Maori

THE OCEAN IS OUR PRAIRIE By Martin Rumsby When the explorer Captain James Cook first made landfall in New Zealand he had on board with him a Tahitian navigator named Tupaia who was able to converse with local Maori and cite common ancestors. In trading with the Europeans, Maori preferred Tahitian tapa Tapa – tree bark beaten into cloth and onto which abstract patterns and designs are applied. This art form is popular throughout the South Pacific and was likely instilled in Len Lye’s visual sub-conscious before he emigrated to London and then New York. to European cloth. Alice Te Punga Somerville. Once Were Pacific. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2012 p xv There is poetry in the shifting words and meanings of Polynesia. Entering the Pacific Ocean in 1769 Cook’s ship H.M.S. Endeavour was populated not only with crew but also a contingent of scientists and artists tasked with the Enlightenment project of measuring and classifying flora, fauna, land, sea, along with the transit of planetary bodies. An Enlightenment outlook may be characterized by a, “terror of darkened spaces, the illegibility of men and things. The aim of this tradition has always been to eradicate the domain of myth, suspicion, tyranny and, above all, the irrational.” James Donald. Imagining the Modern City. London. The Athlone Press. 1999. p76. Where Maori and Polynesians regarded the sea as a living and breathing life force, an extension of the land itself, Cook’s ‘experimental gentlemen’ reduced them to standardized 2-dimensional grids of latitude and longitude. The same type of grid that Thomas Jefferson applied to the landscape of the United States. From here this ‘empty territory’ could be claimed, cut-up, assigned, and cultivated in a manner quite foreign to Maori thought. Maori regarded the land as ancestral treasure to be respected and conserved for succeeding generations. For Maori the land was a rangitira, a chiefly or noble person, with its own rights. Essentially, the arrival of Europeans in the Pacific instigated a process in which Modernism was layered over traditional thought. When Maori finally realized the extent of the European project they instigated a debate that remains on-going. This debate proceeds from points where Enlightenment and Maori thinking intersect in, say, ideas of humans as one life force among many within the vast equilibrium of a constantly changing cosmos, an entity in which all things are bound together in complex webs of reciprocal exchange. These debates are now core in defining New Zealander’s national sense of identity and their prevailing attitudes toward environmental issues and the rights of Maori. In his landmark study Maori Art History, Architecture, Landscape and Theory Rangihiroa Panoho tells us that, “Maori art is an idea, not so much a form; Rangihiroa Panoho. Maori Art History, Architecture, Landscape and Theory. Auckland. Bateman. 2015. p8. it is the flow, not so much where the flow settles.” The Maori view of time is maybe best expressed by the saying, ‘ ‘walking forwards, looking backwards.’ Here, the past and the future intermingle in the present. It is up to us in the present to preserve as much as possible of the past as a way of mapping the future. As Confucius said, we have evolved from a more perfect past and move toward an uncertain future. From this standpoint we would ignore the pattern of tradition at our own peril. In life we can look back. It is only in death that there is nothing to turn back to. In history it is written and in Polynesia the stories are written on the tapa, being in the conversations of women as they beat tree bark into cloth. Through this tapa and its stories we may shape the present from the past toward an image of the future in which Pacific culture expresses an inclusive New Zealand/Pacific identity. Even a modernist such as the post Ezra Pound may agree with this standpoint. “Tradition is a beauty which we preserve and not a set of fetters to bind us.” Ezra Pound. The Tradition (1913) in, Poetry III. 4, January 1914. p137. The Nuiean New Zealand artist John Pule (b.1962) whose work in painting, print-making and filmmaking, adresses themes of cosmology, print-making, filmmaking and performance, often works within forms and styles that can be identified with tapa. Witi Ihimaera (b 1944) was the first Maori to write a novel. He believes that Maori have to write tribally, within the context of the specific place they come from. Ihimaera belongs to a North Island East Coast tribe upon whose beach at Whangara their ancestor Paikea arrived and it is upon this story that he based his novella The Whale Rider (1987) Whale Rider may relate to an earlier story from Mauke in the Cook Islands. Here, the great fisherman Paikea is swept out to sea by a hurricane. New Zealand Maori pick up the story of Paikea riding a whale to safety in Aoatearo, New Zealand. HYPERLINK "http://www.cookislands.org.uk/7mauke-explore.html" www.cookislands.org.uk/7mauke-explore.html Accessed January 31, 2014. This later became the film Whale Rider (2002). Here Maori are shown expanding their reality to incorporate the wider Pacific as something other than an extension of metropolitan culture. Ihimaera believes that the film gains potency from having been filmed at Whangara Personal email to the author. September 6, 2013.. More recently, Ihimaera’s novella Medicine Woman was adapted into the film White Lies (2013) and in 2016 his novel Bullibasha was adapted as a film titled Mahana, directed by Lee Tamahori. Ramai Hayward a.k.a Ramai Te Miha, Patricia Rongomaitara Te Mihi and Patricia Miller (1916 – 2014) was the first Maori professional photographer and the first Maori filmmaker. From 1940 Ramai collaborated with the pioneering filmmaker Rudall Hayward (1900-1974) on film projects in New Zealand, China and Europe. They married in 1943. Her involvement in his projects included acting, writing, cinematography, producing and directing. Ramai’s first directing credit was for Children of China (1961). She also co-directed her husband’s final film To Love A Maori (1972) before directing The Dolls House the following year. Deborah Shepard (ed): Between the Lives: Partners in Art. Auckland, Auckland University Press, 2005 The first feature film directed by a Maori was Barry Barclay’s Ngati (1987), he followed this up with Te Rua in 1991. Ngati emphasizes the power of community in shaping the lives of people and how people shape the life of community. An important founding figure of Maori cinema, Barclay (1944-2008) directed the seminal Tangata Whenua (People of the Land) (1974) television series which presented Maori issues from a Maori perspective. Barclay, who trained for six years in an Australian Roman Catholic seminary before returning to New Zealand to work in radio and film, also wrote extensively about what he called “Fourth Cinema,” Indigenous Cinema. “I think a Maori filmmaker is someone Maori who identifies as Maori and is proud to use the camera as a Maori for Maori purposes, at least some of the time. It’s good fun to do other things as well.” Lynette Read Interviews Barry Barclay in Illusions #31, Summer 2000/2001 p3 Almost everywhere, indigenous artists tend to address issues from a standpoint of their indigeneity, a factor which politicizes their work. For Barclay, indigenous societies exist beyond and before modern nationalist orthodoxies as enduring remnant cultures. A Fourth Cinema sets its own agenda and defines its own parameters in terms of indigenous lived experience and the community the film maker represents and works within. “It means looking out at the stranger coming to you, and not being looked at, and made an object of, by this person … but also a matter of looking out for – a caring that defines a community, and human ecology. With ecology goes community.” Stephen Turner, Barry Barclay: the Camera on the Shore in Illusions No. 41, Winter 2009, p32 According to the filmmaker Merata Mita (1942-2010), “Maori films are driven by identity, resolution and survival.” Merata Mita; The Soul and the Image in, Jonathon Dennis & Jan Bieringa Film in Aotearoa New Zealand, Wellington, Victoria University Press, 1992 p17 “Mita … described the filmmaking process as involving … cosmological areas of dark and light … Darkness, for Mita, is the filmic space of the theatre and the genre itself where the resurrections of the past take place. It is an unchanging area where ancestors can be accessed and remembered and brought alive through collective memory and the lively reception of descendants.” – Rangihiroa Panoho. Maori Art History, Architecture, Landscape and Theory. Auckland. Bateman. 