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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781742194400 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Spinifex Press |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2000 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| File size: | 618 KB |
Read an Excerpt
Manawa Toa
Heart Warrior
By Cathie Dunsford, Janet Mackenzie
Spinifex Press
Copyright © 2000 Cathie Dunsford,All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-875559-69-5
CHAPTER 1
Tama tu, tama ora, tama moe, tama mate.
The person who stands, lives; the person who sleeps, dies.
The moon guides a canoe over silent black water, then disappears. Frogmen in an inflatable boat zoom towards figures waiting on the sand. As they reach the shore, the moon slides from its eclipse to the sound of helicopter blades and gunshots. They dive for cover, some into the water, some to the bottom of the craft. She watches from the beach. A bullet tears past her leg. She plunges into the ocean, her fins stretching to power her toward the craft. Waves lash her face. Her shell protects her back from bullets shooting through the water. She draws in a huge breath and dives as deep as she can. Beneath the surface, it is black. Seaweed tangles in her fins. She struggles to fight free.
Cowrie wakes. The moon edges her way over the dunes and shines through the trunks of her nikau palm hut. She cannot get back to sleep. She wraps her lavalava around her large, strong body and walks across the dunes to the ocean. Stalks of marram grass lit by moonlight remind her of Peta's sweetgrass. As she reaches the last dune, the wild West Coast wind lashes at her face, fills her lungs. She draws in a deep breath, remembers the nightmare. He titi rere ao, ka kitea; he titi rere po, e kore e kitea.
A lone torea plunges its beak into the sand to dredge up a tuatua which spits in the bird's face as it is raised from its sleepy depths. The torea flies away, leaving the tuatua to burrow its way back to freedom. Moonlight catches the white water as waves break far out at sea. Brilliant stars sparkle over the Pacific shores. She imagines navigating her way through these breakers in the dark. Ancestral waka came from all over the Pacific guided only by stars. There were no stars in her dream, just a blanket of blackness covering them until the whirring and gunshots, then a glaring light. She recalls Keo telling her Mika's story about finding the Hawai'ian fishermen, Aka and Vile, shot in the moonlight as they tried to escape from the enemy. It's said they had entered into the American nuclear testing zone and were pursued back to Ka Lae. Aka was shot scaling the cliff face and found dangling in the fisherman's ropes. Vile was blasted in his back as he secured the canoe. Maybe this was the source of her dream? No-one knew for sure what had happened but speculation led to the US military.
Cowrie shivers, the night wind tugging her lavalava. She walks up the beach to the driftwood log in the shape of a stranded whale, the place that marks her rescue of little Maata from drowning. It's good to be back in Aotearoa, where threats are from the wildness of nature and the pull of waves rather than gunshots piercing the darkness.
Ko Uenuku tawhana i te rangi.
Uenuku, the God of Rainbows, like a bow in the sky.
"Oho, Cowrie! Wake up!" Mere's voice cuts into her sleep. Drowsily, she opens her eyes. "It's after ten. You're s'posed to be at kohanga reo. Shift your lazy bum and get up there!" Her mother throws her lavalava over to the mattress and exits the opening of the nikau hut.
Still dazed by her sleepless night, Cowrie wraps the purple and yellow hibiscus cloth around her body and ambles to the kohanga. The children laugh at her tousled hair and know she has just risen. They tease her relentlessly. To divert their attention, she tempts them with a story if they gather round her feet. Kids in all shapes and sizes fall about her like waves swirling around seaweed in the ocean.
Once they are all settled and she's wiped a few snotty noses, she asks them who's ever seen a dolphin? Of course, most of them have and all of them know the famous story of Opo, the gay dolphin who haunted the shores of nearby Opononi, on the inner Hokianga harbour, in the fifties. Their parents have told them tales of the magic fish that graced their beaches for years until one day it was lured away by a fisherman and found stranded in a rock pool, unable to escape.
"Now I'll tell you a different dolphin tale. This one is a Chumash story."
"What's Shoe-mush, Cowrie?"
"Chumash is the name of a Native American tribe — an iwi like Nga Puhi, who lived on the west coast of the Pacific Ocean, on the shell of Great Turtle Island."
"What's Great Turtle Island?" pipes up a Yugoslav kid, descended from the early gumdiggers in the area.
"That's America, silly," asserts Maata, proud of her knowledge.
"Shoosh," say the others, keen to hear the rest of the story.
Cowrie lowers her voice to keep their attention. "The Chumash people thrived so well they could no longer live on the island of Santa Cruz, so Hutash dreamed into life a rainbow bridge to carry them across to Carpinteria on the mainland."
"Is mainland the back of the turtle?" asks Matiu.
"Course it is," chips in Maata.
"Shoosh" comes the chorus, allowing Cowrie to continue.
Like all storytellers, she elaborates on the story each time she tells it. She gets the kids to identify the colours of the rainbow and they listen carefully as she explains how the rainbow bridge is created and then how, when people fell off it during the crossing, they were turned into dolphins and set free into the wide ocean. How dolphins came to be sacred to the tribe because they knew that some of these creatures were their aunties and uncles and cousins and sisters.
