U(wā)S: Maungarongo Te Kawa

RON TE KAWA / Who IS Aotearoa? / Who IS so-called New Zealand?

Winter's relentless claws dig in. My phone pings genocide, disinformation, Far-Right extremism, Temu advertising, a rolling back of 50 years of Māori development / Tino Rangatiratanga. I’m trying to be helpful, hopeful, and trying to forgive, or to be forgiven. I put my phone to sleep.

Enter Maungarongo Ron Te Kawa (Ron). We’re waving at each other through the windows of the newly renovated gothic-inspired Te Matatiki Toi Ora, Christchurch Art Centre (what a mouthful) where Ron is in residency,¹ and Ngaio Cowell and I run Te Whare Tapere, a Māori and Indigenous house of storytelling.

Ron is Ngāti Porou, colourful, sustainably stylish, the person you gravitate to, the interlocutor. His work is vivid like his character. Story quilts made of discarded rainbows, satin, creatures, lace, plants, velvet, atua, dreams, and magic. Zoe Black notes that audiences and visitors are "seduced by the sequins and sparkle."² I enter the temporary studio where fluorescent body parts relax on a fabric-filled floor, two big eyes, a patchwork arm that could be puppets, sculptures, or a waharoa.³ I’m drawn to the back of the room where a series of smaller quilts have been lovingly laid out. Ron explains how they were created during his recent Norway residency: they connect us by telling the migration story of the kuaka, or bar-tailed godwit, a manu that journeys from the Alaskan Yukon–Kuskokwim Delta to Aotearoa every year. Unlike the seabirds with which it shares the sky, this manu can fly 8–9 days continuously without a kai in between. The quilts keep each other company. I imagine their conversations: “Mun ráhkistan du,” says one in the Northern Sami language, “kā nui taku aroha,” replies the other in te reo Māori.

Now it’s not Ron’s style to focus on Indigenous peoples' trauma; he is fully aware of colonization’s unrelenting violence. He recalls transformational moments in the 90s and 00s when people started to turn to him for solace, feeling unsafe in their streets, work places, and homes. It was a time of media fueled HIV narratives that targeted marginalized gay communities. There were fear tactics from Don Brash’s "Iwi vs Kiwi" slogans, and plenty of words used to name and shame: “dole bludger,” “coconut,” “retard,” “faggot,” and “hori.” ⁴ Fast-forward 30 years and the number of people looking for peace is increasing, our protest cries gone global so now they’re immortalized in hashtags and celebrity tweets: #MeToo #TransRightsAreHumanRights #ThisIsNotUs #Landback #FreePalestine #BLM #MaunaKea #IdleNoMore #ToitūTeTiriti. I’m personally lamenting the devastating disconnection of wāhine Māori from their whānau and whenua, so I too find solace, joy, delight, and aroha in the work of Maungarongo Ron Te Kawa. He quips about coloniality’s grip on reality, “I hit back with sequins… and glitter… and energy.”⁵ Ron’s focus then isn’t on deficit-theorising Māori further; his focus resembles love letters to Māori as they truly are: love is the radical act here.

AESTHESIS or how to view…

In positioning myself, I am a researcher and storymaker raised in the storytelling traditions of my European ancestors who passed down the idea of an arts sector where creative practice is commodified into disciplines and silos, and artists compete and are measured for resources and revenue. I’m also raised in the storytelling traditions of my Mana Moana⁶ tupuna where stories are “inseparable from Indigenous peoples’ past, present, and future lives.”⁷ Our stories “contain philosophical thought, epistemological constructs, cultural codes, and worldviews,”⁸ and so I’m part of these New Wave scholars attempting to (re)define language and critiques about creative practice by artists who whakapapa Māori. We seek new ways to accentuate our experiences, we (re)claim content and context, we combat the dangers of what Paulo Freire sees as single narratives, dominant narratives, quantitative measuring, re-othering, and false decolonization.

