E oho! Captain Cook: The beginning of what?

Speakers

Paul Diamond, Tanja Schubert-McArthur, Emalani Case, Alice Te Punga Somerville

Mihimihi

Paul Diamond: He hōnore, he korōria, he maungarongo ki runga i te mata o te whenua, he whakaaro pai ki ngā tāngata katoa.

Ki ngā mate kua hinga i te toki o Aituā. Haere koutou ki te moana nui, te rerenga o ngā waka i hoehoe ai e rātou mā, ka ngaro i te tirohanga kanohi.

Heoi anō, e mau tonu ana i ngā tōpitopito o te ngākau.

Apiti hono, tatai hono, rātou te hunga mate ki a rātou. Apiti hono, tatai hono, tātou te hunga ora ki a tātou katoa.

Kua whakarauika tātou I tēnei ruma, kei te papa e ki a nei, ko Tiakiwai. Ko Tiakiwai te awa iti e rere atu ki te Moana, te Whanga nui a Tara. Ko Te Ahumairangi te ingoa o te papa kei runga. Koira te hiwi kei kora.

Na reira, ngā mana whenua o te rohe nei, ngā tāngata o te Raukura, Taranaki Whānui ki te Upoko o Te Ika, ka nui anō te mihi ki a koutou katoa.

Ka mihi hoki ki te kaupapa o te ra, tēnei kaupapa kōrero e ki a nei, ko e oho! Kia noho tahi, kia whakarongo, kia korero, kia rere ngā whakawhiti whakaaro e pā ana ki te taonga ra, Te Tiriti. Kia whakaohooho i a tatou.

E tika ana kia tu tēnei kaupapa kei te whare nei, te whare kaipupuri I ngā taonga, Te Te Tiriti, Te Wakaputanga, te Te Petihana Whakamana Pōti Wahine.

Hei te ra nei, ka tuku mihi ki ngā kaikorero e rua, tēnā kōrua.

Te Atiawa, Taranaki Maunga, tēnā koe Alice,

Emalani, aloha, mahalo.

Nau mai ki te whare, ki te kaupapa nei. Mauria mai o kōrua pukenga, kōrero hoki, kia whakaoho I a tatou.

Na reira, ka nui te mihi ki a koutou katoa kua whakarauika mai.

Group singing: Whakarongo ake au ki ngā reo o te motu
e karanga mai ana huakina huakina te whare ē
ka oti ka oti ngā mahi ē
haere mai e te iwi kia piri tāua
kia ki te atu ai ngā kupu whakairi ē
ēnei ngā wariu o ngā mahi tuhinga
hei mahi ketuketu
ngā whakaaro rerekē
ko hanga whakatū ngā aria ki te iwi
e kore e mimiti he puna wairua ē
he puna wairua ē

Paul Diamond: Kia ora koutou. So I’m Paul Diamond from the Alexander Turnbull Library, and just to explain what I’ve just said in my mihi to open proceedings today just to welcoming you here acknowledging those who’ve passed on, acknowledging the mana whenua of the rohe nei, who are acknowledged in some of the-- for example in the naming of our floors in this building and welcoming you to the kaupapa, the next installment in the series E oho, which kind of loosely translates as wake up; kōrero caught it all around the taongaongue of the Treaty that’s very appropriate that that’s here as the whare that cares for the Ttreaty, which is held by Archives New Zealand. But the exhibition is here at the National Library. And welcoming the two speakers today.

Tanja Schubert-McArthur

Tanja Schubert-McArthur: Nau mai, haere mai ki Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa! Welcome to the wellspring of knowledge, which is the National Library. And welcome to the E oho! Waitangi Series 2021. Some of you would have come to the launch event in January, and we discussed how New Zealanders commemorate Waitangi Day. And some of you may have visited the He Tohu exhibition upstairs maybe on Waitangi Day. Welcome back. My name is Dr. Tanja Schubert-McArthur. I’m a learning facilitator here, and I’m also the organiszer of the series.

This series aims to lay the foundations for all people living in Aotearoa by exploring key events in history that shaped the nation we call home. Each month we put together events that relate to our founding documents. He Whakaputanga and Te Tiriti in particular, which I housed upstairs in the document room. And we want to provide a safe space for robust discussions.

Coming up next Tuesday on the 29th of April, the day that Te Tiriti was signed in Wellington, we have Morrie and Honiana Love to do a walking tour, but this event has proved very popular and is now fully booked. And then the week-- sorry, the months after on the 19th of May, there is an event about a short history of the Waitangi tribunal, and we have Judge Caren Fox, Dame Claudia Orange, and Colin James to talk about this very exciting kaupapa.

But now it is my great pleasure to introduce to you the speakers of today’s talk, Captain Cook — The Beginning of What? Dr. Emalani Case and associate professor Alice Te Punga Somerville, welcome. So originally from my Waimea, the big island of Hawaii Emalani Case grew up in a small town immersed in the stories and histories of her place. Her BA and degrees in English are from the University of Hawaii, and she completed her PhD in Pacific studies at Victoria University in Wellington.

Emalani now shares her love of stories and histories as a lecturer in Pacific studies. As a Hawaiian woman, scholar, activist, writer, blogger, and dancer, she’s deeply engaged in issues of indigenous rights and representation, colonialism and decolonisation and environmental and social justice. Emalani’s first book Everything Ancient was Once New, Indigenous Persistence from Hawaii to Kahiki was published by UH Press in 2021. And I’m pleased to say you can buy a copy outside at the book stall eftpos only.

And Alice Te Punga Somerville is of Te Atiawa and Taranaki descent. She’s a scholar, a poet, irredentist, who might explain that further later. And she’s an associate professor in the faculty of Māori and indigenous studies at the University of Waikato. Alice studied at the University of Auckland, earned a PhD at Cornell University as a Fulbright scholar and master and recipient and has held academic appointments in New Zealand, Canada, Hawaii, and Australia.

Her monograph Once were Pacific Māori Connections to Oceania won Best First Book 2012 from the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. Alice researches and teaches Māori, Pacific, and indigenous texts in order to centre indigenous expansiveness and descent of colonialism. And she's also the author of 250 ways of-- sorry, get it right-- 250 Ways to Start an Essay about Captain Cook published by Bridget William books also outside on the book. So please join me in welcoming Alice and Emalani!

Not yet. So just to explain how we run this event today. First, we will watch a little film clip, which is taken from our He Tohu map table table. It features Captain Cook. Then we will hear Alice and Emalani in conversation. We’ll stop around 1 o’clock, let anyone who needs to go leave, and then we’ll continue with a kōrero circle, which is deeper discussion, quite interactive so if you have the time please stay for that. And film clip. Thank you.

Film clip

(Film clip showing waka and a sailing ship sailing to and around New Zealand during different time periods. It also shows the movement of people in New Zealand and some of the historical events of New Zealand's history.)

Introduction — Alice Te Punga Somerville

Alice Te Punga Somerville: Tēnei te mihi kia a koutou, ki a tātou ko huihui mai nei. It’s wonderful to be here. For me, being from here, it’s always a great pleasure to be home. It’s a special pleasure to be here with Emalani. So, I’m going to be reading a little bit of an introduction to - I guess make us all feel like we all know what kaupapa we’re here for and the positions that we want to speak from.

And then from there, it’s going to be a little bit kind of choose your own adventure, free for all. We thought it would be more interesting for us to be in conversation with each other because I think the- what is it, the sum will be greater than its parts or whatever rather than if just one of us spoke and the other one spoke.

Our recent book publications were mentioned, and we will both be at different points reading from our books and maybe other bits and pieces. But that’s just to give you a bit of a sense of how are we’re going to start. So, I’ve started in a very glamorous way, I’m just going to pick up my paperwork.

