UnCooked Meets

Abstract

Aotearoa New Zealand has been invaded by strangers – and their horrible histories – for over 250 years. In October 1769, the British explorer Captain James Cook landed the HMS Endeavour on Kaiti Beach in Tūranganui-a-Kiwa: a moment of [re]discovery celebrated as the birth of a bi-cultural nation by some, and the inciting incident for multi-generational trauma by others. In 2019, the Semi-quincentennial of Cook’s arrival was marked by ‘Tuia Encounters 250’, a performative series with waka hourua, va’a tipaerua and three tall ships – including a replica Endeavour – voyaging across Aotearoa to commemorate, elucidate and reaffirm historically-significant cultural encounters.

This essay explores the performances of Tuia 250 alongside two counter-performances: Barbarian Production’s site-specific Cook Thinks Again (2019), where the ghost of James Cook leads a tour through the contemporary streets of the capital city Wellington with an intentional rethinking or disruption of the past; and the Hori’s Pledge roadshow (2022) – a modern Māori Hero’s Journey to un-name ‘New Zealand’. The discussion distinguishes Western conceptions of re-enactment – as potential for catharsis – from whakamaumahara, or performance as embodied memory: a palimpsest of traumatic meetings. In attending to the obligations of Aotearoa’s constitutional document, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, this essay explores how we might relearn our pasts through the narratives held in our inherited bodies.

My home lies in the region of Te Upoko o te Ikaa-Māui: the head of the fish retrieved by Pacific trickster, Māui. As I stand on a beach on the south coast of our capital city, Te Whanganui-a-Tara (Wellington), I look out across Te Moanao-Raukawa, a stretch of water that separates Te Ika (The Fish), the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand, from Te Wai Pounamu (The Place of Greenstone), the South Island. On this clear day, I can see across to the snow-tipped peaks of Kā Tiritiri-o-Te Moana, the Southern Alps.

Te Moana-o-Raukawa is also where the waka (canoe) Matahorua travelled in pursuit of Te Wheke-a-Muturangi, the giant octopus. Guided by Ma’oli navigator, Kupe, this journey marked the discovery of Aotearoa – the ‘land of the long white cloud’, first sighted by high priestess Kuramārōtini: ‘He Ao, He Ao, He Aotea, He Aotearoa’ (A Cloud! A Great Cloud! A Great White Cloud!).The battle between Kupe and Te Wheke-a-Muturangi forms the geography around this ocean passage, with the body of the slain mega-cephalopod strewn in all directions, including forming the two islands known as Ngā Whatu. Māori Scholar Te Rā Moriarty (Ngāti Toa Rangatira) explains their meaning:

Ngā Whatu represents the eyes of the wheke (literally: ngā whatu – the eyes). They are tapu and historically … when waka would cross between the North and South islands, those on the waka would cover their eyes with the leaves (rau) of the kawakawa plant when passing by Ngā Whatu if they hadn’t made the journey at least three times before. That’s where the name Raukawakawa or Te Moana o Raukawa comes from – the covering of the eyes with the leaves of the kawakawa plant. (Moriarty 2022)

Te Moana-o-Raukawa is where the history of the Ma’oli-who-became-the-Māori, the tangata whenua (indigenous peoples) of Aotearoa, begins: with a battle between human and beast. These zigzagging channels represent this great struggle – one that ended in the death of Te Wheke, a tohu or portent, and a collective decision to explore, and eventually become one with, these new lands.

Except that Te Moana-o-Raukawa does not exist on a map. Instead, it is officially named ‘Cook Strait’ – one of innumerable locations in Aotearoa named for another seafarer, the British captain James Cook.

Names are important.

I did not know this story of the naming of Te Moana o Raukawa until recently. Yet the narrative of Captain Cook’s grand southern adventure was the anchor point of lessons I received on the origins of New Zealand at primary school. The cleaving of ‘history’ from ‘myth’ is a clear example of ways our education system has been dictated by cultural imperialism, and one reason I now have to unlearn the wrong names – and wrong stories – of my homeland.