"How did the aunties get inside? Did the dolphins eat them?"
"No. They became dolphins when they entered the water. So they could be free." Cowrie thinks of the transformation of Peta, her return to Kahnawake, to Nanduye, her need to reconnect with her people through their work together.
"So, was Opo one of our ancestors?" asks Hone.
"May well have been," replies Cowrie. She's never thought of this before. Strange how kids so often get right to the core of the truth. It's as if they have some knowledge buried deep in them.
"Did Opo come back to tell us something?" asks Maata.
Cowrie has to think a moment. "Perhaps so, Maata. When Opo first came, everyone was touched by her dolphin spirit, her friendliness with people. She'd swim close to the shore, even touching people with her fins. But later, when greedy men tried to cash in on the act, the dolphin was harassed by people throwing their kids on her back, by crowds of tourists entering the water and trying to touch her. Instead of appreciating her, they wanted to possess her, own her, have a piece of her."
"Is that why she disappeared?"
"It's said she followed a fisherman up the harbour and her sonar was disturbed by blasting in the water, but she could also have been exhausted from the attention and people not leaving her alone."
"So we killed her then," asserts Marama.
"One way or the other, yes," Cowrie replies.
"Did she come to warn us about greed?"
"I think so. She came for many reasons. Maybe she was once one of us. But she serves as a lesson that we still need to learn."
"I'd like to be turned into a dolphin. I could swim anywhere I wanted and if too many people hassled me, I'd just swim back out to the open sea," asserts Piripi.
"Right on, Piripi. Now, I want you all to draw the story of Hutash and the rainbow bridge or Opo or anything we've talked about this morning."
The children gather their crayons and lay large sheets of newsprint from the Hokianga Herald on the floor. Tongues out, green, blue, orange, yellow crayons grasped as if they are a lifeline to the spirit. Cowrie can't resist a smile as she sees uncles, aunties and brothers being turned into strange dolphin-like creatures and coloured arcs bursting from islands into the skies and falling gently on the land beyond. One picture depicts a rainbow stretching from the shores of Opononi over to the dunes and a dolphin splashing out of the water, stars bursting around its body.
"Why the stars, Hone?"
"They're tear drops. They dazzle in the water then turn into tiny dolphins. They live in the wreck of the Rainbow Warrior. I know 'cos my dad took me out there last summer and dived down into the sunken boat. He said there were fish living all over it."
Cowrie is close to tears herself. "Ae, Hone. Out of death, new life."
"But the French still shouldn't have sunk her with that bomb, eh Cowrie?"
"No, Maata. No they shouldn't."
"I'm gonna walk the rainbow bridge and fall into the water and turn into a dolphin so I can protect all the protest ships at sea so we can stay a clean, green land," states Maata. The kids get excited and all agree it'd be a good life underwater. Bright colours erupt from their canvases, fill the room with hope, shimmering out the windows like a rainbow arc emerging from the misty water when the sun shines through.
He korero taua ki Wharaurangi, he korero ta matau ki Otuawhaki.
The talk is of war at Wharaurangi, but at Otuawhaki, they speak of making fishhooks.
Kuini pokes her head through the entrance to Cowrie's hut. "Kia ora, sis. You still hard at it? Time for a break, I reckon."
"You can talk! I've seen your candlelight flickering in Tainui past midnight for the last three weeks! I nearly came in one night when I had a bad nightmare and couldn't get back to sleep. But just as I approached, you must've blown the candle out so I strolled to the beach."
"I guess we've both been hard at it. But I've finished the draft proposals for establishing Te Aroha abuse prevention scheme nationally and I'm ready for some relaxation. Wanna go fishin'?"
"Aw, dunno, Kuini. Still got heaps of work to do."
"I thought you'd given up that bloody thesis stuff."
"Have. But writing for a feminist press is as hard, only I don't have to fight the academy to be heard now. The same amount of research has to be done."
"Virtual reality hits the Hokianga! If Dale Spender is right, you'll be forgetting about the printed page anyhow. Books'll cost too much, deplete the rainforest, but electronic media will be an eighth of the price and more accessible."
"Yeah, and useful for political action. Koana has been emailing progress on land disputes on the Big Island."
"So you'll be ready for some kai moana then, eh?"
Cowrie sighs, knowing she's had the best out of the day and her mind is too tired to be of much value in the remaining hours. "You're on. You get the paddles and kayaks ready and I'll bring the fishing gear."
Kuini needs no encouraging. She's off to the beach in a flash to unhitch the kayaks from the pohutukawa trees and pull up the paddles from under the ferns. In the shed behind Mere's cottage, Cowrie unfurls the lines from the last expedition, pissed off that someone has used them without cutting the bait from the hooks. It stinks. The marae cats could've had a nasty experience. As she saunters over the dunes, she feels the sun on her face and a weight lift from her shoulders.
