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Tears of Rangi
Experiments Across Worlds
By Anne Salmond Auckland University Press
Copyright © 2017 Anne Salmond
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77558-924-2
CHAPTER 1
Hau: The Wind of Life
He iwi ke, he iwi ke
One strange people and another
Titiro atu, titiro mai Looking at each other
– CHANT BY MERIMERI PENFOLD
In October 1769 in Uawa, on the east Coast of the North Island of New Zealand, the star navigator and high priest Tupaia sketched Joseph Banks, a wealthy young botanist, exchanging white cloth for a crayfish with a local man. Tupaia and Banks had arrived on board the Endeavour, commanded by James Cook, and sent into the Pacific by the Royal Society of London and the British Admiralty to observe the transit of Venus, and to search for Terra Australis Incognita (the Unknown Southern Continent).
The ship had sailed from Ra'iatea, Tupaia's home island and one of the homelands of Maori. After a three-month stay in Tahiti, where Tupaia joined the expedition, the high priest escorted his Endeavour shipmates to the great voyaging marae Taputapuatea, where he had trained as a priest of 'Oro, the god of fertility and war in the Society Islands. Afterwards they headed south across the Pacific, arriving on the east coast of New Zealand in spring, when the kowhai trees were flowering.
Although Tupaia died in Batavia during the Endeavour's return journey to England, Joseph Banks preserved the sketch made by the high priest in Uawa, along with others he had drawn in Tahiti and Australia. These were lodged in the British Museum, where many years later, art historians guessed that since many of these 'naïve' images were painted in watercolours, the artist might have been none other than Joseph Banks himself. It was not until 1997 that these drawings were attributed to Tupaia. During his research into the life of Joseph Banks (later friend of George III, President of the Royal Society and impresario of British imperial exploration), Banks's biographer Harold Carter noticed a passage in one of his letters that mentioned this drawing. In 1812, Banks wrote to a friend:
Tupia the Indian who came with me from Otaheite Learnd to draw in a way not Quite unintelligible. The genius for Caricature which all wild People Possess Led him to Caricature me and he drew me with a nail in my hand delivering it to an Indian who sold me a Lobster but with my other hand I had a firm fist on the Lobster determind not to Quit the nail until I had Livery and Seizin of the article purchasd.
While the Uawa sketch shows Joseph Banks holding a piece of white cloth (almost certainly Tahitian bark cloth, highly sought after by Maori), rather than a nail, the description in his letter almost certainly refers to the image that Banks lodged (with others by the same artist) in the British Museum.
Far from being a 'wild man', however, Tupaia was a brilliant and charismatic leader in the Society Islands. When he joined the Endeavour, he was seeking to enlist Cook and his men in seeking to avenge the conquest of his home island, Ra'iatea. As a high priest and star navigator, Tupaia was a leading figure in the 'arioi cult dedicated to 'Oro, the god of fertility and war, famed for its lovers, artists, dancers, actors, scholars, warriors and star navigators. After their departure from Tahiti, Tupaia piloted the ship through the surrounding islands, and worked with Captain Cook on a remarkable chart of the Pacific, centred upon Tahiti and based on relative bearings and distances in space-time (elapsed nights) between different islands. Later, the young naturalist Georg Forster would describe Tupaia as 'an extraordinary genius'.
Like his charts, Tupaia's sketches were revolutionary. During his time with the Royal Society party, he often sat with the ship's artists, drawing the same subjects but creating new kinds of art works, using European techniques with a quintessentially Polynesian vision. Painted in the colours of bark cloth – black, brown and red-brown – his image portrays two men, one European (Joseph Banks) and one Maori, standing face to face, offering gifts to each other. In New Zealand, as in the Society Islands at that time, life was ordered by relational networks, and driven by exchange. If a taonga (treasured item) was handed over, it carried part of the vital force, or hau, of the donor and his or her kin group, tangling the lives of donor and recipient together.
In 1907, when Elsdon Best, a New Zealand ethnologist who had spent a lifetime studying Maori customs, wrote to an elder called Tamati Ranapiri, asking him to explain the concept of the hau, Ranapiri replied:
As for the hau, it isn't the wind that blows, not at all. Let me explain it to you carefully. Now, you have an ancestral item (taonga) that you give to me, without the two of us putting a price on it, and I give it to someone else. Perhaps after a long while, this person remembers that he has this taonga, and that he should give me a return gift, and he does so.
This is the hau of the taonga that was previously given to me. I must pass on that treasure to you. It would not be right for me to keep it for myself. Whether it is a very good taonga or a bad one, I must give to you, because it is the hau of your taonga, and if I hold on to it for myself, I will die. This is the hau. That's enough.