On 6 October 1769 a group of strangers landed their immense alien vessel on Kaiti Beach in Tūranganui-a-Kiwa (now Gisborne), on the northern East Cape of Aotearoa. They were not expected or invited by the mana whenua, the inhabitants of that region. Regardless, the crew of this ship – tasked with the holy purpose of the ‘Doctrine of Discovery’ – decided to seek out the local sites. The group of Māori men who first encountered these aliens, uncertain of their intentions, reacted with a wero: a performative challenge. The aliens’ response was to shoot at the locals, murdering four, including Ngāti Oneone rangatira (chief) Te Maro. The following day, the would-be discoverers tried again. A misunderstanding led to the death of another rangatira, Te Rakau, and the murder of four fishermen. Cook would go on to map the coastline of this land and thus completed the game of colonization: you draw it, you name it, you claim it!

This is an account of three contemporary site-specific performative responses to Cook’s invasion of Aotearoa. Each performance is provoked by a desire to engage with the past through a critical lens – to spark conversations about colonization – and yet each had vastly different modes of expression. Through each encounter, I map ways that historically inflected bodies of both tangata whenua (Māori) and tangata tiriti (treaty partners, non-Māori) become ‘re-routed’ by re-experiencing invasion in-situ – transformations that speak to the vitality of the body as chronicle of a living past.

COOK MEETS

In 2019 the Semi-quincentennial of Cook’s arrival was marked by Tuia Encounters 250, a government-sponsored performative series that conflated the historic voyage of Cook with narratives of Oceanic exploration by our Ma’oli ancestors. Tuia 250 were ‘family friendly’ events where waka hourua and va’a tipaerua fa’afaite voyaged with three tall ships − including a replica of Cook’s vessel, the HMS Endeavour − across Aotearoa, visiting ‘sites of historic and cultural significance’ to share stories of ‘cultural encounters’ (Te hekenga o ngā waka Tuia 250 Voyage 2019). The Ministry of Culture and Heritage website explains the Tuia 250 was designed as ‘a national opportunity to hold honest conversations about the past, the present and how we navigate our shared future’ (ibid.).

Advocate for global Indigenous rights Tina Ngata (Ngāti Porou) appealed unsuccessfully to the United Nations Permanent Forum for Indigenous Issues to prevent the replica tour. She writes:

To provide welcoming ceremonies for the replica of a ship which killed our people and stole our lands is exactly the kind of endorsement our colonizer requires of us to maintain their false premise of being invited, and welcome, in their role. (Ngata 2019b)

Ngata, who has called for the dismantling of the Doctrine of Discovery, speaks of the multiple ‘colonial fictions’ that justify resituating invasions as ‘historical’, ‘inevitable’ and ‘beneficial’:

In spite of its attempts at inclusion, TUIA250 cannot help but entrench many of these fictions, by centring the stories of the nation around the date of the arrival of Cook. Even our own voyaging history has been hitched to the core date of Cook’s arrival. No doubt some see this as an opportunity for Māori, but in failing to dismantle the core fictions upon which these frameworks of domination rest, an even greater opportunity has been granted to the colonial project to reaffirm its place at the centre of our nation. (Ngata 2019b)

In Tūranganui-a-Kiwa, the four local iwi (tribes) of the region collectively refused to greet the arriving flotilla with a traditional pōwhiri, a meaningful ceremony of welcome entrenched in our own practices of Indigenous hospitality, manaakitanga. In Wellington, the mau whenua descendants of the Taranaki whānui iwi lit fires along the original settlements of the Miramar peninsula for the arrival of the HMS Endeavour replica, an act of ahi kā, signifying that this whenua (land) is already settled, by tangata whenua (Johnsten 2019).

Yet they still happened.

My eldest son, invited as part of a regional education incentive, was allocated two vessels to board and explore when the flotilla docked in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington harbour: one was a waka hourua, the double-hulled canoe used by our Ma’oli ancestors, and the other was the Endeavour replica. While I can appreciate how such performative interactions might offer a novel learning experience, having my own child board this particular vessel represents a disturbing act of re-colonization: my traumatic past entangled with my nascent future. Afterwards the children were given a commemorative colouring book and a series of flashcards toting facts about Pacific voyaging.

Ngata has written extensively and eloquently about the cultural trauma of these re-enactments (see 2019a and 2019b), while Alice Te Punga Somerville (Te Āti Awa, Taranaki) also speaks to the myriad of emotions we feel to see Cook’s invasion showboated (Somerville 2020). My interest is specifically on how the understanding of performance in te ao Māori (the Māori world) and our connection to our physical environment heightens the stakes of site-specific re-enactments of invasion-as-discovery.