Of course, amongst the dangers of an inherited Western art/culture system is that it is "based on an invented past where Western connoisseurship established the parameters of what was or is considered art or aesthetic."⁹ The value of Indigenous art, according to this system, is often determined by the vanishing status of the tribe, reinforcing colonial narratives of extinction and scarcity. These ideologies, when embedded in mainstream education, become instruments for the "colonization of consciousness,"¹⁰ redefining Indigenous minds through the imbued values and ideals of its settler society. Such political acts do not cultivate Indigenous creative communities; instead, the commodification of art and culture, in contrast with Indigenous storytelling as a knowledge paradigm, reveals deep flaws in our understanding of Indigenous realities.

Walter Mignolo provides some comfort that even though we are "trapped in the Western epistemic and hermeneutical vocabulary,"¹¹ it is necessary for introducing new concepts like “Fanon’s sociogenesis,”¹² and it is also crucial to work with(in) existing concepts to de-naturalize or decolonize them. Mignolo offers an alternative to art/culture aesthetics: "aestheSis". Decolonial aestheSis challenges and subverts the dominance of modern/colonial aesthetics, naming and articulating practices that resist the control exerted not only over the economy, politics, and knowledge, but also over the senses and perceptions. “Decolonial aestheSis is an option that delivers a radical critique to modern, postmodern, and altermodern aestheTics and, simultaneously, contributes to making visible decolonial subjectivities at the confluence of popular practices of re-existence, artistic installations, theatrical and musical performances, literature and poetry, sculpture and other visual arts.”¹³

On the experience of being loved, whakapapa is the requisite that underlies mātauraka Māori.¹⁴

In te reo Māori, "roko"¹⁵ or "rongo" means to listen, hear, feel, smell, taste, and perceive—all of the senses except sight. The linguistic connection to the senses traces back to Roko, atua of peace, kūmara, and cultivated foods who is also known by the names Roko-marae-roa, Roko-mā-tāne, and Rongo-hirea. Roko is one of the many children of Raki, the sky father, and Papa, the earth mother.

In the "music arts", Hineraukatauri is the atua of both dance and taoka puoro. She is personified by the pūtōrino, an instrument she loved so deeply that she transformed herself to reflect its tapered wooden form. Unique to Aotearoa, the pūtōrino possesses three voices: male, female, and a mysterious “other.” The male voice is summoned when the instrument is played like a trumpet. “When cross-blown, the voice is that of Hineraukatauri. The third voice is said to belong to Hineraukatauri’s elusive daughter, Wheke, who has dominion over the barely discernible sounds heard in forests. When a musician is playing the pūtōrino, they are simultaneously sharing hā (the breath of life) with Hineraukatauri and the instrument itself. By communing with these energies, a locus of transmutability or sacred space is invoked.”¹⁶

Synchronously, other atua call to each other from their immaterial homes: Hineraukatamea of entertainment, Hinekauorohia of rituals and reflection, Hine-te-iwaiwa of poets, weavers, and midwives, Waipuna-ā-Rangi of the Matariki star cluster. Each karaka ascends and descends, finally captured and embodied in the material world and words of Ron Te Kawa… where “fabric softens the story.”¹⁷

“interweavings of times and places”¹⁸

In a world dominated by capitalism, gender-based violence, and divisive narratives, Maungarongo Ron Te Kawa’s work emerges to soothe the stoicism I’ve learned to rely on in order to do the work of a (re)indigenising artist/scholar/māmā. More than radical acts of love and resistance, Ron’s stories highlight what is most subversive about our culture, we Māori, Indigenous and marginalized identities just won’t die, that is to say we won’t surrender to the enduring pathos of a White saviour complex that relies on “niceness” to justify its means. Zora Neale Hurston’s words remind us of the agony of “bearing an untold story inside you,”¹⁹ and similarly, Ron’s creations show the power of living these stories openly, without judgement, self-depreciation, or shame. Language is returning to the people, and with it, the power to live as we want to live, for as Ron puts it, “The Māori world has everything that I need to be deliciously fulfilled.”

E rere nei te mihi ki a kōrua Antonia and Samuel mōhou i tautoko nui. Kia koe Maungarongo Ron Te Kawa, nei rā te kupu aroha, kupu wairua, kupu mana hoki. Ko te tangata o te whenua, Tīhei Mauri Ora!