2015. p323. Both Mita and Barclay argued that the colonial influence can be erased or revised, a contention which the art historian Rangihiroa Panoho warns is fraught not only with Orwellian associations but also weakens the essential elements of opposition, conflict and disagreement already inherent in Maori art and culture . Mita made several documentaries which passionately presented indigenous points of view on socially contentious subject matter. Her films included Bastion Point: Day 507 (1980), Patu (1983) and Mana Waka (1990). With Mauri (1988), a film which probed concepts of culture around notions of birth, marriage and death Mita became the first Maori woman to direct a feature film . Mita embraced a communal approach to filmmaking, including a training programme for young Maori filmmakers as part of her work. She also taught indigenous screenwriting, aesthetics and production at the University of Hawaii and was executive producer of The Land Has Eyes (Visioni Hereniko, 2004), the first feature film made by a native Fijian. Mita’s other films included Te Pahi: The Maori Drum (1996), The Dread (1996), and Hotere (2001) From the 1960s New Zealand’s most significant Maori Modernist visual artist Ralph Hotere (1931-2013) developed an abstract and installation style of minimalist art which at times addressed social and political subject matter. “There are very few things I can say about my work that are better than saying nothing.” Hotere in Merata Mita’s film Hotere. Paradise Productions. 2001.. Her final film was Saving Grace (2011). Tony Mitchell. Merata Mita in, Directory of World Cinema Australia & New Zealand 2. Bristol & Chicago. Intellect Books. 2015. pp 276-279. Other notable Maori feature films include Lee Tamahori’s Once Were Warriors (1994) and Te Tangata Whai Rawa O Weneti (The Maori Merchant of Venice) (2002) directed by Don Selwyn (1935-2007). Here, Shakespeare’s famous play is performed by Maori in the Maori language. More recently, Taika Waititi has come to prominence with a series of popular feature films including, Boy (2012), What We Do in the Shadows (2013), and Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016), an adaptation from the novel Wild Pork and Watercress by Barry Crump. Prior to the Maori cultural renaissance the Samoan American playwright John H Kneubuhl (1920-1992) wrote plays in Honolulu before moving to Hollywood where he worked as a television writer. His screenwriting credits included episodes of Star Trek, Hawaii Five O, Mannix, The Fugitive, Doctor Kildare and Gunsmoke from the mid 1950s to the late 1960s. Kneubuhl also produced the cult film The Screaming Skull in 1958. Disillusioned with Hollywood he burned his television scripts and returned to Pago Pago,. His Think of a Garden and Other Plays was published by the University of Hawaii Press in 1997. Kneubuhl died in American Samoa in 1992. Another Samoan writer, Albert Wendt (b. 1939), had two of his stories made into feature films. Sons For the Return Home (1979), based on the novel of the same name, a tragic inter-racial love story, directed by Paul Maunder, was the first full-length feature made about Samoa. Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree Flying foxes (bats) are sometimes seen by Samoans as being messengers of the Gods. Because they hang upside down it is believed that they see things differently from the rest of us. Interestingly, the Samoan word pe’a, the name for a traditional body tattoo is also the same word for flying fox. Seen frontally, the pe’a looks like a flying fox about to open. Wendt’s Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree is a novella, part of a larger novel Leaves of the Banyan Tree. (1990), directed by Martyn Sanderson, featured the poet and film artist Richard von Sturmer as Tagata, the tree dwelling flying fox whose suicide prompts the story’s main character to look for life’s deeper meanings. Described as the first Polynesian existentialist film it tells the story of a young man, Pepe the trickster, son of a Samoan patriarch. Torn between the demands of tradition and the temptations of modernity Pepe rejects Christianity, leads a juvenile gang, experiments with alcohol and sex, burns down a church and then robs his father’s store, bringing shame on his family. Later, suffering from TB in an infirmary, Pepe turns his hand to poetry, writing a letter to the self, which becomes the story Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree. Besides his experiences of growing up and being educated in Samoa and New Zealand, as a thinker Albert Wendt was also influenced by the French existentialist writer Albert Camus (1913-1960) and the French Algerian post-colonialist theorist Frantz Fanon (1925-1961). The Orator (2011) by Tusi Tamasese, the first feature film written and directed by a Samoan, is an almost Shakespearian depiction of the search for justice and redemption by a family of outsiders in Samoa. Slowly paced in long shots and long takes the film offers a glimpse into an ancient Polynesian culture in a way that recalls, say, Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953). When people awaken politically then there is a corresponding upsurge in artistic and cultural activity. This has been true for Maori and Pasifika artists in New Zealand since the 1980s. Following the arrival of television in New Zealand in 1960, various sections of society realized that they were subject to media neglect and mis-representation. How, they asked, could such mis-representation lead to an open and participatory democracy that may in some way accord with populist notions of New Zealand as a free and open country? In the early 1980s independent filmmakers began addressing gay, women’s and indigenous issues. For them, the modernist certainty of the autonomy of art no longer held true. Their work extended the frame of reference towards social activism and multi-culturalism. These artists included Peter Wells, Stewart Main, Shereen Maloney, Merata Mita and Martyn Sanderson. Indigenous concerns have been continued in the media art works of Lisa Reihana, Maree Mills, Rose-Michele Lee, Natalie Robertson and Rachael Rakena. These artists address issues of self, society and environment from a specific Maori perspective. Their ideas are related to the evolution of the idea of New Zealand into Aotearoa, as a society that embraces Maori cultural and spiritual values as its foundation. An expansive wide-screen multi-channel, digital cinema meets the art gallery in Lisa Reihana’s In Pursuit of Venus (Infected) as installed at the Auckland Art Gallery in 2015. A formal work which consists of consecutive left to right tracking shots across a landscape depicted in a nineteenth century French wallpaper Les Sauvages de la mer Pacifiqe. The wallpaper represents idealized Tahitian scenes. Here, by means of green-screen technology, it becomes a backdrop for superimposed live-action performances. Within these scenes small discrete groups of actors perform scenes of intercultural interaction and misunderstanding. These include Polynesian dancing, tattooing, European explorers raising a flag, instigating trade, a sailor being disciplined, documenting the locality and so on. The performances serve to refigure the wallpaper within a sensual post-colonial discourse of indigenous politics and reality. The viewpoint here is a native