We’re speaking today as two indigenous women academics who are committed to thinking about our respective indigenous communities in the context of the histories networks, whakapapa politics, possibilities of the broader Pacific region. Neither of us are biographers of Cook or historians of 18th century Europe. And at the same time, neither of us are standing here or sitting here as reliable native informants.

Today, we’re speaking with each other and with all of you as indigenous scholars whose research and teaching expertise brings us to the necessity of engaging with Cook and his legacy. As we talk today, we may switch constantly between Cook the person and Cook the symbol of the British colonial project in this place from which he cannot be extricated. Of course, the switching between Cook the man and Cook as symbol of colonialism is at the heart of questions about how he is remembered.

Some of us think we’re trying to determine whether he was a nice person we’d be happy to accept a Facebook friend request from, while some of us are unable to talk about Cook without talking about everything that’s happened here since 1769. The problem with talking about Cook is that we can’t stop talking about him. The question of how he should be remembered is not the same as a question about whether he should be remembered.

We can’t not remember Cook, that would be a futile and unhelpful argument for either of us to make. Neither of us would say the way to deal with Cook is to stop talking about him. But both of us know the risks, the violence of certain histories and people being prioritised while others are made invisible.

One origin story of how this session came about is that I wrote an essay that turned into a book published by Bridget Williams Books Press called 250 Ways to Start an Essay about Captain Cook, which is--

[LAUGHTER]

--which is what it says on the tin, there are 250. It’s a big number it turns out. [LAUGHS] But there’s never just one origin story. There are other origins and whakapapa we can trace to this moment in this conversation, the mobility both of us have had around the Pacific region, and between Hawaii and Aotearoa, specifically-- the discipline of Pacific studies that we both share. Emalani’s own book which is brand new, and amazing, and hot off the press, and the lifetimes and doctoral theses, and writing that sits behind that. There's the invitation from the library, another origin for this conversation. There's the building of this library on our iwi land.

The problem with Cook

Two, ‘With beginnings.’ ‘There was never a single beginning point for the history of this place. It wasn’t Cook on a beach, it wasn’t the confiscation of land and storming of Parihaka, it wasn’t Gallipoli, it wasn’t the pushing apart of primordial appearance, it wasn't goldfields, it wasn’t the arrival of waka, it wasn’t a lover’s tiff between mountains, it wasn’t a boat full of influenza docking in Samoa, it wasn’t the Treaty, it wasn’t certain women getting the vote, it wasn’t a fished-up fished, it was all of these. It was all of these and more besides.’

The problem with Cook is that he keeps being described as a first. But the other problem is that very often when we go, oh, well, if he’s not the first, we’ll talk about what came before. And then what can happen is that everything Māori gets incorporated into New Zealand history as if we were just all hanging out here waiting to become New Zealanders one day, which is an assimilationist view of our history. And it should be able to stand quite apart from national stories.

But if Cook’s not the first, but he’s also not just a continuation of a particular story, what do we do? Because we kind of think we need to have what one way or the other. But the problem with both of these views of history is that they are linear.

Patricia Gracein Baby No-eyes writes, ‘There’s a way the older people have of telling a story. A way with a beginning is not the beginning. The end is not the end. It starts from a centre and moves away from there in such widening circles.’ So, for the rest of our session today, we're going to talk about a whole lot of different centres. Emalani.

Introduction — Emalani Case

Emalani Case: Kia ora! Aloha mai kakou! It’s such an honour to be here. And so thank you to the National Library. Thank you to Alice for the invite to come, and sit, and just talk, and have a conversation.

I’m very thankful that Alice has already outlined that, no, we’re not historians, we’re not biographers, but we are people who have to talk about Cook. He is part of our histories. We can’t disarticulate him from our histories, from our current realities in the Pacific, as well. And so he's somebody we have to engage with, someone we have to talk about.

As you were speaking, I was thinking about Cook in Hawaii. I’m from Hawaii. And there is a dominant narrative. [LAUGHS] And sorry, this is sort of an evil chuckle. But there’s this sort of dominant narrative about Cook in Hawaii, because that's where his life ended.

So how is he remembered? What is the beginning of the Cook story in Hawaii? It’s the end.

[LAUGHTER]

So when we think about ends and beginnings, really the centre, or his end in Hawaii was the beginning of something else. And so it brings us back to this spiralling notion of time, which disrupts that really linear idea of time that Alice pointed to.

So, I’m just going to read a very small paragraph section from my new book. I don’t talk about Cook at length, but there is one chapter where I engage with Cook. And I talk about Tuia 250, the commemorative events for Captain Cook in 2019 that happened here in Aotearoa. I was here at the time, and really had to engage with that event, and think about what it meant for someone from Hawaii to come over and see this man, who we remember in a very particular way from home, being celebrated and commemorated in a particular way here.

Extract from “Everything Ancient was Once New”

So, in one of my chapters-- Yeah. I’ll just read a tiny section. ‘At a poetry event at the start of the year a Māori woman came up to me, and asked, "Can I hug you?" She paused briefly, and then continued, "I always thought we should have a hug a Hawaiian day to thank you for what you did to Cook.

[LAUGHTER]

Though some may think her request distasteful, considering what we did do to Cook, I said, sure, before exchanging a warm embrace and a knowing smile. Our short hug was for the fact that on February 14, 1779, Captain James Cook was killed in Kealakekua, Hawaii.

While it is not my habit to celebrate the death of anyone, or to exchange hugs in commemoration of their demise, I often find myself in situations like the one described above. As a Hawaiian now living in Aotearoa, I have gotten used to this type of interaction. While I personally had nothing to do with ending Cook’s murderous voyages in the Pacific, people in Oceania do remember how and why his life came to an end and sometimes hold my ancestors in high regard for it.’

And I go on in that particular chapter to talk about-- and it gets a little bit graphic, and a little bit gruesome-- what happened after he died. And the way that his body was dismembered, his bones, his flesh was burnt, his bones were stripped, and then dispersed. And I use that, as graphic as that is, as violent and ‘savage’ as it’s been claimed to be-- I use that as a metaphor for how I think we need to think about Cook.

We have to be really strategic. And what I love about being able to sit here in conversation with Alice is that we get to decide where we want to put him in our histories. Do we want to centralise him? Does he need to be centralised? Or, can we fit him into these larger histories for very strategic reasons?

I sit here as a contemporary Hawaiian woman in 2021 very aware of my bias, very aware of how I strategically use history and bits of history to push a decolonial agenda. I’m up front about that. And as the amazing Oceanian scholar, Epeli Hau’ofa, once said, that’s what we’ve been doing all along. That’s what we all do all the time, when we think about our whakapapa we strategically distance those ancestors who may have been a bit shady.

[LAUGHTER]

But we bring them into the forefront when we need them. And so that’s what I do with Cook. I strip it down. I strip the story down so I can get to the bones of it. And that’s when I engage with Cook, as the, perhaps beginning of colonialism, as Alice pointed out earlier.

But it’s about being able to be strategic and say, hey, this is where he-- we have to talk about him. But how we talk about him, and how he’s remembered is what really matters. So I might turn it back over to Alice to talk a bit more about maybe how he’s been remembered by you, or how you’ve remembered him, or yeah.

Is colonialism inevitable?

Alice Te Punga Somerville: Yeah. Thank you. So, when you were talking the thing that came to mind was the person that I dedicated this book to who is in the audience. He’s going to hate me later, and be like, oh, Auntie Lala, why did you have to call on me?

But Matiu, my nephew back there, who is a star of a couple of these pieces, but also there are bigger reasons that I wanted to dedicate it to him. I should have said this later, because I’m going to cry, because Auntie Lala always cries. So emotional. It’s very embarrassing.

But for me, one of the things that struck me when you were talking was when you did ‘savages’ like that [in quotation marks]. And I think one of the things that’s always hard is on the one hand, we want to be very agentic, which is to say we want to be in control of the stories that we’re telling.

