Own your culture and your faith

Tu Tangata, Issue 27, 1 December 1985, Page 8

Own your culture and your faith

Na Manuka Henare, Maori Catholic Church Leader

Maori people must today face two crucial decisions. They have to own up to being a Maori, and also to what spiritual beliefs they have inherited. Manuka Henare believes this is the true measure of te wairua maori and what meaning it has for today’s Maori.

He says in his own life there came a point where he had to say to himself, and his whanau and hapu, that he saw himself as a Maori.

“You seem to have to do this in the New Zealand we have got today, all I know is that I'm not alone in this, I just find so many other Maori bred in the cities, after some point, this just happens... somewhere in your thirties and forties.

“This is also true for one’s faith, however you want to define faith, belief in God or spirituality. At some point you have to say, ‘yes I own it’, then you go on to make it a living faith. I’m not just talking about a Christian faith, even though that is my tradition.”

Manuka says he meets many young Maori who are Mormon, Anglican, Catholic, who when asked where they got it from, say their parents, their tupuna. He says they’ve inherited something to which they must at some stage of their life, take onboard as their own.

“All Christians are called to own their faith, you can't live on someone else’s faith. The Maori Christian who is able to say, yes, that is my faith and I'm thankful to my tupuna for carrying it for me and giving it as part of the taonga, can confidently give a lot more meaning to their life.”

Maori people find it easier to see this faith as inheritance because they do that anyway, says Manuka, with waiata, korero, everything, so why not the whakapono, the belief. Tu Tangata: Why is it that this call comes so late in life for some Maori people? “I reckon initially it's because we're so busy, going out, getting on with life. In my experience it’s when you suddenly find that you've got an uncle who's going to die soon, and you look around and

find it may be you who has to be the next spokesman, the one who carries the can with things related to the whanau and the hapu. “Fve known a lot of fellahs who say that’s what shook them.” It’s this realisation plus maybe not knowing the waiata, the korero, the whakatauki that makes for a decision to own up to being a Maori says Manuka.

"The second reason is when my own children came along, and I looked at my kids and realised I didn’t have anything to give them as Te Rarawa, Te Aupouri descendants. Living in Wellington I knew more Ngati Porou songs, a lot of proverbs of Ngati Raukawa, for which I am grateful, but nothing much from my iwi of the North. I wanted to be a good Maori parent.”

Tu Tangata: What is the relationship between maoritanga and spirituality? “A lot of urbanised Maori have been questioning not so much their faith, but the institution of the church. I mean how pro-Maori is it. Is it nothing more than a part of the colonial heritage?

“Some in rejecting the church have found they are chucking out their faith also, their whakapono. They’re worried about it because their whakapono came down from their tupuna. They’re worried about what else they’re chucking out that is related to their contemporary maoritanga that includes Christianity. You can't talk about maoritanga today without acknowledging the Christianity part of it, unless you want to cut it right out and reject it, like some are trying to do.”

But Manuka says our view of history is sometimes lacking the full picture. He says about one hundred years ago in the period between 1863 to 1883, all the mainline churches pretty well walked away from the Maori people, but the faith didn’t die. They carried on, some like Matata in Hawkes Bay with no priests for thirty years.

“When the bishop finally put priests back there they found more Catholics than before. That tells me that those people had accepted Christianity as their faith. They did not accept Christianity because it gave them a pathway into the pakeha world."

This "toki” was a taonga given to the first group of Maori people to visit the Kalinga people in the highlands of the Philippines. The Kalinga are one of many different tribal peoples in the Philippines whose customs and whanau system has similarities with those of the Maori.

A “Budong" ceremony was performed between the Kalinga and the Maori group. It is a traditional peace making ceremony which involved, whaikorero, waiata. Each side killed a pig and exchanged them, at the end of the ceremony taonga were exchanged, we received this toki. A budong is a peace pact between different tribes within the Philippines. This was the first ocasion a budong had been made with an outside people. It is similar to the Tatau Pounamu of the Te Atiawa and Tuhoe (greenstone door). Under a budong, each side agrees not to do anything to harm each other in any way. The Maori group agreed to it, as a sign of support for their Filipino land struggle and the retention of their culture.

Tu Tangafa: What is different about the Christianity practised today than in days before? “You must come back to your understanding of what your whakapono is. That leads you on to what kind of spirituality do you need to be a Maori today. It seems to me you cannot revive the old Maori religion which was a religion related to a particular lifestyle. Aspects of it you have like the tangihanga. A lot of Maori spirituality is carried on today but there is also Christian thought and practice which we have incorporated in as part of maoritanga. We must ask ourselves what does it mean to be a Maori Christian.