The wahine pull the spray skirts for the kayaks tight around their bodies so that they can get through the huge breakers without swamping their craft. This also allows them to spin into an eskimo roll and do a 360-degree turn to paddling position if they are swamped by a wave. Water swirls around their legs as they prepare the kayaks for take-off. It's crucial to time the waves perfectly or you can get dunked before you've got up a decent paddling speed. Kuini yells "E oma!" and they use their paddles to shove off from the beach, stroking for their lives to make it through the breakers.
As the first wave towers over them and crashes down onto the canoes, Cowrie lets out a shout of joy, emerging from the water cascading over her as her waka springs back to the surface. Kuini begins a mad haka, yelling at the waves in time with the beat of her paddle, and each races to be first to get beyond the breakers. At each cry of "te waka" they hit a wave and skim neatly through its curled cave. Ten minutes and several eskimo rolls later, they are both beyond the breaking surf, triumphant. No matter how often they do this, it always captures the excitement of the first time. West Coast breakers are renowned for their power and many trawlers and old sailing ships from England never made it past the Hokianga sand bar, their wrecks emerging from the surf at low tide as testament to their ghostly journeys.
Paddling beyond the breakers, they follow the flight of torea, akiaki and takapu. Giant gannets dive down into the ocean swooping up fish in their beaks. Ahead of them, a school of kahawai leap from the water, thrashing about on the surface trying to escape the beaks of the gulls. Mollymawks and takapu cruise on the wind currents, waiting for the exact moment to skim the surface and pluck a rich treat of kai moana from the sea. The wahine paddle into the centre of the thrashing fish, dragging their lines behind the kayaks. Within seconds, ika are pulling at the bait. Every line has six hooks on it and they wait until they have a few tails crashing from the wake before they reel in their catches. Each fish is gently taken from the paua and bone hooks and killed immediately with a prick to its head. Soon, the kete at their feet are so full they have to chuck one in the front and one in the back to balance the kayaks for the journey home.
They stroke out parallel with the shore, the sun lowering into the far ocean to starboard. As it sinks, a bright orange glow lights the sky, reflecting off the clouds. Taniwha fly into the horizon, seahorses, feather starfish, crawling octopuses, flying ika change shape as the clouds move and rearrange themselves. They surf in on the waves, the horizon behind them lit with that haunting pounamu shade which signifies an Aotearoan West Coast sunset.
From: koana@hilo.com To: turtle@hokianga.co.nz
Aloha Cowrie,
How are you, Turtle? Have been thinking of you lately. Just returned from a week-long Kanaka Maoli gathering. We discussed land sovereignty issues and there were a range of related workshops. Pele Aloha talked about the importance of retaining the ancient art of talkstory which some of our younger ones are losing. You'd have loved it. We've decided to make this an important initiative for the upcoming Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Conference. It's crucial that haole have our input to this from our perspective.
I'm excited by the work, but the small actions we each take sometimes seem so minimal. Do you ever feel swamped by the hugeness of the task? Ela and I believe that every small action counts and we teach our kids that too. Nele and Peni are becoming more involved in Kanaka Maoli activities and it's exciting to see them reconnecting with the traditions of our 'ohana — beyond what Ela and I, Meleana and Paneke can provide for them.
Can you send us information on how to get our work into print? Community Education at Hilo have provided us free use of their desktop publishing facilities. But we need to know of other Pacific presses that we can network with. We need to know how we can get our work out to a wider readership.
Mauva emailed from Tahiti Fa'a'a. Tavini Haraatira is getting stronger. They're sick of the French domination and military presence. Problem is, so many of the men earn income from it. The islands have become dependent on the colonial power. It's complex. But freedom will come soon. They must get their land back. You know, the same old story through all our islands.
Nele is completing a school project documenting local ki'i pohaku. She's recreated some of the rock drawings on paper and Peni is etching some of them into stones he finds on the beach. They've included some here for you.
Malamo pono, Turtle. I'll hand you over to them.
Hi Cowrie! Peni and I drew these for you on screen and Koana showed us how to transfer them to email. Remember that day we followed the lava trail at Puako? We went back there on a school trip and showed everyone the magic shapes. Now we're making up a book of sketches so they will be here for other kids in the future and for those who cannot get to the isolated sites. Some of the other kids are pissed 'cos we get to draw for our project and they have to write essays — but we reckon it's ok 'cos we thought of it first!
Mahalo for that video you sent of the kohanga kids surfing down those gigantic sand dunes and into the sea. Awesome! We took it to school and everyone wanted to see it over and over. The best part was watching them zoom out of the ocean and back up the dunes in reverse motion! None of us have ever seen dunes that huge. Like the Sahara Desert in the middle of the South Pacific. We can't wait to visit. Koana says she'll bring us over for the next Nuclear-Free Pacific conference.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Manawa Toa by Cathie Dunsford, Janet Mackenzie. Copyright © 2000 Cathie Dunsford,. Excerpted by permission of Spinifex Press.
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