And we want to be a really important part of Indigenous, decolonial moves-- as the move to go we are going to pick, and choose, and be selective. And it’s important that we do that. But what’s unfortunate with this dude is like other people have also chosen ways to talk about him, right? And so as well as us thinking about Cook, and the context of the places that we come from, we also have to reckon with the ways that he’s been understood by other people, right?

And so number 12 in the book is called, ‘At a pie shop in Te Rapa on a rainy day.’ So each of the numbers in the book is a different way that you could-- that I’m saying you could potentially start another essay about Captain Cook.

So number 12 is, ‘At a pie shop in Te Rapa on a rainy day.’ ‘My 13-year-old nephew asks whether we were cannibals. The conversation moves fast, and soon we get to 14th February 1779 when Hawaiians killed Captain Cook. "Was he a bad person?" he asks. We sit back and talk big-picture. It’s not just who you are as a person, although it’s also that. It’s also the consequences of your actions. The flow-on effects. I am thinking, but do not say, Cook is the reason that you, my dear nephew, are the first one in a few generations in our whanau to speak Maori.’

Now that might be unfair, eh? ‘Cause like, poor Cook, man, he was taken out 1779. It’s not his fault that the New Zealand education system stole the language from our mouths.

Like, it’s drawing a really long bow. I think there were other bad guys in-between surely, but I think one of the important things about Cook is not just what did he start, but alongside all of these other forms of colonialism. That starting point in this country has been held up as this beautiful moment, this important historical evidence, but also prophecy of what this country could become-- which is British, really.

So, one of the things that we had spoken about beforehand is that Emalani and I both feel very strongly about the whenua that we come from. But we’ve actually both lived in each other’s countries as Emalani mentioned before.

And one of the things I hear a lot about Cook is couched in a sense of inevitability. Like, you can’t blame Cook, because this is how it would have turned out anyway. If it wasn’t Cook it would have been another guy, you know what I mean? Like, oh, well, how much blame can you place on this one person?

As if colonialism is an inevitability, right? And as my good friend Chad Allen often says, colonialism is not the only model for exchange, right? There are other ways that we can engage in cultural exchange and political diplomacy other than killing people and stealing their stuff. Like there are alternatives. Who knew, right?

So, in this context growing up in New Zealand it did feel like, even though my instinct was colonialism was bad there was a sense of inevitability. And I'm also going to mention a sense of like you should be grateful. At least it was those guys and not the other guys, because they would have been worse to you guys, or they were worse over the Dutch. But this competitive Olympic style who was oppressed the most, or whatever thing.

Sovereignty Restoration Day

Anyway. So, when I went to Hawaii one of the early times-- So I’ve lived in Hawaii a couple of times. And the first time I went there was as a PhD student.

I spent a year there. And I got there in early July. And July in Hawaii is when they celebrate the restoration of the monarchy that happened in 1843.

And it’s at a place called Thomas Park. And it’s named after Mr. Thomas, actually. I don’t think he’s Mr. Thomas. He was Colonel Sergeant Major something. Sorry about that. My notes are here.

And what he did was he restored the Hawaiian monarchy to the Hawaiians after a British person had come and claimed Hawaii for the British, right? And this happened in 1843. And I was like, oh, yeah. The first part of the story I understand.

Oh, yeah. That has to do with Paulette came over, and he was like, you people aren’t treating nice British people very well. So I’m going to extend British sovereignty over these islands.

But the bit that I found really hard to reconcile being Māori, from here, was that six months later another British guy came out. And went, guys, we can’t steal this country from these people. They’ve got their own kingdom. They’ve got their own monarchy. And so it’s called restoration day because he restored the kingdom.

So, what does that tell me. It tells me that there wasn’t necessarily an inevitability that British presence in this place required an overthrow of indigenous sovereignty-- because in this other place-- and yes, it's a complicated history, right?

But in this other place, at that moment, within three years of the signing of the Treaty here-- and when things were starting to get really yuck here, the British, the same people, were sitting in Hawaii restoring a kingdom. Yeah. An indigenous kingdom.

And as a Māori person I found that incredibly moving and enraging, right, because the story of inevitability was something I couldn't accept anymore. And that's something that I gained from being outside of Aotearoa, and also outside of the British empire, right?

Because Cook wasn’t the starting point of the thing that was to follow in Hawaii, because, of course, Hawaii is an American colony-- still a colony-- an American colony rather than a British one, right? And so that difference was a way that I came to know Cook in a new way and his legacy from having been on your whenua.

Doctrine of discover

Emalani Case: Oh, yeah. Lā Kūʻokoʻa. That’s what that day is called. And we still celebrate it as a Hawaiian Independence Day. So that was monumental.

And I just want to tell, talk about everything you’ve said about the so-called inevitability of colonialism. And something that I talk about with my students a lot it’s not only that colonialism was not inevitable, but also, it’s not finished.

There was no end point to Cook’s impacts in the Pacific. They’re still ongoing and Tuia 250, for me, as a Hawaiian. Then coming to Aotearoa and living here was symbolic of that. The fact that he’s still remembered, and talked about in particular ways, and celebrated as a hero, as an explorer, as an innocent discoverer is problematic.

So I remember when I first engaged with Tuia 250 I was, one, surprised, because we talk about his end in Hawaii. And I thought, whoa, why is he being celebrated in this particular way here?

And so, I engaged with activists like Tina Ngata, whose name I should raise, because she just did so much work around protesting and really pushing back against this narrative,that he was this innocent sailor, and this person on a scientific exploration.

And she brought to the forefront the doctrine of discovery, which, when I think about Cook, and I think about the stories that we tell about Cook, I think the doctrine needs to be something we’re all talking about. And I have to give so much thanks to people like her, who’s been talking about the doctrine, and bringing it to our awareness.

Cook sailed into the Pacific armed with this set of principles that enabled conquest. That basically said, if the people you encounter on your travels are not Christian and not white then they’re less than human. And he was armed with those things.

And when I go into classrooms, and I talk to people, I purposefully bring in the doctrine of discovery, because I think it’s something that should be in our vocabulary. And I often find, when I talk to young students, sometimes when you bring these kinds of things to the forefront-- and you disrupt that notion that, one, colonialism was inevitable, but also two that it’s finished-- and you start to disrupt the myths that have been told about Cook, then finally the students feel like they’re armed with something.

They’re like, now I can start to unpack and answer these huge why questions. Why is it that we were colonised? Why is it that Black and Brown bodies in the Pacific are still treated in a particular way? Not that the doctrine provides all of the answers, but it provides some answers. And when you’ve been living with the realities of these histories you need to be armed with some vocabulary and some answers.

And so, yeah. Just, sorry,I feel like I’ve rambled a bit, but just wanted to comment on-- oh, yes.

To wrap back around I feel like I’m spiralling, again. But to come back to that idea of colonialism being done. Something I noticed in the context of Tuia 250, and that I had to really come to terms with in living here, was that we have to disrupt that idea that it’s finished. That you can apologise for past injustices while tangata whenua are still living with the realities of those injustices now.

And so, I felt like my responsibility, as a Hawaiian, coming here was to, yes, bring perhaps gruesome stories to the forefront about him being killed. Not again, to say that that’s the solution to the problem. But to use it as a metaphor to say, we have to be in control of these narratives, be selective, strip it down to the bones so that you can see the realities of settler colonialism here in Aotearoa and in other parts of the Pacific, because that’s the only way we’re going to start to dismantle these colonial structures. Yeah.

Centres of knowledge

Alice Te Punga Somerville: So I want to pick up on this idea of one of the things that I love about what you were just talking about, mentioning Tina Ngata’s work. And I guess, the thinking that we wanted to put forward around the idea of there being many centres.

One of the things that I think is really important is the idea that there are many centres of knowledge about Cook-- historical knowledge, ancestral knowledge, but also new knowledge being created. And if we only look to the usual, or well-funded, or privileged sources or repositories of knowledge, such as academics, libraries, and so on-- we have work to do, but our work is incomplete if we’re not also gesturing towards other sites of knowledge production about Cook and his legacy.