“I had a favourite uncle fond of asking at hui, ‘Am I a Catholic Maori or am I a Maori Catholic?' I used to wonder what the hell he was getting at, because 1 always saw myself as a Catholic Maori. “Of course he was just stating a basic

truth... you’re born a Maori first and once you were baptised, then you became a Christian. So I'm a Maori Catholic.”

Manuka believes Maori today are working through what it means to be a Maori, but there is another question that goes with it... what does it mean to be a Maori Christian?

Therefore there are some answers that only Christians have to seek. That is to know the word of God, and the teachings of your own church.

But Manuka warns, "that when these teachings start turning you into a pakeha, then you've got to question the practice of that church because it’s not the role of the church to turn you into another culture.”

Tu Tangata: Where does this place Maori people faced with pakeha dominated churches?

"I don't think you can find your own cultural religious history in someone else's church. You’ve got to find it in your own church which is deeply rooted in your own culture. That’s why there are Maori sections of the mainstream churches where this discussion, arguing is going on now, ‘how do I be a Maori Methodist, a Maori Anglican etc?' ‘How do I make that particular denomination a part of maoritanga?’ I don't think they're talking about adapting or modifying anymore, I think they want to make it completely Maori.”

Tu Tangata: Is this change for just the Maori sections or the whole of the churches? “Well both ways.... “In recent years the Runanga Whakawhanaunga i nga Hahi has been exploring this maori theology because we do have an understanding of what God is. For centuries and centuries Maori have been thinking about God as expressed in proverbs, creation stories, even the way we've structured whanau, hapu and iwi life.

“I think Maori had been asked themselves the meaning of life, who are we... we didn't need missionaries to tell us those. Christianity was introduced and Maori took to Jesus Christ. It made sense to them that God, the supreme being sending the beloved son to live with human beings to transform them into better people. I think the Maori saw the logic of that and that's why he took to Christianity. Otherwise how do you explain those families at Matata. North Auckland, Waikato and other parts of the country who carried on this Christianity without the institutional backing for decades."

Manuka says our tupuna took to Christianity because they understood its message. He says today's Maori needs to also make that same commitment to believing in salvation for all people.

In this area he says Maori people have a lot of work to do in their own churches, to make it a Maori faith. Tu Tangata: Does this have the effect of

dividing churches? “I remember something Archbishop Paul Reeves said five years ago, that the first pastoral priority for any Maori Christian is to their own people. Here was I thinking that I was for everybody, I never thought I must have some priorities.

"If you look at Jesus, he worked only with Jews. It was Peter, Paul and others who went to Rome and Greece and everywhere else, Jesus had priorities.

"Paul was the one who took on the job of going to the Gentiles. Interestingly enough wherever he went, he first checked in with the local synagogue, the local Jewish community. So he knew who he was.”

Because of this Manuka says the first priority of a Maori Christian today is to evangelise his own people, then he can go off to evangelise anybody else, but that’s the order.

Tu Tangata: Where does that leave Maori people stranded in an urban situation surrounded by fellow pakeha Christians?

"Well it's a problem. In my case my wife is a pakeha and so we juggle going to the local church in Island Bay but I would prefer to go to a Maori Mass, but there ain't too many. What we have to be able to demand from our local church is to say, ‘why can't I be catered for?' Having a monthly Maori Mass is hardly a positive response from a church. Becoming a member of a church should not be an alienating experience. The Christian faith has always put its roots down in those cultures it has gone to, it has learnt from those cultures and at the same time has contributed and transformed those cultures. That is what I am asking to happen in Aotearoa.”

Manuka Henare says a sign of this is the Maori Catholics now asking for their own Maori Bishop, as have all the other mainstream churches their heads... the Bishop of Aotearoa, the Moderator of the Presbyterian Synod, the Tumuaki for the Methodists etc.

"Each Christian community has to produce its own leadership, you can't be dependent on another culture providing religious leaders for you.” Tu Tangata: How independent should this section be?

"Christians all belong to an evergrowing family, but you are a particular kind of Christian and that's not in conflict what Jesus spoke about. He was a very particular type of Jew."

Tu Tangata: What does this independence within Maori sections pose for a New Zealand church, a church of the culture of Aotearoa?

"Well the history of Christianity is very brief in New Zealand. The missionaries came here from Europe to evangelise the Maori and set up some kind of church within the Maori culture. What happened was that in a very short

space of time just after 1840, there was a great flood of pakeha settlers. The churches got redirected from their original mission, to cater for the pakeha settlers. That’s why Maori people can talk of settler churches being here, and also why there aren’t too many indigenous churches.”

Manuka says the mainstream churches are still settler churches where everything about the way that they think and operate is a settler mentality. He says that’s why many of the Maori in all of those churches feel they’re on the fringe.

"Every now and then these settler churches turn around and show a lot of interest in them, (the Maori) and then after a short time return to their preoccupation. Maori people don't want this sort of attention when the majority chooses, so that's why they need their own leaderhsip, to produce prayer forms that take note of your cultural values. That's already happening.

