Reassessment needed

Tu Tangata, Issue 26, 1 October 1985, Page 34

Reassessment needed

Future Maori participation in Pacific Festivals of the Arts will need to be seriously looked at according to this year’s New Zealand organiser Tungia Baker. Selection of participants and criteria need to be questioned in light of what sort of New Zealand representation is appropriate, she says.

Tungia says her impression after this year’s festival in Tahiti was that overall, the Maori presence paled beside other Pacific countries. She says the Maori group portrayed the usual model of the culture that’s seen overseas, but it looked plastic beside other Pacific cultures.

She says the criticism is not aimed at the culture itself, rather at the packaging that it is encased in. And Tungia believes the knowledge of te reo is what makes other countries’ performing arts alive and relevant to them, because they know what they’re doing and they understand what they know. “We’re responsible for producing the model,” says Tungia, “it’s like some of

the kete we produce, tidy, uniform and antiseptic. “We’ve done a very successful holding job, holding onto our culture isolated from our links with the Pacific, but it’s not enough.” In fact Tungia belives if the reo doesn’t survive amongst Maori artists, then so will the arts and crafts be lost.

It’s this onward looking stance that Tungia would like to see develop, a stance that recognised Aotearoa as being of the Pacific with its origins not mythical but real. “I believe our tupuna made the sea voyages to Aotearoa but the enormity of the challenge soon placed the reality in a blankness that was replaced in succeeding generations by myth and distance. It’s this distance and knowledge that must now be addressed by today’s generation and seen for what it is, a geographical separation that’s caused a spiritual separation of the Maori from his Pacific roots.

Tungia says this separation is most noticeable in our treatment of Samoans, Tongans, Fijians, Nuieans and other Pacific Islanders living in Aotearoa.

She says we let them know they don’t belong here, while Maori travelling in the Pacific are told ‘you came from here’.

It’s at South Pacific Festivals that these attitudes can be addressed, not necessarily at the formal functions but in the korero between administrators and artists. And this is another difference between maori art and Pacific art. Other Pacific countries have artists in positions of responsibility of the arts, whereas in Aotearoa the control, direction and support is out of the artist’s hands.

However Tungia says the bright spot for the Maori delegation was the impact of kohanga reo on the Pacific people at the festival. She says the real plight of Maori culture is not generally known amongst Pacific countries and kohanga reo brought home to them just what threats the maori language is facing and what measures are being taken to combat it.

And for the future 1988 South Pacific Festival in Australia and the 1992 festival in Rarotonga, Tungia Baker sees a big challenge to Aotearoa to come up with the cultural goods and not just the packaging.