And so, the really hard work that Tina Ngata, I think, specifically, and then people around her, did around the Tuia 250 that was activist work. But when we describe it as activist work I don’t want to suggest, oh, that’s just the grumpy staff. And then other people were having actual knowledge production, thoughtful thoughts about history, right? That actually, activism is a really important site of knowledge production.

The other thing we saw in 2019 was a number of sites and moments where artists were speaking up, and creating knowledge, and trying to challenge existing knowledge about Cook and his legacy. So, one of the things that I think is important is that even as we said, front and center, the particular kinds of centres that we occupy is Indigenous academics, these centres only make sense in the context of the knowledge being produced, and all of these other centres, as well.

And then, I guess, to jump off another thing that you mentioned about legacy. One of the things that I love about Emalani’s work is that there are a number of us who are interested in saying, does the thinking about indigenous things have to only focus on the place that those indigenous people are from, right?

So essentially, is indigeneity only about specific places, or is it possible that going deeper takes you wider? And so I love the way the Emalani is interested in saying, actually, when we think about indigeneity what we find is networks. What we find is connections, right?

And there are a number of ways in which I think that when we have a look at any one indigenous site or any one site of colonialism, we want to understand that it can potentially direct our gaze to other connections, as long as we take the time to remove our nation-state glasses before we start looking. Because we want to pretend like Captain Cook got on a boat and sailed to New Zealand.

Yeah.

And we also sometimes say, oh, yes, he landed in Gisborne, which is very interesting because Gisborne didn’t exist, at the time. So right? So, this notion that he left England to come to New Zealand.

When I taught Indigenous studies in Australia, Australian students were convinced that he left England to sail to Australia. So right? And so, once we take our nation-state goggles off we can actually see a whole set of networks. We can understand colonialism in some new ways, but we can also understand indigenous networks in new ways.

Number 231: In Batavia

So, I thought I’d read number 231, ‘In Batavia.’ ‘Tupaia, who travelled with Cook for several months, died in Batavia after succumbing to disease. Cook stopped in the Dutch colonial city, where present-day Jakarta now stands, to repair his ship and prepare for the long journey to London in 1770.

Batavia had been built by the Dutch on the site of Jayakarta, which was itself the renamed city of Sunda Kelapa. Of course, all these names reflected local and imperial tugs of war over centuries European countries have long hungered for the spices and other edibles that grow in present-day Indonesia.

Present-day Indonesia, in turn, hungers for the minerals and less densely populated landscape of West Papua, a place that called Irian Jaya and, more recently, Papua Barat. Ever since the sham Act of Free Choice in 1969--’

I’d like us to note the exact 200th anniversary of Cook's arrival here. ‘Indonesia claims this area as a province over which it has territorial authority. The violent as well as subtle genocide of West Papuan indigenous people is perhaps the most perverse and explicit example of active colonialism in the Pacific region at present.’ Not that it’s a competition.

‘Batavia/Jakarta thus continues to be a site of Pacific death. Several Melanesian political leaders, along with a dense and ever-growing network of activists, academics, creatives, politicians and others stand in solidarity with the various #FreeWestPapua independence movements, and the cry of Wansolwara and Papua Merdeka both inspires and affirms the resurgence of complex regional connections and to which Cook first sailed in 1769.’

So if we want to think about Cook from the position of a national project we can do that job. But it’s possible to enable a tracing of Cook's journeys and connections to enable a reconnection, a broader view, a wider network, maybe even a re-understanding of the--

We often talk about Cook, it’s like he spent the whole time either writing in a diary in his ship, or on the beach. It turns out when you’re heading back to London from Indonesia you have to hang out for a long time to get your ship ready, right?

So, we can understand more about Cook, I think, when we’re not just trying to prove what he does or doesn’t mean to a particular nation-state as a first of something. But we can also understand more about indigenous connections, both historical and contemporary.

Opportunities for connections and solidarities

Emalani Case: Yeah. Something I want to pick up on, in terms of Indigenous connections and networks, are also some of the contemporary ruptures and disconnections.

So, in one of my Pacific studies courses we talk about-- we’re talking about Cook all the time. But in one of them, I talk about Cook’s second voyage into the Pacific.

And when he came into the Pacific for the second time he had onboard Johann Forster, a Scottish naturalist, who wrote, who did write in his diary, and wrote his observations. And then published a book called Observations Made During a Voyage Around the World. And in that book there is a chapter that talks about Islanders and human variation in the South Seas.

So, he essentially creates this gradation of Pacific peoples. And he places some higher and some lower. Those that were closer to whiteness were higher-- still inferior but higher. So, the Tahitian was just regarded as the ultimate Pacific person. And the Melanesians are down on the other side-- people from Vanuatu, for example, degraded because of the colour of their skin.

And so, when I think about our opportunities for connections and solidarities today, I think about the necessity to grapple with those kinds of histories that have then been-- or then impacted the way we see each other today.

In my Pacific Studies 101 class, I often ask my students, I say, when I talk about Tahiti, what do you think? And they’re like, ‘ooh, beautiful, exotic, romantic’. Then I say what about Papua New Guinea? And then they’ll go, ‘ooh’, but in a completely different way. And then those words like cannibals and savages will come up. And I go, where does that come from?

These ideas have been existing in the Western imagination of the Pacific for so long that we’ve internalised them. And when we internalise them to the point that it impacts the way we see each other as indigenous people from the Pacific, then that’s what we have to start to really look at so that we can disrupt that.

And so, I think in exploring the histories of Captain Cook, and getting back to those big why questions again, why is it that we look at Black Pacific people in a particular way, and treat them in a particular way, when we understand those histories, and really wrestle with them? Then there’s that opportunity for those connections and those networks.

One other thing, I just wanted to pick up on that you talked about earlier was creatives, and artists, and people really talking about Captain Cook in ways that maybe aren’t published in an academic article or an academic book. But I really want to acknowledge your book, because in 2019 it was originally published as an essay, and I assigned it as a required reading for my students in my PASI 301 class.

And they loved it. And of course, they loved it, because it’s written beautifully, and it’s got these humorous bits. And it’s also very well-researched. But the other reason why they really loved it is they were like ‘this is an academic article’, because it doesn’t follow the so-called standard format.

It is creative. And they were like, wow, so we can write stuff like this. That’s amazing. So, I just wanted to acknowledge your work and the impact it’s had on our students, and the way that, I think, as indigenous academics even while we publish these academic pieces of work we’re also trying to push back at that notion and bring in the work of other artists and activists who inform what we do. So yeah.

250 is a lot

Alice Te Punga Somerville: Thank you. Yes. It was very creative, as I mentioned earlier.

250 is a big number. And I know that sounds like a really stupid thing to say, but I nearly didn’t do that essay that I was asked to write. They’re like, oh, could you write an essay for the Journal of New Zealand History. So like nation-state focus already.

And although there’s a lot of work in that journal that certainly is challenging and trying to extend our sense of what New Zealanders-- And they were like, oh, it's going to be a commemoration, and published in 2019. And I was like, oh, man, this is such a trip for an indigenous scholar to be like, can you be the Māori that writes the piece about Captain Cook?

And a couple of funny things happened. One was, I was like, ‘oh, hell, no. I’m not going to do it’. And then I ended up-- I was actually in the shower one day composing my email of how I would nicely say, I know I said yes, but now I'm going to say no.

And then this idea of counting came to mind, which is funny, because it was actually a terrible idea. So, I would only recommend doing this on like a tenth anniversary of something--

[LAUGHTER]

--because 250 is a lot. And I know that sounds like a very simple thing to say. But when you set yourself a task of writing 250 things when you have a small child, and a job, and you’re Associate Dean, and there’s just a lot. And then you’re like, oh, my God, I'm only up to 123.

