Tungia Baker

Tu Tangata, Issue 20, 1 October 1984, Page 13

Tungia Baker

Kupu whakamihi/Profile

Tungia Baker found at an early age that she was different and had no reason to prove this difference.

"I grew up in Otaki where just about every symbol in the village was pakeha from the doctor through to the school. I assumed everything important was pakeha.”

However on going to secondary school at Queen Victoria in 1953 she found that her childhood was radically different from her eighty fellow school pupils.

“The maori girls had to adjust to me. You see I didn’t realise that other maori women spoke maori normally.”

But young Tungia wasn't a slow starter and flourished under the encouragement of the headmistress, Alice Berridge. Tungia says Hone Waititi was also another great influence on her.

It was in 1958 that Tungia got her first taste of overseas cultures with an American Field Service Scholarship to West Bend, Wisconsin. She was the first maori from Otaki to gain this.

She lived the diversity of the world community with sixty other students from all around the world.

“I saw that different ways of doing things, the alternative, it functions.

Tungia says the overseas experience made her confident in a bi-cultural setting. "I realised that the way maori people live is OK. I am now able to confront people who are uncomfortable with different cultural traits”.

And it was in 1970 that Tungia’s cultural sensitivity was put to good use when she was appointed the New Zealand representative for the American Field Service. This meant both helping to select New Zealanders going overseas and also American students coming here. She also provided the back-up supportive programmes for scholarship students.

Tungia is proud of her kinship links with Ngati Whakaue, Ngati Toa, Raukawa, Te Atiawa and Ngati Mutunga. It’s this quiet confidence in the needs and ways of her people that made Tungia a natural choice for organising the New Zealand participation in the South Pacific Festival of Arts in Noumea this December.

Tungia secured a contract with the New Zealand organising committee for the South Pacific Festival of Arts, as its Executive Officer in early July with on-

ly five months to organise a delegation of 100 artists for the festival in New Caledonia. The 4th South Pacific Arts Festival is being held in Noumea December 8-22 and the latest figures show that threethousand participants from 27 countries and territories of Oceania are expected. “A cross fertilization of cultural energies will take place during the festival and I want to be there when it happens,” says Tungia. As Executive Officer, Tungia’s brief was to put together a delegation of traditional and contemporary maori artists. However, with the little time in which to do it, it wasn’t all that simple. “Certain ‘burps’ were encountered at the beginning such as turning up for work on the first day to find there was no desk, typewriter or even a telephone, literally no office,” she says. Eventually office space was made available in the Department of Maori Affairs. No stranger to the arts, Tungia is a member of the Maori Womens Collective, Haeata, which is publishing a collection of interviews with maori women for the 1985 ‘Herstory’ A weaver and a poet, Tungia has very strong feelings about maori art and its place in New Zealand society. “Contemporary maori art is streaks ahead of the New Zealand art form, whatever that is. It’s been boiling away for the last thirty years and has crescendoes of energy yet to be seen in a Pacific context,” she says.

The presence of maori women in the arts at the festival will be a visible force in the contemporary arts. “I applaud the creative energies of maori women in the contemporary arts and they will be well represented,” says Tungia Baker. Tungia sees the time as being ripe in the Pacific for a new direction. New Zealand should be playing a big part in it but the maori people have just about missed the boat. “Our pacific brothers and sisters will have to ring the changes”. She says whanaungatanga is all we have to bind the Pacific. Maori people must become more pacifically aware and it’s the informal sharing at such Pacific festivals that sows the seed. ‘‘l think it would be great for say someone from Titahi Bay sharing ideas with someone from the Marshall Islands”. It's this weaving together of people and cultures that Tungia puts great faith in. She says it really came home to her when she learnt to rarangi whariki in Rotorua. She saw in the weaving the intertwining of the harakeke and how one strand might be dominant as a tuakana in one row but the teina or lesser in the next. “That’s the complementary roles of the tuakana/teina relationship we have throughout the Polynesian culture. “I also found the harakeke helped to earth me and opened me to a spiritual vocabulary. “I find when I am surrounded by paperwork as I am at times, I need to get back to this earthing. My hands tingle on contact with the harakeke and I find my whole being is recharged.”