one, looking from the land toward the sea from which the eighteenth century Europeans have arrived. It could be said that this scene represents the meeting of Enlightenment empiricism with Romanticism in the South Pacific. For her projected light works Tanya Ruka explores concepts of Maori mythology and time, restating the concept that the past can be incorporated as an equal partner with the present and future. Her interests are in the realm of becoming, but from the luminal space of Te Kore – the nothing, the potential of nothingness – as in the time before creation. “I use contemporary tools in conjunction with traditional forms of patterning such as the repetition and mirroring found in Maori weaving and carving. The knowledge of out Tupuna – ancestors gives access to the past, present and future … represented by the continual looping of the video and sound work. Te Aho Tapu is the sacred thread that links all things. This is the knowledge that is woven into the tukutuku panels in the marae (communal meeting places), korowai (cloaks), harakehe (flax weaving) and whaikairo (carving).” Tanya Ruka HYPERLINK "http://www.tsbbankwallaceartscentre.org.nz/exhibitions/future-exhibitions/tanya-ruka-te-kore-te-ao-the-intrinsic-light-within-nothing Accessed April 4" www.tsbbankwallaceartscentre.org.nz/exhibitions/future-exhibitions/tanya-ruka-te-kore-te-ao-the-intrinsic-light-within-nothing Accessed April 4, 2014 In Tawhirimatea , (2010) Ruka used stop motion processes to create a digital turangawaewae (a place to stand) within an immersive video environment. “Traditionally, for Maori, this is your Whenua, the place where you were born and grew up, surrounded by your family and ancestors.” Tanya Ruka, personal email to the author. July 20, 2011 In You Love My Fresh (2010), a short three channel installation work, Tanu Gago addresses the complexity and diversity of the Samoan experience in the ‘new villages’ South Auckland’s ‘new villages’, destinations of Maori, Pacific Island, Indian and middle eastern migration include Otara, Otahuhu, Mangere, Papatoetoe, Manurewa and Papakura (though Papatoetoe, Manurewa and Papakura may also be thought of as old towns, being located along Great South Road and the main trunk railway of the North Island). of South Auckland. A Samoan brought to New Zealand as a young child and brought up by an adoptive palangi (European) mother and Tongan father Gago hankers after the ‘authentic’ Samoan experience, one in which a gay Samoan male can exist outside of the Fa’afafine (third gender) stereotype. “My art practice is concerned with issues of representation around contemporary Pacific experiences. It examines facets of my own cultural heritage and looks at aspects of identity, gender, sexuality and popular culture amongst Pacific communities.” Tanu Gago HYPERLINK "http://www.thekoolkidscompany.blogspot.co.nz"www.thekoolkidscompany.blogspot.co.nz Accessed August 14, 2013 Set to a haunting, ambient soundtrack of Polynesian hip hop You Love My Fresh opens on an image of the Otara shopping center at night. Subsequent sequences show the decrepitly Third World Otahuhu bus station, a church based workshop where New Zealand born Samoans learn how to prepare a traditional Umu (earth oven), and high voltage pylons traversing the ‘new village’ of Otara. A succession of titles question Polynesians status as anything other than token New Zealanders valued as exotica but relegated to menial, minimum wage jobs, discount shopping centers, and careers as athletes and entertainers. “Your cultural experience shapes me, makes me cynical, violent and resentful … I feel redundant as a citizen in your First World.” The work ends on a choreographed Samoan dance set to an evocatively Polynesian rendering of the New Zealand national anthem. The loss or absence Gago addresses is held equally by pakeha and palangi, though many may not yet recognize it. In The Sound of the Ocean (2015), Gago remixes footage downloaded from the internet as representations of Pacific people, according to Google. Like many contemporary Pasifika artists Gago chooses to engage more with social representation of Pacific people rather than emphasize philosophical or cosmological perspectives or ways in which the traditional design practices and patterns associated with tapa or moko may be layered onto everyday life and thinking. The Cook Island/New Zealand Maori intermedia artist Leilani Kake produces personal works which deal with issues of identity and culture, tradition and change in New Zealand Maori and Pacific Island communities. Kake is interested in documenting the points at which families change, offering insights into intimate and privileged spaces. Her works include Mates (2006), Talking Tivaevae “The Cook Island (Rarotongan) art of tivaevae/quilting and its method of constructon is a culturally symbolic artistic act that weaves communities together, creating and strengthening relationships and sharing cultural identity …(with).. each hand sewn stitch each individual arrives at the tivaevae with their own unique story(2005), Minimal Baroque (2006), Ariki (2007), and Tino Rangitira Tanga (2010). Kake’s immersive four-screen video installation Nga Hau E Wha – The Four Winds (2011) features four ethereally backlit Pacific women (one per screen), each representing a different stage of womanhood – post pubescent, pregnant, motherhood and menopause. Naked, they glide on their backs, arms outstretched, through an enveloping liquid darkness. The water being the ocean that humans crossed to get here, placental fluid and a reminder that, besides the god Tangaroa, Maori mythology also spoke of maidens of the sea. The calm and soothing soundtrack includes a tauparapara, a chant like introductory salutation, recited by Kake herself. “The tauparapara stipulates that we continue the ancient tradition of learning our genealogical links back to the elements of the physical world and down through our human ancestry who now resides in the permanent abode of our people in Hawaiki … (acknowledging) … the essence of life and celebrating our entrance into the world of light.” Program Notes, Fresh Gallery, Otara accessed at HYPERLINK "http://NgaHauEWha.wordpress.com" http://NgaHauEWha.wordpress.com 16/04/2011 In The Hair Cutting (2012), Kake documented her son’s participation in a rite of passage at the Otahuhu Town Hall Community Center. Here, the work may be viewed from different perspectives – as a ritual, or from afar as a small detail from a distant life, or a traumatic meeting of self with society from the point of view of a child having his first haircut. The performance video Siva in Motion (2012) shows the interdisciplinary artist Shigeyuki Kihara employing the choreographic movements of the Samoan taualuga, the dance technique of the native taupou (high born maidens). Kihara, an artist of Samoan descent, also happens to be of Fa’afafine (third gender). Siva in Motion is based on stories told to her of the tsunami which hit Samoa in 2009 and she employs gesture to convey emotional, social and political ideas. Citing the influence of nineteenth century motion study photography Siva in Motion inhabits an intersection of western and Polynesian cultures, dance, photography and film coming across as a Samoan video variation on Marcel Duchamp’s painting Nude Descending a Staircase (1912). Perhaps unintentionally the arms and hand movements superimposed over one another also create associations with the Hindu deity Shiva, say, as the fierce union of Kali and Bhairava. Johnson Whitehira combined traditional Maori design elements with western influences and digital technology as in his Times Square Project (2012) where a series of his digital art works were exhibited on 34 digital boards in Times Square, New York. In April, 2013 the Maori filmmaker Pita Turei staged an eighteen minute long outdoor film projection of archival footage onto the outer walls of the Auckland War Memorial Museum. This event commemorated the contribution of Pacific island soldiers