[LAUGHTER]

Right? But I learned a lot from that, right? It’s been a long time. There have been a lot of stories. It wasn’t hard to find 250, because there aren’t 250. It’s because there are 2,525 that like it could go on. How do you even choose which ones you’re going to select? And how do you do the emotional work of connecting with this range of stories that many of which are not that emotionally cool?

But I, as a trained literary scholar, and someone really committed to literary studies and the potential for engaging with creative work-- in order to do things that are, yes, creative, but are doing these other kinds of jobs-- one of the things that I enjoyed doing was finding writing by other, indigenous poets, actually, about Cook.

And there were some really great ones. Brandy Nalani McDougall, of course, is like I’m going to fail to find it. So, I have a little flick through. And can you--

[INAUDIBLE]

Is it all right? Thank you. It’s in the first half.

[LAUGHTER]

Welcome to the inside of my head for a year. Yeah.

[LAUGHTER]

“Voice Carried My Family”

Emalani Case: Thank you. So and one of the other poets, of course, the Māori poet who’s thought a lot about Cook is Robert Sullivan, the Ngai Tahu, Ngāpuhi poet, who’s incredible.

And of course, he published Captain Cook in the Underworld, a very important text for grappling with Cook, where he imagines Cook as Maui, after Cook’s demise going into the underworld, and then duking it out with Māoris. It’s a fabulous, amazing thing.

But then it seems like Cook did that thing for Robert that he does for a lot of people, that then, I guess, Robert couldn’t get him out of his head, or something. And so, in this collection of his, Voice Carried My Family, which I think is significant that he wrote--

Once he lived in Hawaii, actually, he had this newly regional view of thinking about Cook, and his legacy, and what it was to think about being Maori in the context of regional networks. So, he has a whole section for the great ocean of Kiwa, where he’s thinking about the impact of Cook, and where he’s thinking about Māori who travelled with Cook who hopped on the waka.

And you saw from the early film that they were-- just as Cook was going around collecting Tahitians and Raiatians. He also collected Maori on the way in different points. And but he actually, in the middle of this section of the book he has a poem called 14 Pearl Harbour. It turns out Robert’s into numbering things, as well.

[LAUGHTER]

Maybe some Māori thing, I don’t know. Pearl Harbour. And so what I love about the poem-- I’m going to read the poem, and I’ll tell you one of the things I love about it.

It says, ‘I meant this to be a poem about Aotearoa so forgive me. The Americans have lined their guns in front of the palace, suspended the constitution, arrested the Queen. Not Victoria. Nor Elizabeth. Lili’uokalani. Inheritor of the kingdom that rose when Lono came, bearer of the world’s creation story, the Kumalipu, recited when Kuki/Cook came. But now when I think of the Congress that betrayed her faith I think of Pearl Harbour on the silver screen, wonder at the power of America to make losses seem like victories. What power to reach back into the throat of history and make her words gurgle sweetly.’

So, there’s a lot to love about that poem. And if you were in my class, you’d be lucky enough so we could do some PowerPoint presentations. We could really go there. We could do group work. It’d be amazing.

But I’m just going to jump in, and say, one of the things I love about the poem is the opening. I mean there's to be a poem about Aotearoa, so forgive me, because I think it then continues to be, of course, a poem about Aotearoa. But it’s a poem about Aotearoa which is written from Hawaii, right?

And so that’s not saying, thanks, Hawaiians, for your like stink colonial legacy. It helped me think about who I am, right? It’s not like an exploitative or appropriated poem. I think he's paying homage. He’s really thinking about what it is to be Māori on Hawaiian land. But he also can’t help but think, of course, about the way that New Zealand also has this power to reach back into the throat of history, and make her words gurgle sweetly.

"On Cooking Captain Cook"

Emalani Case: Something I-- just did pick up on what you said about Robert’s work, is that I find there’s so much to learn in the crossing. I’m very fortunate, as a Hawaiian, to be living here. And even when I’m writing about living here, I’m writing about home. And I’m understanding home in a different way.

Different colonial contexts, of course, but there’s so much similarity. There’s so much that I can recognise in the pain, in the history. And so, yeah. I love that poem. And I did find--

You did have just a short line from Brandy’s poem. But Brandy Nalani McDougall, if you don’t know her work, she’s another amazing poet. And she has a poem that’s called, "On Cooking Captain Cook." And gosh--

[LAUGHTER]

We just own that, I guess. And it starts, ‘If you ask the blonde-haired concierge at the Grand Kihei, he will tell you that we ate him whole.’

The poem goes on. That’ the only line she’s got in here. But yeah. So that’s another poet engaging with Cook and really owning that narrative in a particular way.

What does it mean to be in this place?

Alice Te Punga Somerville I just want to-- OK. Sorry. I know that you want us to stop. I’m going I say one last thing really quickly about why I was really excited to have this conversation with Emalani, because very often, I think, in New Zealand we think that the conversation about Cook should probably have a Pākehā person on the stage.

And I get that, because we’re trying to grapple with what it is to be New Zealand, right? Like, probably everyone here, on some level, is interested in grappling with the question of what does it mean to be in this place? And so of course, we need to have someone from the dominant, right, community in this place.

I’m not saying you think it. I’m saying like. You can see how it becomes the logic. Let’s have a Māori and a Pākehā talk about the legacy of Cook, right? This is what it means for Pākehā. This is what it means for Māori. Now I am not in the least interested in the conversation about undermining the Treaty, by saying, we’re not bicultural, we’re multicultural. Because look, Emalani is here, and she’s neither Māori or Pākehā.

But what I hope, or what I’ll say what I have enjoyed immensely about our conversation has been the opportunity-- and I hope for some of you this has been an opportunity that you’ve seen, too, the opportunity to have different conversations about Cook. But maybe, also, about New Zealand when we’re seeking centres, whether they’re centres of knowledge production, whether they’re centres of places to start the story. But this idea of seeking constantly many, many centres, right?

That enables us, ironically, happily, I don’t know, to actually also think in new ways about New Zealand. So we still do the same job, but. We get to do it in a really different way and I think it's when you start thinking about centres that all have a different connection with one another, and we're aware that some centres get more access to the microphone than others, that some centres are supported by school curricula, by mainstream media, by all these things, right?

Then we start to understand that if we have a critique of the power imbalance between the centres and a critique of the linearity of history that forces us to want to pick Cook to either be the first or to be a continuation in a nation of immigrants, which undermines indigenous claims to indigeneity, right? Then we have an opportunity to have some new conversations.

Karakia

Tanja Schubert-McArthur And if you’d like to stand up and join in

karakia
Kia tau ki a tātou katoa
Te atawhai o tō tātou Ariki, a Ihu Karaiti
Me te aroha o te Atua
Me te whiwhingatahitanga
Ki te wairua tapu
Ake, ake, ake
Amine

Alice Te Punga Somerville Awesome.

Questions

Because I’m aware of what happens when people don’t speak into microphones-- I’m not having a go at you here. That people who might be hearing impaired, or something, sometimes don’t hear. I hope you don’t mind if I repeat what you said. But it might sound-- I’m not doing that just to be like I’d like to say that we were great.

[LAUGHTER]

I’m just clarifying. Oh, so what you said was we were great.

[LAUGHTER]

I just wanted to make sure everyone heard that, but I just--

[INAUDIBLE]

[LAUGHTER]

I just wanted to say that the comment was suggesting it would be good for the conversation to continue but that there was an effective question. So I guess, my response would be, thank you. And perhaps if there was a question that could cook our conversation.

As you can see Emalani and I probably feel like settled in here. We feel like we could probably keep going till Thursday, next week, or something. So maybe if anyone wants to redirect us in a new way, or ask a question, or challenge us, that would be great.

Question: Thoughts about Canada

Question: Hi. Coming from Canada, it’s really interesting listening to this, because there are so many parallels with the way that Indigenous people have been treated there. And I’ve been here 21 years now, and it always amazes me how New Zealand seems to uphold Canada as such a good example of treating Indigenous people.