Performative re-enactment has an unsettling connection with memorialization of military battles won by imperialist/colonist/nationalist forces: history’s ‘good guys’. Agnew, Lamb and Tomane describe that while re-enactment is understood as mimesis and therefore ‘infinitely inferior to the original form’ (2020: 2), it is also a way in which participants can attempt to conjure the feeling of the original event, as well as re-affirm its truth: ‘If the incarnation works well, then sufficient energy is released to fuel belief in the being of the past, for it has just this minute become present to our senses as a living and moving phenomenon’ (1). Amanda Card warns of the ‘unreliability’ of performative re-enactment:

Embodied practices and an embodied engagement with objects help enliven the semiotics of the mise-en-scène: enhancing the what, where, and why, with how. But these are not histories per se, they are performances of histories. Bodies do not necessarily produce indubitable facts or evidence in the usual sense of the word. They can vitalize, enhance, confirm, and conflict with the facts from other archives and modes of research. (Card 2020: 31)

Rebecca Schneider suggests that while it is not a record, artefact or document, these events offer a kind of temporal simultaneity. In observing Civil War re-enactors in Turtle Island, Schneider states: ‘everyone I spoke with was deeply excited by their collective investment in a possibility: the possibility of time redoubling, returning in fractured or fugitive moments of affective engagement’ (2011: 37). Re-enactment offers a kind of raising of the dead − to ‘keep the past alive’ (ibid.) − in a replaying of events dictated by the directors/facilitators of the performative encounter. Schneider suggests that replaying of an event ‘unfaithfully’ (2011: 42) can further entrench falsehood as reality through affective assemblage: ‘physical acts are a means for knowing, bodies are sites for transmission even if, simultaneously, they are also manipulants of error and forgetting’ (39). Yet there are ways that theatrical or performative re-enactments might be conceived as an opportunity for catharsis – a purging or purification of the mamae (pain) of the past: a way to assuage all guilt and culpability.

In te ao Māori, all performance has multiple functions and none of these are symbolic in the sense of not being ‘the thing’. Everything is the thing. The pōwhiri is not a performance of welcoming, it is the welcome, it is a spiritual and cultural safety check, it is an opportunity to demonstrate the mana (power) of the host and the guest/s, it is an account of history, past and present, and it is an affirmation of our relationship to our biological connections to the physical landscape, our ancestors, from which the welcoming is being made. The word ‘whakapapa’ translates as genealogy, but also literally describes the layers of earth, reinforcing our bone-deep connection to our homelands. Whakapapa also represents the layers and layers of ancestral trauma that we hold in our bodies. When we perform, we are not simply singular entities; we are our forebears and the whānau (family) we have now and forever. Finally, to remember or memorialize is ‘whakamaumahara’, which literally translates as to ‘carry’ or to ‘put on’ a memory: the physical act of embodying the past. We carry our histories in our bodies; we carry our home in our bodies. These ideas collectively reinforce the trauma of historical re-enactment for Māori, as this pain is not individualized or even simply human: to perform or witness an event of the past is to make it happen to all of us – a drilling, a fracking or an exhumation of our collective mamae.

If every cross-cultural welcome is haunted by the welcomes of the past, just imagine the trauma, and the shame, of having to re-welcome the spectre of Cook and his ‘death ship’ (Matthews 2019) as a kind of disoriented reorientation of where we began to be as a nation.

COOK THINKS AGAIN

The Wellington-based theatre company Barbarian Productions produces inclusive and diverse participatory performance projects aimed at ‘revitalising NZ audiences and communities with radically playful interactive works’ (Barbarian Productions 2022). Provoked by the discourse surrounding the 250th anniversary commemorations, the group staged a promenade, site-specific performance entitled Cook Thinks Again in Wellington in 2019, remounting the show in Tamaki Makarau/Auckland, in 2021. The original production was a guided walking experience around the waterfront of Te Whanganui-a-Tara, conducted by a posthumous James Cook (Tom Clarke), who leads his audience around historically important sites and, in the process, ‘finds himself thinking again about his contribution to New Zealand history’ (Barbarian Productions 2022). Artistic director of Barbarian, Jo Randerson, speaks of the seeds of the work beginning in an improvisation by Clarke during a workshop for another production, Kiwi:

He did a really funny thing where he was dying, and he just took ages to die, you know – he would die, and then he would get up, and die again, and it really hit all of us: Cook just won’t die. He won’t go away. His legacy is so deep through us. (Randerson 2022)