in World Wars I and II. Situating themselves as indigenous South Auckland avant-gardists, Jeremy Leatinu’u and Rangituhia Hollis employ western art making methodologies to express contemporary Polynesian culture in moving images. Their approach allows for the sometimes contentious incorporation of western performance, conceptual and even anthropological strategies into indigenous art practices. Hollis himself cites the early influence of Japanese and western video games on his artistic consciousness. He takes on stereotypes generally associated with Maori, such as negative portrayals of their home life which he reasserts as incipient threats to Maoridom. The single channel video installation Kei mate mango pare (2010) Sally Blundel, Redrawing the Categories, New Zealand Listener, May 18, 2013 p44, based on a Maori proverb calling on the fighting spirits of sharks, depicts a silhouetted school of sharks circling a prominent Auckland volcano, indicating the evolving nature of cultural identity, how cultural identity is not a fixed thing but is contingent upon conflicting social and natural interactions. In Plumley Crescent (2007), part of the de kapua series, a wave of elemental fire or lava consumes suburban dwellings as indication of the disruptions of urban migration. In his four-screen video installation Axes (2007) function as Fascistic symbols directed against Maori. For Mata Mata (2012), collaboration with the Samoan artist Vaimala Urale, a pool hall was recreated as a gallery installation, a common ground where Maori, Pacific Islanders and Europeans could interact. Here Hollis created pool cues beautifully hand-carved with Pasifika patterns derived from traditional objects on display at the Auckland Museum. Spectators were invited to use the cues in a game of pool incorporated as part of the exhibition. In this way Hollis put traditional design back into the hands of the people as a way of reintegrating ancient patterns back into their daily lives. Taking their inspiration from game play, dance and Maori battle traditions, Urale and Hollis created Mata Mata 2.0 (2014), an interactive live art work featuring the performer Jack Gray. Jeremy Leatinu’u uses video to document performances that he stages in public spaces as a way of lending everyday sites an air of theatricality. In The Welcome Project (2010) Rangituhia Hollis. The Other Side of Speaking in, More Than We Know, Exhibition Catalog, Auckland, Tautai Contemporary Pacific Arts Trust, 2013 a two screen video he holds a welcome sign for new arrivals from Tonga, Samoa and Fiji at Auckland airport. In the other screen Leatinu’u spells out welcome with volcanic rocks in the crater of an iconic Auckland volcano. Johnson Witehira, Tanya Ruka, Rangituhia Hollis and Jeremy Leatinu’u all had work included in the group show Since 1984: He aha te ahurea-rua? curated by Martin Awa Clarke Langdon for Auckland’s St Paul St Gallery in 2015. As an assertion of the importance of indigenous performance and moving image work Linda Tanoa’i has created an immense archive (Linda TV) of events, documenting openings and performances, interviewing artists and participating in artistic collaborations. In demonstration of the possibility of intercultural dialogue, Kauri-oke (2013), a moving art work of an entirely different order was produced by the Australian artists Tessa Zettel and Karl Khoe. Kauri-oke is a portable, solar powered karaoke machine set within a cabinet of recycled New Zealand kauri timber. The timber, from which many homes in San Francisco were also made, was sourced from a demolished house in Sydney, Australia. Kauri was exploited and exported to add allure to Australian domestic interiors. It is as if the colonizer is here repatriating the product of a globalized trade to its source. The eccentric ‘machine’ is mounted on a hand-held trolley on which it is pulled through the Otara flea market as a mobile archive of popular Maori and Pasifika songs. People can add their own songs, or search for songs that are not available on the internet, creating a song list specifically related to the local community. In relating to this machine we may ask how nostalgia shapes our readings of the places we once knew, encouraging us to look to new forms of social imagining, dwelling and remembering. The historic avant-garde was motivated by an idea of offering hope and freedom, changing an unworkable world by destroying repressive institutions to allow for personal and social transformation. In this way the injustices of the past would be washed away. What the above work demonstrates most of all is that indigenous people are now reaching a point where they can represent themselves, whether on their own terms or in critical dialogue with their former colonizers. Language and contexts can be extended to incorporate the indigenous and therefore bringing us to the end of ethnography. Pacific Island nations are likely to face new threats in the coming century. These include increased resource competition in an already unregulated environment. The threat of rising sea levels associated with global warming will result in the de-population of several island nations. Trans-national crime, often better resourced and armed than small island states, presents threats of increased arms, narcotics and people trafficking throughout the region. One wonders if there will be specifically Pacific responses and solutions to these threats. What indigenous art shows us is that there are alternate ways of thinking and orienting ourselves in relation to other people and the world. Ways that worked for them. For us to find a way forward, if that is what we desire, we can look backwards and reassess where we have come from. In recent years western politicians have experimented with systems, qualitative, and numerical analysis as ways of increasing the outputs of self-regulating market democracies, none of which performed as promised. What they led to was the false reporting of unsustainable outcomes, resulting eventually in economic meltdown within a wider context of impending global environmental catastrophe. We may have already gone too far. The political dimension of such thinking, that there is a single answer toward creating a better world led, in the twentieth century, to the excesses of the left, the right and religious fundamentalists. Inspired by Jean Paul Satre (1905-1980), Frantz Fanon and Ali Shariati (1933-1977) recent national and religious liberation movements have come to believe that escape from imperialism lies in violence and terrorism. These movements have opposed themselves to western laissez faire notions of a disinterested freedom based on notions of universal human rights. And these competing notions rip and tear at each other like colliding tectonic plates, in an insane continuance of one against the other. But maybe there is another way, one that lies in a pluralistic respect for human dignity, where our differing ideas and values can live alongside and enrich one another. The way that molecules live and slide past one another as canoe molecules, water molecules, breeze molecules and muscle molecules as we navigate our selves across the horizon, beyond the sunrise and, for Polynesians, back to Hawaiki. It could be that there is still something to be found in the ways that indigenous people conceived of, coped with and managed their economies and universes as places where work and leisure held equal value and were equitably distributed amongst all riting on the anniversary of George Orwell’s death in 2014, George Woodcock stated, ’Unless we choose to decentralize and to use applied science, not as the end to which human beings are to be made the means, but as the means to producing free individuals, we have only two alternatives to choose from: either a number of national, militarized totalitarianisms … or else one supranational totalitarianism.” - George Woodcock , Five Writers Who Feared The Future. HYPERLINK "http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116276/george-orwell-anniversary-death" www.newrepublic.com/article/116276/george-orwell-anniversary-death? Accessed January 20, 2014.. PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 6