Look what they’ve done they’ve got an assembly of First Nations there. They’ve got reservations. They’ve got free university. And yet it’s horrible there. And so, I just wondered if you had made any inquiry into that situation there. And if you had any comment about it.

Alice Te Punga Somerville: So, I want you to answer first, because I want to say something very practical first to the person with the baby at the back. Please don’t feel you need to keep your baby quiet. I have a three-year-old here who regularly adds joyous, happy--

Emalani Case: We love the giggles, yes.

Alice Te Punga Somerville:--volume. So please, we are very comfortable with the sound of children. So don't feel that you need to keep the baby quiet at all.

Emalani Case: I was actually thinking as you were speaking that sometimes in Hawaii there's a tendency to look at New Zealand, and go, they’ve got things figured out there. And there’s so much danger in that.

One, because then we start to play this, like Alice brought up earlier, this oppression Olympics game. We’re more oppressed than them. But also, then we dismiss the realities of the Indigenous people, and the fact that things are not OK. They’re different.

And I think when we dig into the specificities of each location then we can actually start to learn more. And then when we dig into those specificities, then we find ways to collaborate and to forge solidarities between the indigenous peoples.

But yeah. I’m probably not as familiar with the Canadian context. But I did notice that there is that tendency to always look afar, and go, well, they’ve got things figured out. And then what then comes about is this myth of innocence.

This myth that, oh, it wasn’t-- in 2014, John Key said, oh, New Zealand compared to other places was settled quite peacefully, completely ignoring the history of the land wars and all the other atrocities. And so there’s this myth. In the United States it’s another one that propagates this myth of innocence. And when we start to do that comparison, then we can start to perpetuate that myth as well, which is really dangerous. So that’s what I was thinking about when you were speaking.

Alice Te Punga Somerville I think, I agree, totally. And I think one of the things that I have found in my bouncing between Oceania and the North American continent is how many connections there are. And for example, with the Cook story, he went there, too.

And so often what we’ve ended up doing, contemporarily, as we end up isolating like, oh, that’s a particular colonial context, and this is another colonial context-- and there is a , I have to say trippy is the only word for it. Strange little pantomime that was written.

And I don’t want to tell you any lies. But I think it was like 1780-ish maybe called Omai, or A Voyage Around the World, or words to that effect. And it’s this pantomime that was written, because Omai, of course, Tupaia play never made it to London, because he died in Batavia, right?

So the first Polynesian person to make it back, or the first Pacific person in effect to make it back to London was Omai, also known as Mai. And he was also from what’s currently French-occupied Polynesia.

And he went back, and he got there with Cook after a second voyage. So they landed about 1775, and he spent a couple of years there. And he was like hot stuff.

Like, people would like trot around-- There’s actually an important portrait of him in the National Portrait Gallery in the UK. And the National Portrait Gallery staff describe him as quote ‘Britain’s first Black superstar’.

So like they’d be like, ooh. And it’s really cute. You can read diaries of society ladies of that time. They were like, oh, Omai came to dinner. He’s so hot. That’s a paraphrase.

[LAUGHTER]

It’s not exactly a direct quote. But you can see the general, right? Anyway. So he was such a superstar.

And it’s hard to imagine now, because currently, we don’t think about the possibility that the Pacific had a really high place in the thinking about empire and the world from the UK. Because usually when you’re in the UK now, and they do make empire, they’re like oh, yes, Africa, Southeast Asia, India, right, South Asia, the Americas. And those are also empire, but the Pacific has dropped out, but back then, it had a really high profile.

So there was this like crazy pantomime where there was literally a parade of all of these people from the places that Cook had visited. And this is shown in London at Coventry Garden, maybe. And so they have all of these places.

And so, when I was a PhD student, I was like, I’ve never heard about this pantomime. So I start reading it, and I’m going through it. And I’m like, trekking all these places.

And some of them are very familiar. Of course, there’s Hawaiians, there’s-- right? There’s all these people from Pacific places. And then there’s these people who are Indigenous to currently Canada. And I’m like, what the hell? They’re like invading our story. Cook is our guy--

[LAUGHTER]

Like, he came to the Pacific, right? But from the UK, at that point, Cook’s Pacific, and this was how it was understood, Cook’s Pacific included the West Coast of Canada. So there’s an opportunity, again, for us to rethink about and reimagine those connections, right? And they’re actually very specific things.

I don’t know how many of you saw the Sam Neil documentary about Cook, though, like the series. But he actually traced it. And I wonder, I think that challenged nicely this idea that Cook got in a boat to come to the Pacific. Because he did, but the idea of the Pacific, at that point, of course, included indigenous communities, including in present-day Canada.

I guess, the only other thing that I would absolutely echo is the idea of the desire to set up-- they’re more colonised, they’ve had a worse time, they’ve had a better time. This is always an outsider narrative which is used to reinforce the undermining of indigenous rights-- whether it’s worse over there, so you people should be grateful, right?

Or, they had worse colonisers than you guys. I mean, imagine if the French, I mean if the French had taken over New Zealand we would still be a colony. It’s like, oh, OK. Thank you.

I’m so glad you stole my language now when you put it like that. I’m so glad this library is built on our stolen land. When you put it like that, I mean, we could have been speaking French, right?

[LAUGHTER]

So it’s ridiculous. But it’s a really important logic which is used to undermine Indigenous claims of connection to place, right? And indigenous sovereignty. So bringing up these things I think is really important. And even though you see Canada might feel like it's a different conversation, it’s the same conversation. And I will say, for me, personally, this is one of the things that I really enjoy about Indigenous studies as a discipline, because we are actually coming together, and getting to swap notes, and learn from one another.

And so, which is a segue way to number 241.

[LAUGHTER]

It’s like I planned this. 241, With a View from the Shore. ‘In 1990, Jose Barreiro edited a special issue of Northeast Indian quarterly. It’s called View from the Shore: American Indian Perspectives on the Quincentenary. The volume is so rich and full of thinking from Indigenous scholars of the Americas. We can learn a lot about Cook, and think more about how we think about him, when we listen in on the conversation people in that hemisphere have been having about Columbus for a while now.’

Emalani Case Any other burning questions?

Question: Summary of Restoration Day

Question: Yeah. I just wanted to know a little bit. I’m not very familiar at all with the history of Hawaii. But you mentioned the Restoration Day in 1843, where the British gave them back their monarchy. But of course, now they're under American rule. Can you just give us a little summary of what went on?

Emalani Case: Yeah. [LAUGHS] So--

Alice Te Punga Somerville: You’ve got your PowerPoint?

Emalani Case: Yeah.

[LAUGHTER]

The history of Hawaii in a few minutes. No. So yes, we were eventually taken over by America. well, our monarchy was restored, 1843. 1893, jumping way ahead, we still had a monarchy, and our last ruling monarch, Qeen Lili’uokalani, who was brought up in Robert Sullivan’s poem, was overthrown by a group of wealthy businessmen, American businessmen, who were the descendants of missionaries who basically wanted land and power.

So, they overthrew her, and then, in 1898, we were illegally annexed. And it’s been proven, the United States actually issued an apology in 1993-- Here’s what getting us back to how apologies really don’t mean a whole lot.

They apologised saying, yeah, it was unlawful the way we took you over. It wasn’t actually legit. We didn’t have enough votes in Congress to actually do it, but we did it anyway. We’re sorry, but everything will stay the same.

So, I’ve jumped way ahead from annexation, illegal annexation in 1898, to Apology Bill in 1993, but we’ve been under-- there are many of us who say rather than being an official state of the United States we are under prolonged military occupation. Hawaii’s actually one of the most heavily militarised places in the Pacific, in addition to places like Guahan, or Guam, with huge American military outposts.