The hau is at the heart of life itself. As Ranapiri explained to Best, if a person fails to uphold their obligations in these transactions, their own life force is threatened. As good or bad taonga and gifts or insults pass back and forth, embodying the power of the hau, patterns of relations are transformed, for better or for worse.
When Elsdon Best wrote about Ranapiri's account of the hau, it captured the imagination of a French sociologist, Marcel Mauss. In 1925, Mauss published The Gift, a classic work exploring gift exchange in a range of societies, including his own. Quoting Ranapiri, he contrasted the Maori concept of the hau of the gift with the assumption in contemporary capitalism that all transactions are driven by self-interest, arguing that this gives an impoverished view of how relations among people generate social life. For Mauss, the hau, or the 'spirit of the thing given', impels a gift in return, creating solidarity. His discussion of the concept is perceptive, but in fact, it only scratches the surface. In Maori ways of thinking, hau drives the whole world, not just human relations. It goes far beyond the exchange of gifts among people.
According to the tohunga (experts) in the ancestral whare wananga (schools of learning), hau emerged at the very beginning of the cosmos. In a chant recorded by Te Kohuora of Rongoroa for the missionary Richard Taylor in 1854, for example, the world begins with a burst of energy that generates thought, memory and desire. Next comes the Po, long aeons of darkness. Out of the Po comes the Kore, unbound, unpossessed Nothing, the seedbed of the cosmos, described by an early ethnologist as 'the Void or negation, yet containing the potentiality of all things afterwards to come'. In the Kore, hau ora and hau tupu, the winds of life and growth, begin to stir. As hau flows through the world, the sky emerges, and the moon and stars, light, the earth and sky and ocean:
Na te kune te pupuke
From the source of growth the rising
Na te pupuke te hihiri
From rising the thought
Na te hihiri te mahara
From rising thought the memory
Na te mahara te hinengaro
From memory the mindheart
Na te hinengaro te manako
From the mind-heart, desire
Ka hua te wananga
Knowledge becomes conscious
Ka noho i a rikoriko
It dwells in dim light
Ka puta ki waho ko te po ...
And Po (darkness) emerges ...
Na te kore i ai
From nothingness came the first cause
Te kore te whiwhia
Unpossessed nothingness
Te kore te rawea
Unbound nothingness
Ko hau tupu, ko hau ora
The hau tupu (wind of growth), the hau ora (wind of life)
Ka noho i te atea
Stay in clear space
Ka puta ki waho ko te rangi e tu nei And the sky emerges that stands here
Te ata rapa, te ata ka mahina
The early dawn, the early day, the mid-day
Ka mahina te ata i hikurangi!
The blaze of day from the sky!
Through these exchanges, new forms of life emerge. As a Te Arawa scribe, Te Rangikaheke, told Sir George Grey, an early governor of New Zealand, at the beginning of the world when life first appears, 'kotahi ano te tupuna o te tangata Maori – ko Ranginui te tu nei, ko Papatuanuku e takoto nei' – 'there is just one Maori ancestor, Ranginui standing here and Papatuanuku lying here'. Male sky and female earth are a single being, locked together. From their union the ancestors of agricultural crops, sea and waterways, the winds, fern-root and people emerge, crushed in darkness between their parents.
Cramped and frustrated, the older brothers decide to separate earth and sky, letting light into the world. After a series of unsuccessful attempts, Tane-nuia-Rangi, the ancestor of forests, takes an axe known as Hauhautu (make hau and hau stand) and cuts them apart. Stricken with grief, they cry out, 'Why has this crime been committed? Why have we been separated?' As Rangi's tears fall down to earth, forming lakes and rivers, Papa's mists rise up to greet him. Enraged by this assault on their parents, Tawhirimatea, Space-twister, the ancestor of winds (hau), attacks his older brothers, smashing and splitting Tane's trees, assailing land and sea with whirlwinds and hurricanes, and driving the ancestors of root crops underground. In the midst of this chaos, the offspring of these founding ancestors quarrel with each other and go their separate ways, finding new places to live in and becoming new kinds of creatures – the ancestors of fish diving into the sea, for instance, while the ancestors of lizards hide under rocks on the land.
Only Tu, the ancestor of people, stands tall against Tawhiri's onslaught, earning the right for his descendants to consume those of his brothers – birds, trees, fish, shellfish, fern-root, yams, taro and sweet potatoes, destroying their tapu (ancestral presence) and making them noa (ordinary, free from ancestral constraints). Through the separation of Rangi and Papa, te ao marama – the everyday world of light – emerges. Light is separated from (but still linked with) darkness; life from death; sky from earth; male from female; up from down and left from right, oriented by the bodies of the founding ancestors. Different ancestral beings are generated and take their places, linked by their quarrels and ongoing exchanges. Later, Tu's descendants – tangata (people) – sometimes also quarrel and separate, migrating to new places and forging new kin networks. Many of the stories about exploring Polynesia, including New Zealand, tell of disputes followed by journeys to distant places. In this viral kinship system, driven by the exchange of gifts (that bind people together) or insults (that divide them), ancestral networks are readily replicated and transported, allowing the exploration and settlement of new places and forging new groups of people, as well as maintaining relationships over time.