THE OCEAN IS OUR PRAIRIE By Martin Rumsby When the explorer Captain James Cook first made landfall in New Zealand he had on board with him a Tahitian navigator named Tupaia who was able to converse with local Maori and cite common ancestors. In trading with the Europeans, Maori preferred Tahitian tapa Tapa – tree bark beaten into cloth and onto which abstract patterns and designs are applied. This art form is popular throughout the South Pacific and was likely instilled in Len Lye’s visual sub-conscious before he emigrated to London and then New York. to European cloth. Alice Te Punga Somerville. Once Were Pacific. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2012 p xv There is poetry in the shifting words and meanings of Polynesia. Entering the Pacific Ocean in 1769 Cook’s ship H.M.S. Endeavour was populated not only with crew but also a contingent of scientists and artists tasked with the Enlightenment project of measuring and classifying flora, fauna, land, sea, along with the transit of planetary bodies. An Enlightenment outlook may be characterized by a, “terror of darkened spaces, the illegibility of men and things. The aim of this tradition has always been to eradicate the domain of myth, suspicion, tyranny and, above all, the irrational.” James Donald. Imagining the Modern City. London. The Athlone Press. 1999. p76. Where Maori and Polynesians regarded the sea as a living and breathing life force, an extension of the land itself, Cook’s ‘experimental gentlemen’ reduced them to standardized 2-dimensional grids of latitude and longitude. The same type of grid that Thomas Jefferson applied to the landscape of the United States. From here this ‘empty territory’ could be claimed, cut-up, assigned, and cultivated in a manner quite foreign to Maori thought. Maori regarded the land as ancestral treasure to be respected and conserved for succeeding generations. For Maori the land was a rangitira, a chiefly or noble person, with its own rights. Essentially, the arrival of Europeans in the Pacific instigated a process in which Modernism was layered over traditional thought. When Maori finally realized the extent of the European project they instigated a debate that remains on-going. This debate proceeds from points where Enlightenment and Maori thinking intersect in, say, ideas of humans as one life force among many within the vast equilibrium of a constantly changing cosmos, an entity in which all things are bound together in complex webs of reciprocal exchange. These debates are now core in defining New Zealander’s national sense of identity and their prevailing attitudes toward environmental issues and the rights of Maori. In his landmark study Maori Art History, Architecture, Landscape and Theory Rangihiroa Panoho tells us that, “Maori art is an idea, not so much a form; Rangihiroa Panoho. Maori Art History, Architecture, Landscape and Theory. Auckland. Bateman. 2015. p8. it is the flow, not so much where the flow settles.” The Maori view of time is maybe best expressed by the saying, ‘ ‘walking forwards, looking backwards.’ Here, the past and the future intermingle in the present. It is up to us in the present to preserve as much as possible of the past as a way of mapping the future. As Confucius said, we have evolved from a more perfect past and move toward an uncertain future. From this standpoint we would ignore the pattern of tradition at our own peril. In life we can look back. It is only in death that there is nothing to turn back to. In history it is written and in Polynesia the stories are written on the tapa, being in the conversations of women as they beat tree bark into cloth. Through this tapa and its stories we may shape the present from the past toward an image of the future in which Pacific culture expresses an inclusive New Zealand/Pacific identity. Even a modernist such as the post Ezra Pound may agree with this standpoint. “Tradition is a beauty which we preserve and not a set of fetters to bind us.” Ezra Pound. The Tradition (1913) in, Poetry III. 4, January 1914. p137. The Nuiean New Zealand artist John Pule (b.1962) whose work in painting, print-making and filmmaking, adresses themes of cosmology, print-making, filmmaking and performance, often works within forms and styles that can be identified with tapa. Witi Ihimaera (b 1944) was the first Maori to write a novel. He believes that Maori have to write tribally, within the context of the specific place they come from. Ihimaera belongs to a North Island East Coast tribe upon whose beach at Whangara their ancestor Paikea arrived and it is upon this story that he based his novella The Whale Rider (1987) Whale Rider may relate to an earlier story from Mauke in the Cook Islands. Here, the great fisherman Paikea is swept out to sea by a hurricane. New Zealand Maori pick up the story of Paikea riding a whale to safety in Aoatearo, New Zealand. HYPERLINK "http://www.cookislands.org.uk/7mauke-explore.html" www.cookislands.org.uk/7mauke-explore.html Accessed January 31, 2014. This later became the film Whale Rider (2002). Here Maori are shown expanding their reality to incorporate the wider Pacific as something other than an extension of metropolitan culture. Ihimaera believes that the film gains potency from having been filmed at Whangara Personal email to the author. September 6, 2013.. More recently, Ihimaera’s novella Medicine Woman was adapted into the film White Lies (2013). Ramai Hayward a.k.a Ramai Te Miha, Patricia Rongomaitara Te Mihi and Patricia Miller (1916 – 2014) was the first Maori professional photographer and the first Maori filmmaker. From 1940 Ramai collaborated with the pioneering filmmaker Rudall Hayward (1900-1974) on film projects in New Zealand, China and Europe. They married in 1943. Her involvement in his projects included acting, writing, cinematography, producing and directing. Ramai’s first directing credit was for Children of China (1961). She also co-directed her husband’s final film To Love A Maori (1972) before directing The Dolls House the following year. Deborah Shepard (ed): Between the Lives: Partners in Art. Auckland, Auckland University Press, 2005 The first feature film directed by a Maori was Barry Barclay’s Ngati (1987), he followed this up with Te Rua in 1991. Ngati emphasizes the power of community in shaping the lives of people and how people shape the life of community. An important founding figure of Maori cinema, Barclay (1944-2008) directed the seminal Tangata Whenua (People of the Land) (1974) television series which presented Maori issues from a Maori perspective. Barclay, who trained for six years in an Australian Roman Catholic seminary before returning to New Zealand to work in radio and film, also wrote extensively about what he called “Fourth Cinema,” Indigenous Cinema. “I think a Maori filmmaker is someone Maori who identifies as Maori and is proud to use the camera as a Maori for Maori purposes, at least some of the time. It’s good fun to do other things as well.” Lynette Read Interviews Barry Barclay in Illusions #31, Summer 2000/2001 p3 Almost everywhere, indigenous artists tend to address issues from a standpoint of their indigeneity, a factor which politicizes their work. For Barclay, indigenous societies exist beyond and before modern nationalist orthodoxies as enduring remnant cultures. A Fourth Cinema sets its own agenda and defines its own parameters in terms of indigenous lived experience and the community the film maker represents and works within. “It means looking out at the stranger coming to you, and not being looked at, and made an object of, by this person … but also a matter of looking out for – a caring that defines a community, and human ecology. With ecology goes community.” Stephen Turner, Barry Barclay: the Camera on the Shore in Illusions No. 41, Winter 2009, p32 According to the filmmaker Merata Mita (1942-2010), “Maori films are driven by identity, resolution and survival.” Merata Mita; The Soul and the Image in, Jonathon Dennis & Jan Bieringa Film in Aotearoa New Zealand, Wellington, Victoria University Press, 1992 p17 “Mita … described the filmmaking process as involving … cosmological areas of dark and light … Darkness, for Mita, is the filmic space of the theatre and the genre itself where the resurrections of the past take place. It is an unchanging area where ancestors can be accessed and remembered and brought alive through collective memory and the lively reception of descendants.” – Rangihiroa Panoho. Maori Art History, Architecture, Landscape and Theory. Auckland. Bateman. 