So yeah. There’s a current and ongoing effort for sovereignty. And what I love about Alice bringing up the story about the restoration of our kingdom in 1843 is that people often think, oh, sovereignty, that’s ridiculous. That’ll never happen.

But we maintain this-- I often talk about the concept of radical hope. We maintain this radical sense of hope that it happened before, and it could happen again.

Maybe not in my lifetime, maybe not in my children’s lifetime, but who knows. It’s not an inevitable end to our story. Yeah. Thanks for that question.

Alice Te Punga Somerville: Which brings me, to the word irredentist.

[LAUGHTER]

I’m not that interested in teeth.

[LAUGHTER]

It turns out, but an irredentist, just so you know, this is one of the tombs that I like to teach my first year students to help them understand the importance of going to a dictionary when you bump into a word you don’t know. Because I bumped into this word when I was a PhD student, in an article.

An irredentist is someone who advocates the return of land, which is currently under the control of a foreign power. Handy word.

[LAUGHTER]

Emalani Case: The power of vocabulary and having those on hand.

Question: Concerns and hopes around NZ history curriculum development

Question: Oh, shoot. It’s loud. Pardon me. My name’s Leah. I had a question talking about thinking about radical hope. And it just, in general, the concerns that you've expressed around Cook, and how we remember Cook, and the colonial figures of our history, in general.

I wondered what your greatest concerns, and perhaps if you have any hopes around the 2022 New Zealand history curriculum development or reset, I suppose? Yes.

Emalani Case: You take that one first.

[LAUGHTER]

Alice Te Punga Somerville: Man, I thought the history of Hawaii in one answer was hardcore [Laughter] . And itwas.You did it beautifully.

I mean, I think, on one level, it has to be a step in the right direction, right? Like, what we have been teaching at school doesn’t work. And I can tell you that, because I spent most of my life-- the people that I spend more time in my life with, except from my husband and child, than anyone else, is 18, 19, 20-year-olds who have come through the New Zealand education system and end up in university. And they do not know how to make sense of the place where they live, right?

That is not true for all of them. I teach at the University of Waikato a reasonable proportion of our students come through the Kura system. The curriculum there is already doing some different stuff around this.

But for a lot of students-- and I see this as someone who doesn’t teach in history, so it doesn’t-- like, as you guys know from the way I was like, maybe it was 1770 blah. Like, I’m not as concerned about being able to spout out a timeline or whatever.

But what I’m concerned about is students not knowing how to engage critically with history. And so, if we just go, well, it used to be that timeline, and now it’s that one-- it used to be this list of like names and faces that you need to like match up which person is which person--

If it’s just like additive, or the same old, then we’ve done something, but it actually hasn’t changed anything. Because 20 years from now, we’ll realise that that, too, was an inadequate story, even though, this week, we might think that we're fabulous for putting that together.

So for me, I think my greatest hope is that we will provide opportunities for students in the schooling system to learn how to engage critically with history, and with the questions of history. So as we find out new things they’re not like, oh, well, I-- Well, actually, when I was at school I learned this other thing. But they’re interested in grappling.

One of the other hopes that I have, and this is the-- I think the privilege of being an educator in New Zealand is that I think the students that I engage with across a wide range of student communities, in general, are not just confused about where they are, grappling with where they are, but actually curious in a hopeful way themselves for-- like, it must be possible to understand this place.

So, they come with questions. And I think what I want is for these questions to not feel rhetorical, right? But for these to be critical questions that there’s actual engagement.

So, I don’t think it’s helpful if we suddenly have an extra additional three chapters to the book about New Zealand history, right? I would love there to be more New Zealand history that says, what’s the histories we can tell of this place when we’re not focused only on making an argument for the nation-state, right?

Obviously, because I’m interested in the cross- trans- indigenous global, regional whatever. That’s my thing. Someone else will have another thing.

But my hope is that we don’t get so hung up on content. What we actually need is really good, enough of a foundation in the content to be able to learn how to ask good critical questions. The Captain Cook, we may still be talking about once my three-year-old there is, I don’t know, my age.

Captain Cook may still be someone we’re talking about. It maybe someone else. I just hope that she has the skills to ask the questions and the confidence. And the confidence to ask questions beyond what you hear at your own dinner table, even if those things are good. Mom and dad are here. I’ve learned very good things at my own dinner table, right?

[LAUGHTER]

Yeah. But I think, for me, that’s the hope.

Emalani Case: I tautoko all of that, and I’d also say, my hope is that students will see history not as something that they learn about that’s in the past, but history as being part of their lives. History is something that they can create in the present.

I think it was Greg Denning who said something like: History is always made contemporary in our working with it, in our presentation of it in the present. History is always made new.

So I want students to not see-- oftentimes, I spend most of my time with groups of students around the same age. And when I say history, they’re like, oh, my God, it’s so boring.

But then when you show them how history impacts them now, when I teach them about things like the doctrine, I hope the doctrine makes it into the curriculum. That would be a hope. I hope we start talking about real things.

And when you start to do that with students, and when they’re able to, again, to go back to those big why questions, when they start to have the language to unpack these big why questions, then they’re empowered. And some liberation happens, as well. I think history, too, is an opportunity to see connections.

Derek Chauvin was just convicted today for the murder of George Floyd, right? And that is connected to the racism that we see here in the Pacific. That is connected to systems of colonialism.

And when we start to make those connections obvious to students, and empower them, and enable them to start making those connections themselves, then history is really empowering. So, like Alice said, I hope it’s not just a let’s insert this section here, but let's change the way we view history so that our students don’t have to walk into our classrooms anymore going, ‘why did I not learn about this before? And whoa, I thought history was super boring’, but actually, it’s not. It’s really, really important, [LAUGHS] because I’m part of it.

And I and our students have the opportunity to create history in the present. That’s our responsibility. So those are my big hopes. [LAUGHS] It may not happen in 2022, but we can still dream.

Alice Te Punga Somerville: OK. While you were talking I thought of two other things that I want to add.

Yeah, go ahead.

[LAUGHS]

Emalani Case: Yeah, of course.

Alice Te Punga Somerville: So, I know I just said that I don't think the focus should be on content, but I think this is a form of critical questioning maybe but also content. What I really, really hope is that students understand the history of the soil on which they stand, right?

It’s not helpful to grow up in Wellington, and know heaps of stuff about what happens at Waitangi, and you don’t even know the name of mana whenua here, why we have--

One of the things I wrote about in the book was a comment on how many people claim they love Wellington, and they have no idea why Taranaki Street is called Taranaki Street. And if you don't understand that, right?

I had a friend once, who said, can you imagine going to visit a friend who’d been living in Japan for 40 years, and then you went to visit them. And then you were like, oh, can you tell me about this thing. And they were like, yeah. I don’t know. You’d be like, but you've been living here for 40 years. How do you not know that, right?

So, specificity, I want specificity to be part of this, but also, beyond the borders of North, South, and Chatham Islands, because one of the things and just when you were saying about students coming in, and saying, why did I not know this? We do not currently talk about the history of New Zealand’s colonial role and ongoing role in the Pacific.

And in particular, every single person coming through school in New Zealand should understand, should know the terminology of the New Zealand realm. They should know which countries are still politically affiliated to New Zealand through the realm mechanism, right?

We should not continue to have students who go, oh, is that why there’s so many Samoans here, right? It’s like, yes. Because they were our colony, and then we wanted cheap labour, right?

And so, what I would like, and I guess, this is, again, the form of New Zealand history, which is not about constantly focusing on the established or conventional borders of the state-- is more specificity. And then also understanding what Damon Salesa would refer to as New Zealand’s Pacific empire.

Emalani Case: I just want to add that it's not just for our students to understand the importance of the New Zealand realm and to have that terminology. But our Pacific studies staff at Vic we sometimes do trainings for DIA. And we talk about the New Zealand realm.

