Present Encounters : Papers from the conference of the Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, 1996

Jonathan Mane-Wheoki lndigenism and Globalism: 'First Nation ' Perspectives in the ContemporaryArt ofAotearoa/New Zealand and Te Moananui-a-Kiwa/ the Pacific 'The I ndigenous network', Lisa Reihana, a contemporary Maori artist, has observed , 'can be quite close , even though the distances are very far' .1 The distances that separate the island communities scattered across the vast expanse of water known to Maori as Te Moananui-a­ Kiwa - the great sea of an ancestor called Kiwa, who lived in ancient times - but wh ich others call the Pacific Ocean, are very far indeed . Although there are stories of return voyages to far-flung islands of origin, once the voyages of discovery and settlement had been completed there was usually no going back. However, the memory of ancestors, and quarrels, and partings, and voyages, is enshrined i n oral histories handed down th rough their descendants, t he fifty t o sixty generations o f Maori , the I ndigenous people o f the southern-most habitable islands on this 'g lobe': Aotearoa/New Zealand. These events happened long ago, long before Europeans ventured into Te Moananui-a-Kiwa and 'd iscovered' it, and named it the Pacific Ocean , long before Europeans 'discovered' and named Australia and New Zealand. The fi rst settlers adapted creation stories from their islands of orig i n to the islands that became their permanent home, e . g . Te l ka-a-Maui (Maui's fish , the fish-shaped North I sl and of Aotearoa) , Te Waka-a-Maui (Maui's canoe, the canoe-shaped South Island , also known as Te Wai Pounamu , the greenstone/nephrite water) . Even so, the hankering t o retu rn t o origins, t o t he primal 'root o f the stump', survives in the belief that when a Maori dies, that person's spirit m igrates up the West coast of Aotearoa to the northern-most tip of Te Tai Tokerau, Cape Reinga , leaps i nto the swirling waters and heads across Te Moananui-a-Kiwa to the mythica l ancestral homeland of Hawaiki - a variation , incidentally, of the words Savai'i, an island i n the Samoa group, and Hawai'i. Our ancestors would be thunderstruck at the ease with which their descendants today are able to retrace the ancient paths of m ig ration across Te Moananui-a-Kiwa , to reconnect with the descendants of Polynesian ancestors from whom our ancestors parted company all those generations ago. No first nation person i n the region would want to gloss over the ill-effects and bitter experiences of European invasion - and the consequent subjugation and demoralisation of I ndigenous peoples, the theft of their lands and resou rces, the callous destruction of their cultu res and belief and value systems. All of these crimes are matters of historical record . Until recently, however, fi rst nation people such a s Maori - fou rth world, colonised people - were aware, acutely aware in their isolation from other fi rst nation peoples, of the effects of European colonisation only on themselves. In 1 974 Robyn Kahukiwa , a largely self-taught Maori artist, painted The Choice. A somewhat naive and provincial, but achi ng ly sincere, contribution to the realist movement i n New Zealand art at that time, the painting encapsu lates the d i lemma facing the kind of secondary school student Kahukiwa was teach ing at Mana College in Pori rua. Near the capital , Wellington , Pori rua was a raw, industrial mun icipa lity t o whi ch unskilled migrant workers, mainly Maori from other tri bal areas in New Zealand and Polynesian immigrants from the Pacific Islands, were flocking i n considerable n umbers. A young woman is represented i n Kahukiwa's painting as torn between the world of the tri bal marae, the traditional seat of Maori identity, and the enticements of contemporary u rban life, including apeing Afro-American culture . I n 1 975 the New Zealand government passed i nto legislation the Treaty of Waitangi Act, according recogn ition to the agreement entered i nto in 1 840 between chiefs of the Maori tribes and representatives of the British Crown , and , i n effect, retrospectively positioning New Zealand as having been ever since a bicultura l n ation - bicultural as between the tangata whenua (the I nd igenous 'people of the land') and tangata tiriti (the people of the Treaty, i . e . , 32