Randerson talks about the work being driven by her frustrations at the monocultural commemorative events marking the 100 year anniversity of World War I in 2014, coupled with her own (re)discovery of the excavated site of Te Aro Pā in 2005, now ‘preserved’ in the basement of an apartment complex on Taranaki street. Randerson was motivated to do something to represent the complexity – and complicity – around the colonial narrative in Aotearoa for many Pākehā, New Zealanders of European descent:

I feel there’s a thing as Pākehā where you can just try and quickly assert which side you’re on – that you’re an ally and that history has got nothing to do with you – like real distancing … I feel like this is not taking responsibility for how we carry it … You don’t want to take up space, but what we also heard a lot was ‘you Pākehā, you’ve got to do some of this work by yourselves’. (Randerson 2022)

The project was formed through conversation and consultation with Māori. Arts Practitioner Borni Te Rongopai Tukiwaho (Te Arawa, Tuhoe, Tuwharetoa) spoke of Barbarian needing to place their own positionality within the narrative, saying, ‘[T]his is a Māori story … and you’re telling the perpetrator’s story’ (cited in Randerson 2022). Randerson (2022) speaks of ‘actively trying to model a Pākehā taking responsibility and re-forming’. She describes early audience encounters where Māori felt that Barbarian were being ‘too kind’ in their representation of Cook and encouraged Clarke to push the racism of his performance otherwise he would be skirting the discomfort of colonialism from a Pākehā perspective: essentially letting him ‘off the hook’ (Randerson 2022). Randerson describes this discomfort from Pākehā audience members:

People would arrive to the show − and they knew what they were coming to, they’d bought tickets − but they would arrive and they would see the figure in the costume and their bodies’ drew away, like: ‘I don’t want to be seen in connection with a racist figure’ – which I totally understand. Those are the places we were trying to dance between – keep the audiences in the experience with us but keep them, and ourselves, actively ‘on the hook’. (Randerson 2022)

The efficacy of Cook Thinks Again relied on Clarke’s ability to perform Cook (as clown) with self-reflexive irony, creating a slippage between the past and the present where he became the conduit for the audience to ‘think/again’. This manifestation of ‘again-ness’ was conflated with the now-ness and presence of the physical sites of trauma across Wellington city, and the audience’s awareness of standing in and on an historically charged whenua. Randerson speaks of the vitality of the promenade performance for the collective participants:

I love sitting and watching theatre – and not that you can’t have a full body reaction experience there – but I think that moving gives you time to process; it also gives you time to literally let things land in your body, because Tom’s performance is complex and dense, there’s no easy response. Allowing audiences to physically move and reflect, and also to socialise with someone near them, or just talk about something completely different, or walk in silence is important, and also to connect that learning to specific sites. (Randerson 2022)

Yet there is more to this, even for non-Māori, in making this connection between our bodies as historically inflected and the remapping of our physical environment with a performative re-enactment of the past. Randerson states:

I feel quite strongly about positioning learning, especially deep philosophical or approach-changing stuff, in connection to the body. It’s really great when it can be metabolised – you connect better. I mean there’s all of the history in the land anyway and then you’re like actively growing up with conversations around whenua … I think it was like people blending into place. (Randerson 2022)

What was important was that this was not a faithful re-enactment, per se, but rather a deliberately inaccurate represention of Cook, narrating an accurate version of history that until now was mostly hidden or skewed to protect Pākehā guilt. What if ‘what was’ was actually what it should have been?

HORI’S PLEDGE

Names are important.

In September 2021, representatives of political party Te Pati Māori launched a petition calling on the Labour Government to officially restore the country’s original name ‘Aotearoa’, alongside returning original te reo Māori names to all settlements across the nation. In response, right-wing organization Hobson’s Pledge orchestrated their own campaign for ‘New Zealand not Aotearoa’. Artist/Activist Hohepa Thompson (Ngāti Kahungunu-ki-Wairarapa, Ngāti Toa Rangatira, Kai Tahu), aka ‘The Hori’, was motivated to create his own counter-response: ‘Hori’s Pledge’. Hori’s Pledge begins with the wero (challenge) ‘This is Aotearoa’:

‘this is aotearoa’ … is about acknowledging not only Aotearoa as original name of this country but also the historys of the Māori people and the way our knowledge systems and history worked – via whakapapa – (geneology) we are [tangata] whenua (native people) of this land and we are not looking to change the name but to reinstate it back to Aotearoa and be officially acknowledged in our country. (Thompson 2021)

Thompson speaks of how Māori mark history through performance – including waiata (song), karakia (prayer) and moteatea (chanting), but also through visual design. He states:

I use my art to bridge the gap between the worlds so that people see te ao Māori, a Māori world view – and how beautiful it is. (Thompson 2021)

In 2022, Thompson travelled across Aotearoa to promote Hori’s Pledge, driving a ute and trailer with a billboard featuring giant images of Abel Tasman and James Cook. While Tasman’s image asks, ‘Are we Abel to be called Aotearoa now?’, Cook’s portrait is emblazoned with the slogan: ‘This guy wasn’t strait, he was Cooked as’ (Thompson 2022). The tour was intended to raise awareness among communities and ‘potentially spark conversations among whānau’:

I can see things from each side’s perspective and with my work, I try to offer that to give. The people that are viewing the artwork give some context into why we think the way we do and why Pākehā might not understand that. So it’s kind of bridging the gap between those two worlds. (Thompson cited in Martin 2022)

‘This is Aotearoa’ is performative decolonization and re-indigenization. Thompson is actively unfolding the historical archive of each location and un-naming, rather than undoing, the stories of invasion: restoring the mana and rightful origin of the whenua, through restoring (and literally re-storying) the rightful names of each site. Hori is itself a reference to a racial slur, so, through adopting this persona, Thompson is speaking back to our racist past (and present) and yet also reminding Pākehā of their own attempts to cover over the enduring guilt of colonization.The re-presentation of the image of Cook reinforces Cook’s status as a swindler (not ‘straight’ with his intentions) while also denouncing his claim to naming Te Moana-o-Raukawa (Cook Strait). Yet it also playfully plays out – and plays with – Cook’s own demise. In saying he was ‘cooked as’, it not only refers to the idea of Cook (the brand) as being over-done, defeated or exhausted, it also draws on the fact that Captain Cook was literally ‘cooked’ by the mana whenua of Kealakekua Bay, Hawa’ii, after attempting to kidnap the Aliʻi nui (supreme ruler) Kalaniʻōpuʻu. Cook is thus reduced not as the ultimate consumer of Indigenous people, but the consumed.

PERFORMANCE AS HISTORY

From 2023, schools across Aotearoa will be rolling out a revised New Zealand history curriculum, adjusted to focus on ‘the foundational and continuous history of Māori, the impact of colonisation and settlement, the power people and groups hold, and the relationships that shaped our history’ (Ministry of Education 2022). These changes are significant and welcomed; it is a long-awaited implementation of an obligation laid out in our constitutional document, Te Tiriti o Waitangi (the Treaty of Waitangi) (1840): the promise to protect Māori, our land and culture.

While this decolonization of the way we educate tamariki (children) of the history of this place has been carefully and respectfully conceived, it has also prompted me to question how history is archived. Inspired by the work of the Hori, I suggest that Māori performance – our oratory, our songs, our dance (kanikani and haka) – are the only truly liberational forms of historical documentation. As a Māori mother, I want my children to relearn our pasts through the narratives held by our inherited bodies, to feel the energy of the whenua, and our ancestors, reverberating from within. In other words, discovering our history as action, and acknowledging performance as embodied history, in and of itself.

HISTORY HAS ITS EYES ON YOU

Cook only ‘discovered’ Te Moana-o-Raukawa in 1774, from Tōtaranui (Queen Charlotte Sound), the easternmost point of the Marlborough Sounds at the top of Te Wai Pounamu, the South Island. Climbing Arapaora Island, Cook looked out to ‘discover’ the passage of water linking the Tasman Sea to the Pacific Ocean. Incidentally, Tōtaranui is not all that far from Mohua, Golden Bay, where Dutch explorer Abel Tasman first ‘discovered’ and named New Zealand in 1642.

I don’t know if Cook ever stood on this beach at Te Upoko o te Ika-a-Māui, but I like to imagine, when I dig my own feet into the gritty sand, that history played out a little differently. I imagine Te Wheke-a-Muturangi, slippery and swift, rising out from the deep, while Cook sits mapping his claim, wholly unaware of ngā whatu, the gaze of a monster, watching … waiting …