Maori kin groups are contextual and dynamic, with some relations forged by insult and fighting; others by adoption, friendship and marriage, accompanied by gift exchange; while others, of lesser value, are allowed to wither away.
Rather than bounded groups, these are open-ended networks springing from 'root ancestors' planted in the ground. People can activate different links under different circumstances, constantly changing through space and time. On the marae (ceremonial centre for kin groups), with its carved meeting house, its marae atea, or forecourt for orators, where hosts and visitors sit facing each other, and its dining hall, ancestors are present as their descendants debate the questions of the day, recount ancestral deeds, forge new alliances, and are married or farewelled back to the Po, the ancestral realm. This is captured in a haka (war chant) composed by Merimeri Penfold:
He iwi ke, he iwi ke One strange people and another
Titiro atu, titiro mai Looking at each other
This chant evokes an exchange of gazes across the marae. Iwi means 'a group of people' and ke invokes the strangeness of one group to another. Titiro atu is one's glance directed at another, while titiro mai is the others' glance in reply. In these recursive exchanges, identity takes shape, and shifts. All of the action – for better or for worse – happens across the pae, the middle ground. In this liminal space, male sky and female earth, living and the dead, local people and their visitors meet, intermingle and change places. Ancestors appear in genealogies and stories, in photographs, and in the carvings that line the inside walls of the meeting house, support its roof, and decorate the exterior gable and porch.
As the Tainui expert Pei Te Hurinui Jones explained, in Maori ancestral thinking, space-time is a spiral, a vortex. Standing in the present, one can spin back to the Kore, the Void, where the first burst of energy unleashed the winds of growth and life – and out into the future. At the University of Auckland marae, for example, Tane-nui-a-Rangi, the carved meeting house, embodies the ancestor who first ascended the layered heavens on a whirlwind to fetch the three baskets of knowledge for his descendants.
Inside the meeting house, the ridgepole and its carved posts tell the story of Tane separating his parents, Rangi and Papa, while carved ancestors stand around the walls, the priestly experts and navigators who guided their canoes across the Pacific from Hawaiki to New Zealand. Sitting inside Tane-nui-a-Rangi, the belly of the ancestor, one is literally transported into te ao Maori, the ancestral Maori 'world'. At the centre of the back wall of the house stands a carving of Hinenuitepo, the ancestress of death. During a tangi (funeral), the body of a deceased person lies at her feet. Towards the back of the house, the kowhaiwhai (rafter paintings) shade off into darkness, while towards the front, the door and window open into te ao marama (the world of light) where the colours of the kowhaiwhai become bright.
The waiata (chant) sung at the opening of the marae, composed by Merimeri Penfold, incorporates Te Kohuora's creation chant. According to Viveiros de Castro, such cosmological chants do not reflect a 'world view' but rather, express 'a world objectively from inside it'. As Marshall Sahlins remarks, 'The [Maori] universe is a gigantic kin, a genealogy ... a veritable ontology' – a way of being that patterns the world, based on whakapapa – vast, intricate networks of relations in which all forms of life are linked, generated by exchanges between complementary pairs, animated by hau.
Thus when Maori greet each other by pressing noses, their hau (breath, wind of life) intermingles. If a person presses noses with a carved ancestor, the same thing happens. When rangatira, or chiefs, speak of an ancestor in the first person as ahau, or 'I', it is because they are the 'living face' of that ancestor, and if they speak of their descent groups in the same way, it is because they share ancestral hau together. A refusal to enter into reciprocal exchanges, on the other hand, is known as hau whitia, or hau turned aside. Hauhauaitu (or 'harm to the hau') is manifested as illness or ill fortune, a breakdown in the balance of exchanges. The life force has been harmed, showing signs of collapse and failure.
In early times, the hau of an enemy might be extinguished by rituals including awhe i te hau (gathering in the hau), while the hau of a kin group might be destroyed by ceremonies that included whangai hau (feed the hau), in which the hau of their leader was fed to an enemy atua (ancestor god). Equally, the hau might be revitalised by a successful act of retribution – for instance, in the kai hau kai (eating the hau as food) ceremony, in which the hau of the enemy and his or her atua was consumed. In this way, the original insult is wiped out, restoring ora – life, health, prosperity and abundance – to the victors. Utu, the principle of reciprocity, drives the exchanges between individuals and groups and all other life forms, past and present, working towards (an always fragile) equilibrium.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Tears of Rangi by Anne Salmond. Copyright © 2017 Anne Salmond. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
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