“The challenge of a lot of young Maori is to these Maori sections, saying correctly, ‘just how Maori are you?' By and large most of the prayer forms and sacramental practices, (I’m not talking about the actual sacraments) are translations of someone else’s cultural forms and expressions, so we have to go a lot further here, but it comes back to the question of leadership. Within the Maori kinship tribal systems, leadership is crucial.”

Unlike the pakeha more individualistic response, Manuka believes the Maori believer looks for a group response and a kaumatua or leader to emerge. He says they don’t feel right unless they have one. Tu Tangata: What is your assessment of the Catholic Church being rooted in Aotearoa?

“In my job with the Commission for Evangelisation, Justice and Development I'm very aware of many Catholic people who want to see their church become rooted in this country, and become more than an extension of Irish Catholicism, French Catholicism, Italian Catholicism and English Catholicism. That aspiration is expressed not only in the lay people but also in the present hierachy of bishops.”

The EJD commission has run a Lenten programme aimed at the pakeha side of the Catholic Church showing that the Treaty of Waitangi belongs to them as part of a bi-cultural partnership that allowed pakeha settlers to come to New Zealand.

Manuka says preparatory work on the programme showed many pakeha only too willing to say they had no culture. He says it shows they're lying first up, and secondly, are of no help to Maori because the Maori look around and see nothing but pakeha culture. “We see it, feel it. experience it and yet here are some pakehas telling us

they don't have one.” He says after the EJD programme some parishes came out feeling confident that they did have a culture and it wasn't all bad... He says the intention was to show them what Maori people were on about.

“There’s no need to get pakehas rushing over to fill up on maoritanga because they don't know their pakehatanga yet.”

Tu Tangata: Would you see current moves to spread the Renew programme throughout the Catholic Church in New Zealand as being in line with this New Zealand identity? (Renew is Catholic programme imported from the States to rejuvenate parish life)?

“I see the bishops move to have Catholics look at their faith as being timely and those involved will learn a lot, it’s all part of this journey to make this church a New Zealand church.” He says from the hui he attends, many Maori see Renew as a pakeha response to a pakeha need.

However he feels the Maori people are already involved in their own renew programme, a questioning of what their maoritanga and faith mean.

“The maori challenge today is a total renewal, because the Maori is looking at the culture, the way of life, the spirituality, the philosophy, everything. And the Maori is responding to it. Our renew programme is called Tu Tangata, Maatua Whangai, Kohanga Reo, the land struggle.

“Otherwise how do you explain this quest by a lot of young Maori who are critical of the Christian churches, but at the same time are wanting to know about their taha wairua. I think they're genuine, they don’t want to learn karakia just for the sake of appearance, they want to know what it means.”

Manuka says a total view of the material and spiritual as always affecting one another is the Maori way of living. He says this was really demonstrated for him at the Maori Economic Summit where the wairua was acknowledged as interwoven in with the economic management needed. Nowhere at the pakeha Economic Summit did this figure at all says Manuka.

Tu Tangata: Is it a tougher task these days for Maori to practise their spirituality?

“Yes, because of all the outside influences converging and coming in on Maori all the time. It's such a totally pakeha world that in order to escape from it, you have to do some quite extraordinary things.

“You turn on the radio, the tv. If you turn it on at the wrong time you listen to ten minutes in Maori, which is all you get. Yes it is tough, because part of the Maori spirituality is just soaking up an atmosphere that is Maori."

Tu Tangata: These extraordinary things Maori have to d 0... could this point to an

inability of Maori people to cope with urban life?

“Well I believe that all Maori who call themselves Maori have to belong to a marae, in fact you belong to a number of marae. My papakainga is in Whangape, Tai Tokerau. In recent years I've been trying to get my children back there at least once a year.

“I’m also involved in Te Kainga a church centre in Webb Street, so we're fundraising and cleaning that one up. It’s hoped to develop into a marae for Maori Catholics in Wellington.

“My children go to Wellington High School so we’re also involved in the bilingual programme there and the whanau atmosphere.” Manuka says as he travels the countryside he goes to a number of Maori Catholic marae, Christchurch

Te Rangimarie, Hamilton Hui Te Rangiora, in Auckland Tu Nga Waka and Whaiora. He says he finds himself belonging to all these marae because they are the centres of his activities.

“I now understand why you have to belong to a marae, because that is the centre of Maori activity. If you are living in the city you're talking about a particular kind of marae, church ones, sporting ones, university ones, school ones, and of course your papakainga. I mean thousands of city-living Maori spend hundreds of dollars a year on travelling back to their papakainga just to stand there for a while, to get in tune, in touch.

“Those are the hallmarks of a Maori today, any Maori that cuts himself off from the marae is in a critical situation.”