taught all my life that to learn the Maori language as a nation would be a foolish and indulgent waste of time and we would all be better off learning Japanese...but now that would be Chinese... Language is the very basis on which we stand to see our view of everything about us be it art, history or social interaction of any kind. As we work toward a time when New Zealand is genuinely bi-lingual it is at the most basic level that we will look at the word Tangatwhenua and that will be the test of the spiritual side of this convergence of cultures. Once spirituality is based on separateness as for example in the Jewish telling of the Godly imperative where they are the chosen race and the rest of us all second class, bit players to their supremacy in the Lord Gods eyes then truly there is no hope for oneness. The Jews have cast themselves as a race apart and they pay every day for that arrogance. Surely, the true understanding of this word Tangatawhenua and its spiritual dimension is what stands to separate us or bind us and surely we are stronger as one united company of citizens. Is Tangatawhenua not a spiritual understanding for a planet under stress as mankind forgets his place in the order of things? In the same way we have moved on from Ten Guitars

to Whirimako Black

and from egg sandwiches

to feta and rocket salad

we must bring a much more sophisticated language to this discussion of who we are all to become."

"As a White fifty-something male

I admire the work Maori have done in standing their ground and finding a place of respect for their essence and I think it is time for the Whitie to arrive at the table with a little more than tired rhetoric and angry indigence.

It is time to cutaway the American style of blind tirades pushing the party line

and say what you want and like and don't like clearly and with more reason than "I am on top so fuck off you bloody Hories." Don't get me wrong here, I am not an apologist for Maori, I just see the facts are being missed. For example I do not think it is for a White male driven parliament to remove Maori seats but I say to Maori, I cannot respect your political power until you remove what are now a racist, apartheid institution."

"As I watch these images of our elders flicking past on this marvel of modern technology I wonder,

can we ourselves pick up the ball and run with it or will we just stay in our trenches and talk shit for another twenty years while change happens outside the gate?

Maori have dodged and woven their way through the maelstrom of

beaurocracy they were positioned in at the signing of the treaty and like Ali "roping the dope"

their long fight is admirable and if the White middle class do not educate themselves then they can expect to be disappointed in what is left for them as they will be seen as the righteous fools who dragged their feet into the most important discussion our country faces.

It is time they moved with the times. The ignorance keeps them back with the dial phone and it is the age of much brighter ideas.

From the very first meeting with Maori there were white and other coloured races who became Pakeha-Maori, accepted as Ariki, Toa and Rangatira in their own right so the idea that we are all Tangatawhenua is as old and as Maori as rotten corn. "

"The word Maori was translated much more like "normal" and the word Pakeha meant 'different". So I suggest it is inappropriate to usurp the spiritual concept of Tangatawhenua as a differentiation. For my part in this conversation I say, I am white and I am Tangatawhenua, it is dodgy for any Maori to tell me I am not for the sake of a political branding exercise. And I do not mean I am fodder to be initiated into whatever any tribes idea of Maoridom is. My tribe allows women to sit where they like and we will make our own choices about our ideals, customs and spirituality, that is the basis on which any tribe is created equal.

The time of the Ngati Pakeha is here and if the nation is to be one I say that idea is the first step in a new, more sophisticated understanding of who we all are and how we might turn the wheel of colonialisation full circle. This attitude is one of moving toward a union of minds which encompasses the peoples of this land Aotearoa, a name and myth which was devised by a white guy by the way."