2015. p323. Both Mita and Barclay argued that the colonial influence can be erased or revised, a contention which the art historian Rangihiroa Panoho warns is fraught not only with Orwellian associations but also weakens the essential elements of opposition, conflict and disagreement already inherent in Maori art and culture . Mita made several documentaries which passionately presented indigenous points of view on socially contentious subject matter. Her films included Bastion Point: Day 507 (1980), Patu (1983) and Mana Waka (1990). With Mauri (1988), a film which probed concepts of culture around notions of birth, marriage and death Mita became the first Maori woman to direct a feature film . Mita embraced a communal approach to filmmaking, including a training programme for young Maori filmmakers as part of her work. She also taught indigenous screenwriting, aesthetics and production at the University of Hawaii and was executive producer of The Land Has Eyes (Visioni Hereniko, 2004), the first feature film made by a native Fijian. Mita’s other films included Te Pahi: The Maori Drum (1996), The Dread (1996), and Hotere (2001) From the 1960s New Zealand’s most significant Maori Modernist visual artist Ralph Hotere (1931-2013) developed an abstract and installation style of minimalist art which at times addressed social and political subject matter. “There are very few things I can say about my work that are better than saying nothing.” Hotere in Merata Mita’s film Hotere. Paradise Productions. 2001.. Her final film was Saving Grace (2011). Tony Mitchell. Merata Mita in, Directory of World Cinema Australia & New Zealand 2. Bristol & Chicago. Intellect Books. 2015. pp 276-279. Other notable Maori feature films include Lee Tamahori’s Once Were Warriors (1994) and Te Tangata Whai Rawa O Weneti (The Maori Merchant of Venice) (2002) directed by Don Selwyn (1935-2007). Here Shakespeare’s famous play is performed by Maori in the Maori language. Prior to the Maori cultural renaissance the Samoan American playwright John H Kneubuhl (1920-1992) wrote plays in Honolulu before moving to Hollywood where he worked as a television writer. His screenwriting credits included episodes of Star Trek, Hawaii Five O, Mannix, The Fugitive, Doctor Kildare and Gunsmoke from the mid 1950s to the late 1960s. Kneubuhl also produced the cult film The Screaming Skull in 1958. Disillusioned with Hollywood he burned his television scripts and returned to Pago Pago,. His Think of a Garden and Other Plays was published by the University of Hawaii Press in 1997. Kneubuhl died in American Samoa in 1992. Another Samoan writer, Albert Wendt (b. 1939), had two of his stories made into feature films. Sons For the Return Home (1979), based on the novel of the same name, a tragic inter-racial love story, directed by Paul Maunder, was the first full-length feature made about Samoa. Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree Flying foxes (bats) are sometimes seen by Samoans as being messengers of the Gods. Because they hang upside down it is believed that they see things differently from the rest of us. Interestingly, the Samoan word pe’a, the name for a traditional body tattoo is also the same word for flying fox. Seen frontally, the pe’a looks like a flying fox about to open. Wendt’s Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree is a novella, part of a larger novel Leaves of the Banyan Tree. (1990), directed by Martyn Sanderson, featured the poet and film artist Richard von Sturmer as Tagata, the tree dwelling flying fox whose suicide prompts the story’s main character to look for life’s deeper meanings. Described as the first Polynesian existentialist film it tells the story of a young man, Pepe the trickster, son of a Samoan patriarch. Torn between the demands of tradition and the temptations of modernity Pepe rejects Christianity, leads a juvenile gang, experiments with alcohol and sex, burns down a church and then robs his father’s store, bringing shame on his family. Later, suffering from TB in an infirmary, Pepe turns his hand to poetry, writing a letter to the self, which becomes the story Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree. Besides his experiences of growing up and being educated in Samoa and New Zealand, as a thinker Albert Wendt was also influenced by the French existentialist writer Albert Camus (1913-1960) and the French Algerian post-colonialist theorist Frantz Fanon (1925-1961). The Orator (2011) by Tusi Tamasese, the first feature film written and directed by a Samoan, is an almost Shakespearian depiction of the search for justice and redemption by a family of outsiders in Samoa. Slowly paced in long shots and long takes the film offers a glimpse into an ancient Polynesian culture in a way that recalls, say, Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953). When people awaken politically then there is a corresponding upsurge in artistic and cultural activity. This has been true for Maori and Pasifika artists in New Zealand since the 1980s. Following the arrival of television in New Zealand in 1960, various sections of society realized that they were subject to media neglect and mis-representation. How, they asked, could such mis-representation lead to an open and participatory democracy that may in some way accord with populist notions of New Zealand as a free and open country? In the early 1980s independent filmmakers began addressing gay, women’s and indigenous issues. For them, the modernist certainty of the autonomy of art no longer held true. Their work extended the frame of reference towards social activism and multi-culturalism. These artists included Peter Wells, Stewart Main, Shereen Maloney, Merata Mita and Martyn Sanderson. Indigenous concerns have been continued in the media art works of Lisa Reihana, Maree Mills, Rose-Michele Lee, Natalie Robertson and Rachael Rakena. These artists address issues of self, society and environment from a specific Maori perspective. Their ideas are related to the evolution of the idea of New Zealand into Aotearoa, as a society that embraces Maori cultural and spiritual values as its foundation. An expansive wide-screen multi-channel, digital cinema meets the art gallery in Lisa Reihana’s In Pursuit of Venus (Infected) as installed at the Auckland Art Gallery in 2015. A formal work which consists of consecutive left to right tracking shots across a landscape depicted in a nineteenth century French wallpaper Les Sauvages de la mer Pacifiqe. The wallpaper represents idealized Tahitian scenes. Here, by means of green-screen technology, it becomes a backdrop for superimposed live-action performances. Within these scenes small discrete groups of actors perform scenes of intercultural interaction and misunderstanding. These include Polynesian dancing, tattooing, European explorers raising a flag, instigating trade, a sailor being disciplined, documenting the locality and so on. The performances serve to refigure the wallpaper within a sensual post-colonial discourse of indigenous politics and reality. The viewpoint here is a native one, looking from the land toward the sea from which the eighteenth century Europeans have arrived. It could be said that this scene represents the meeting of Enlightenment empiricism with Romanticism in the South Pacific. For her projected light works Tanya Ruka explores concepts of Maori mythology and time, restating the concept that the past can be incorporated as an equal partner with the present and future. Her interests are in the realm of becoming, but from the luminal space of Te Kore – the nothing, the potential of nothingness – as in the time before creation. “I use contemporary tools in conjunction with traditional forms of patterning such as the repetition and mirroring found in Maori weaving and carving. The knowledge of out Tupuna – ancestors gives access to the past, present and future … represented by the continual looping of the video and sound work. Te Aho Tapu is the sacred thread that links all things. This is the knowledge that is woven into the tukutuku panels in the marae (communal meeting places), korowai (cloaks), harakehe (flax weaving) and whaikairo (carving).” Tanya Ruka HYPERLINK "http://www.tsbbankwallaceartscentre.org.nz/exhibitions/future-exhibitions/tanya-ruka-te-kore-te-ao-the-intrinsic-light-within-nothing Accessed April 4" www.tsbbankwallaceartscentre.org.nz/exhibitions/future-exhibitions/tanya-ruka-te-kore-te-ao-the-intrinsic-light-within-nothing Accessed April 4, 2014 In Tawhirimatea , (2010) Ruka used stop motion processes to create a digital turangawaewae (a place to stand) within an immersive video environment. “Traditionally, for Maori, this is your Whenua, the place where you were born and grew up, surrounded by your family and ancestors.” Tanya Ruka, personal email to the author. July 20, 2011 In You Love My Fresh (2010), a short three channel installation work, Tanu Gago addresses the complexity and diversity of the Samoan experience in the ‘new villages’ South Auckland’s ‘new villages’, destinations of Maori, Pacific Island, Indian and middle eastern migration include Otara, Otahuhu, Mangere, Papatoetoe, Manurewa and Papakura (though Papatoetoe, Manurewa and Papakura may also be thought of as old towns, being located along Great South Road and the main trunk railway of the North Island). of South Auckland. A Samoan brought to New Zealand as a young child and brought up by an adoptive palangi (European) mother and Tongan father Gago hankers after the ‘authentic’ Samoan experience, one in which a gay Samoan male can exist outside of the Fa’afafine (third gender) stereotype. “My art practice is concerned with issues of representation around contemporary Pacific experiences. It examines facets of my own cultural heritage and looks at aspects of identity, gender, sexuality and popular culture amongst Pacific communities.” Tanu Gago HYPERLINK "http://www.thekoolkidscompany.blogspot.co.nz"www.thekoolkidscompany.blogspot.co.nz Accessed August 14, 2013 Set to a haunting, ambient soundtrack of Polynesian hip hop You Love My Fresh opens on an image of the Otara shopping center at night. Subsequent sequences show the decrepitly Third World Otahuhu bus station, a church based workshop where New Zealand born Samoans learn how to prepare a traditional Umu (earth oven), and high voltage pylons traversing the ‘new village’ of Otara. A succession of titles question Polynesians status as anything other than token New Zealanders valued as exotica but relegated to menial, minimum wage jobs, discount shopping centers, and careers as athletes and entertainers. “Your cultural experience shapes me, makes me cynical, violent and resentful … I feel redundant as a citizen in your First World.” The work ends on a choreographed Samoan dance set to an evocatively Polynesian rendering of the New Zealand national anthem. The loss or absence Gago addresses is held equally by pakeha and palangi, though many may not yet recognize it. In The Sound of the Ocean (2015), Gago remixes footage downloaded from the internet as representations of Pacific people, according to Google. Like many contemporary Pasifika artists Gago chooses to engage more with social representation of Pacific people rather than emphasize philosophical or cosmological perspectives or ways in which the traditional design practices and patterns associated with tapa or moko may be layered onto everyday life and thinking. The Cook Island/New Zealand Maori intermedia artist Leilani Kake produces personal works which deal with issues of identity and culture, tradition and change in New Zealand Maori and Pacific Island communities. Kake is interested in documenting the points at which families change, offering insights into intimate and privileged spaces. Her works include Mates (2006), Talking Tivaevae “The Cook Island (Rarotongan) art of tivaevae/quilting and its method of constructon is a culturally symbolic artistic act that weaves communities together, creating and strengthening relationships and sharing cultural identity …(with).. each hand sewn stitch each individual arrives at the tivaevae with their own unique story(2005), Minimal Baroque (2006), Ariki (2007), and Tino Rangitira Tanga (2010). Kake’s immersive four-screen video installation Nga Hau E Wha – The Four Winds (2011) features four ethereally backlit Pacific women (one per screen), each representing a different stage of womanhood – post pubescent, pregnant, motherhood and menopause. Naked, they glide on their backs, arms outstretched, through an enveloping liquid darkness. The water being the ocean that humans crossed to get here, placental fluid and a reminder that, besides the god Tangaroa, Maori mythology also spoke of maidens of the sea. The calm and soothing soundtrack includes a tauparapara, a chant like introductory salutation, recited by Kake herself. “The tauparapara stipulates that we continue the ancient tradition of learning our genealogical links back to the elements of the physical world and down through our human ancestry who now resides in the permanent abode of our people in Hawaiki … (acknowledging) … the essence of life and celebrating our entrance into the world of light.” Program Notes, Fresh Gallery, Otara accessed at HYPERLINK "http://NgaHauEWha.wordpress.com" http://NgaHauEWha.wordpress.com 16/04/2011 In The Hair Cutting (2012), Kake documented her son’s participation in a rite of passage at the Otahuhu Town Hall Community Center. Here, the work may be viewed from different perspectives – as a ritual, or from afar as a small detail from a distant life, or a traumatic meeting of self with society from the point of view of a child having his first haircut. The performance video Siva in Motion (2012) shows the interdisciplinary artist Shigeyuki Kihara employing the choreographic movements of the Samoan taualuga, the dance technique of the native taupou (high born maidens). Kihara, an artist of Samoan descent, also happens to be of Fa’afafine (third gender). Siva in Motion is based on stories told to her of the tsunami which hit Samoa in 2009 and she employs gesture to convey emotional, social and political ideas. Citing the influence of nineteenth century motion study photography Siva in Motion inhabits an intersection of western and Polynesian cultures, dance, photography and film coming across as a Samoan video variation on Marcel Duchamp’s painting Nude Descending a Staircase (1912). Perhaps unintentionally the arms and hand movements superimposed over one another also create associations with the Hindu deity Shiva, say, as the fierce union of Kali and Bhairava. Johnson Whitehira combined traditional Maori design elements with western influences and digital technology as in his Times Square Project (2012) where a series of his digital art works were exhibited on 34 digital boards in Times Square, New York. In April, 2013 the Maori filmmaker Pita Turei staged an eighteen minute long outdoor film projection of archival footage onto the outer walls of the Auckland War Memorial Museum. This event commemorated the contribution of Pacific island soldiers in World Wars I and II. Situating themselves as indigenous South Auckland avant-gardists, Jeremy Leatinu’u and Rangituhia Hollis employ western art making methodologies to express contemporary Polynesian culture in moving images. Their approach allows for the sometimes contentious incorporation of western performance, conceptual and even anthropological strategies into indigenous art practices. Hollis himself cites the early influence of Japanese and western video games on his artistic consciousness. He takes on stereotypes generally associated with Maori, such as negative portrayals of their home life which he reasserts as incipient threats to Maoridom. The single channel video installation Kei mate mango pare (2010) Sally Blundel, Redrawing the Categories, New Zealand Listener, May 18, 2013 p44, based on a Maori proverb calling on the fighting spirits of sharks, depicts a silhouetted school of sharks circling a prominent Auckland volcano, indicating the evolving nature of cultural identity, how cultural identity is not a fixed thing but is contingent upon conflicting social and natural interactions. In Plumley Crescent (2007), part of the de kapua series, a wave of elemental fire or lava consumes suburban dwellings as indication of the disruptions of urban migration. In his four-screen video installation Axes (2007) function as Fascistic symbols directed against Maori. For Mata Mata (2012), collaboration with the Samoan artist Vaimala Urale, a pool hall was recreated as a gallery installation, a common ground where Maori, Pacific Islanders and Europeans could interact. Here Hollis created pool cues beautifully hand-carved with Pasifika patterns derived from traditional objects on display at the Auckland Museum. Spectators were invited to use the cues in a game of pool incorporated as part of the exhibition. In this way Hollis put traditional design back into the hands of the people as a way of reintegrating ancient patterns back into their daily lives. Taking their inspiration from game play, dance and Maori battle traditions, Urale and Hollis created Mata Mata 2.0 (2014), an interactive live art work featuring the performer Jack Gray. Jeremy Leatinu’u uses video to document performances that he stages in public spaces as a way of lending everyday sites an air of theatricality. In The Welcome Project (2010) Rangituhia Hollis. The Other Side of Speaking in, More Than We Know, Exhibition Catalog, Auckland, Tautai Contemporary Pacific Arts Trust, 2013 a two screen video he holds a welcome sign for new arrivals from Tonga, Samoa and Fiji at Auckland airport. In the other screen Leatinu’u spells out welcome with volcanic rocks in the crater of an iconic Auckland volcano. Johnson Witehira, Tanya Ruka, Rangituhia Hollis and Jeremy Leatinu’u all had work included in the group show Since 1984: He aha te ahurea-rua? curated by Martin Awa Clarke Langdon for Auckland’s St Paul St Gallery in 2015. As an assertion of the importance of indigenous performance and moving image work Linda Tanoa’i has created an immense archive (Linda TV) of events, documenting openings and performances, interviewing artists and participating in artistic collaborations. In demonstration of the possibility of intercultural dialogue, Kauri-oke (2013), a moving art work of an entirely different order was produced by the Australian artists Tessa Zettel and Karl Khoe. Kauri-oke is a portable, solar powered karaoke machine set within a cabinet of recycled New Zealand kauri timber. The timber, from which many homes in San Francisco were also made, was sourced from a demolished house in Sydney, Australia. Kauri was exploited and exported to add allure to Australian domestic interiors. It is as if the colonizer is here repatriating the product of a globalized trade to its source. The eccentric ‘machine’ is mounted on a hand-held trolley on which it is pulled through the Otara flea market as a mobile archive of popular Maori and Pasifika songs. People can add their own songs, or search for songs that are not available on the internet, creating a song list specifically related to the local community. In relating to this machine we may ask how nostalgia shapes our readings of the places we once knew, encouraging us to look to new forms of social imagining, dwelling and remembering. The historic avant-garde was motivated by an idea of offering hope and freedom, changing an unworkable world by destroying repressive institutions to allow for personal and social transformation. In this way the injustices of the past would be washed away. What the above work demonstrates most of all is that indigenous people are now reaching a point where they can represent themselves, whether on their own terms or in critical dialogue with their former colonizers. Language and contexts can be extended to incorporate the indigenous and therefore bringing us to the end of ethnography. Pacific Island nations are likely to face new threats in the coming century. These include increased resource competition in an already unregulated environment. The threat of rising sea levels associated with global warming will result in the de-population of several island nations. Trans-national crime, often better resourced and armed than small island states, presents threats of increased arms, narcotics and people trafficking throughout the region. One wonders if there will be specifically Pacific responses and solutions to these threats. What indigenous art shows us is that there are alternate ways of thinking and orienting ourselves in relation to other people and the world. Ways that worked for them. For us to find a way forward, if that is what we desire, we can look backwards and reassess where we have come from. In recent years western politicians have experimented with systems, qualitative, and numerical analysis as ways of increasing the outputs of self-regulating market democracies, none of which performed as promised. What they led to was the false reporting of unsustainable outcomes, resulting eventually in economic meltdown within a wider context of impending global environmental catastrophe. We may have already gone too far. The political dimension of such thinking, that there is a single answer toward creating a better world led, in the twentieth century, to the excesses of the left, the right and religious fundamentalists. Inspired by Jean Paul Satre (1905-1980), Frantz Fanon and Ali Shariati (1933-1977) recent national and religious liberation movements have come to believe that escape from imperialism lies in violence and terrorism. These movements have opposed themselves to western laissez faire notions of a disinterested freedom based on notions of universal human rights. And these competing notions rip and tear at each other like colliding tectonic plates, in an insane continuance of one against the other. But maybe there is another way, one that lies in a pluralistic respect for human dignity, where our differing ideas and values can live alongside and enrich one another. The way that molecules live and slide past one another as canoe molecules, water molecules, breeze molecules and muscle molecules as we navigate our selves across the horizon, beyond the sunrise and, for Polynesians, back to Hawaiki. It could be that there is still something to be found in the ways that indigenous people conceived of, coped with and managed their economies and universes as places where work and leisure held equal value and were equitably distributed amongst all riting on the anniversary of George Orwell’s death in 2014, George Woodcock stated, ’Unless we choose to decentralize and to use applied science, not as the end to which human beings are to be made the means, but as the means to producing free individuals, we have only two alternatives to choose from: either a number of national, militarized totalitarianisms … or else one supranational totalitarianism.” - George Woodcock , Five Writers Who Feared The Future. HYPERLINK "http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116276/george-orwell-anniversary-death" www.newrepublic.com/article/116276/george-orwell-anniversary-death? Accessed January 20, 2014.. PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 13