We talk about understanding New Zealand as a colonial power that then went out into other islands in the Pacific. And that being the reason why there are so many Pacific peoples here. And it’s amazing how so many of the employees at the end of our training will go, I thought we were just trying to be nice--

[LAUGHTER]

And that’s why we give them special preferences and special quotas to migrate. And when you give them that history. Again, then they go, actually, well, we have obligations to these people. That’s why there are so many Samoans here, and Tongans, and Cook Islands Māori. It’s that colonial empire and that colonial relationship.

Alice Te Punga Somerville: So bouncing further,off the idea that it’s not just students. I know a family, a Pākehā family, where the kids are being exposed to and really connecting with ways of thinking about what it is to be in this place that things like pronouncing Māori names nicely, understanding a little bit of history, and so on. And they are being exposed to this at school, at the moment. And they are having a terrible time in the relationship with a parent who-- so this is just one specific family.

But what one of the risks, I know it's not a hope, but anyone can say it anyway. One of the risks, I think, is that we end up providing opportunities for engaging with these new ideas, which they are for some students-- for all students it will be a new way of thinking about this place that we don't likego, OK, off you go. And then they go home, and it becomes an unsafe space for them, and challenges the relationships they have with family, and so on.

So what I hope is that this doesn’t end up being a thing that happens at school, and the rest of the national conversation doesn’t shift. Because otherwise, we’re setting up 15-year-olds, 16-year-olds, 17-year-olds to have really difficult, emotional relationships with the stakes of knowing this stuff. And when you’re teaching in Indigenous studies and Pacific studies you become very aware of the emotional work, the emotional labour that’s involved in learning and unlearning around this stuff.

And I just hope we don’t set up a bunch of 13 to 17-year-olds. It’s already hard enough, emotionally, to be 13 to 17, without having to take on the impact of Captain Cook around your dinner table.

Question: How did living off your whenua affect your connection with your culture?

Question: Hello. Oh, that works. Mula, my name is Salota. I have a question. Sorry. I’m reading from my phone. If you guys could talk a little bit more about not living on your whenua, or when you were and how that affected your connection to like the Moana, at large, but also reframing the ideas of like nation-state, and how you grappled with that, both like academically, but perhaps more importantly, like how your own personal feelings around that reframing was? Hi, Emalani.

[LAUGHS]

Alice Te Punga Somerville: Cool question. Go.

Yeah.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

Emalani Case: Hi, Salote. One of our awesome students from-- Wow, Salote, you were in my class. Yeah. Ages ago. When I was a teaching fellow before I ever became a lecturer at Vic. And I was very honoured to have Salote in one of my courses.

But yeah. That’s an excellent question. And it’s something I think about all the time. I remember living here, as a student, and then coming back as a lecturer, and really having to ask myself, I identify as an indigenous woman. That’s how I understand myself and experience myself in the world.

But I had to ask what that means when I’m not living on the land that I’m indigenous to. And what kind of obligations come with that. And so I’m still working through that. It’s something that I think about all the time.

But something that I actually talk about in my book, and the chapter where I talk about Captain Cook, talks about me dealing with my own positionality, what kinds of critical questions I’ve had to ask of myself in living here. And I think what living here has afforded me to do and has gifted me is the ability to ask these deeper questions about relation, about indigeneity, and about responsibility.

In 2019, I gave a talk at the NAISA, Native American and Indigenous Studies Conference that was in Waikato. And I remember I gave a talk about Captain Cook. My gosh, I’ve been talking about him for a few years now.

But I remember a scholar in the audience asked me afterwards, why didn’t you talk more about whakapapa? Because I was trying to figure out, am I a settler, what am I? Trying to figure out what to call myself here.

And he was like, oh, why don’t you talk about whakapapa. And I said, one of the things that I try to do is I want to acknowledge our genealogical connections that go beyond any nation-states, that go beyond our colonial distinctions. I acknowledge those, but I try not to lean on them too much to make me feel too comfortable.

Because sometimes, I hear people say things like, well, I’m indigenous to the region. But that is not the same thing as being indigenous to this place. And so it keeps me a little bit on edge, but I like that, because it keeps me in check.

I’m like Emalani, what is your place? And I’m not always successful, and I mess up sometimes, but I think asking the question helps me to be a more meaningful, hopefully meaningful solidarity with the people whose land I’m on. So yeah. Thank you, Salote.

Alice Te Punga Somerville: It is a really good question. I think a lot of the things I’m going to say is just going to be like the Māori version of what Emalani said. So I’ll try not to just repeat that.

[LAUGHTER]

But I would say that actually one of the things Māori, I think, don’t do well is diaspora. We don’t do diaspora well, partly because we keep talking in New Zealand as if we’re all here, even though 20% of us aren’t, right?

And so, one of the things that means is then when we go somewhere else we actually don’t connect with each other and the way that other communities do who are used to thinking about themselves as being diasporic. So, and by diaspora, I mean people who live outside their home, and don’t have necessarily an intention to move back. But for home, that home place is an important part of how they understand who they are. So just so I’m not using words that people are like, what the hell is she going on about?

So, I’m really interested in thinking about diaspora. I’ve got a couple of fabulous students. I’ve got a student just handed a master’s thesis looking at Māori on the Gold Coast. I’ve got a PhD student looking at Māori America. I’ve written a lot about being Māori outside.

And for me, I have found some really useful thinking stuff, which is actually also connected to the heart stuff, has come out of Settler colonial studies. And in particular, the work in Hawaii that we often think of now all sort of shorthand as Asian settler colonial studies.

So, settler colonial studies is the area of the academic conversation which is interested in talking about colonialism in places where rather than just colonialism being about taking stuff, it’s also been about the mass migration of people to the point that Indigenous people are now the minority, right? And one of the really important contributions of Settler colonial studies, and of one particular scholar, Patrick Wolfe, is the concept that colonialism is a structure not an event, right?

And this is really important, I think, for thinking about Cook, for example, too, right. It’s not like, oh, that was the one moment. Oh, that guy, Cook.

Yeah. Jumped out at Uawa Tolaga Bay 1769. That was colonialism. But colonialism is a structure.

Now once we understand colonialism as a structure rather than event, whether or not your people were there when that event went down, or whether or not your people are related by coming from the same place from the people who were there when that event went down, you are still complicit with as long as you benefit from the colonial structure, right? And that was really useful to me. It’s hard when you’re Māori, and you’re used to always thinking about yourself as being indigenous, to realise when you get somewhere else you are complicit with the undermining of indigenous sovereignty, because you’re benefiting from, right, colonialism, right, from the structure of colonialism in that place.

And I think the desirable thing, the thing that would be really fun, would be to be like, oh, but we’re all indigenous.

[LAUGHTER]

So you don’t mean us. Like, it’s the other people were complicit with colonialism. But I’m like a nice Māori person, and I was invited by these nice Indigenous people from here. So it’s my get out of jail free card. But actually, I think the relationship only works if you go through the hard bit and you, on some level, commit to staying in that hard bit, right?

I learned a huge amount from the Asian settler colonialism guys about being indigenous. So in Māori terms, I think about the way that I think about ourselves outside of Aotearoa, through the concept of Manuhiritanga [being guests], So we often think about ourselves as tangata whenua here, but we are manuhiri in other places, right?

One of the things that I think is useful about that is that when I’m here I’m signing at tangata whenua in Wellington, like there’s no question. But say, if I went to the South Island, or where I live in Waikato, I’m manuhiri. Im not from there. But I don’t lose anything.

There’s, I don’t lose being tangata whenua when I’m understanding myself as manuhiri, right? And that, for me, was a useful leap, right? It wasn’t like I lost being Māori, because I understood that I was not indigenous to that place, and I had to go through that place of understanding that.

When I go to Australia, my passport, my New Zealand passport is stamped by someone who was legally only there because the Australian state is there on the basis of terra nullius, which is the colonisation of a place that says there was no one here. There are so many cute ways I could doctor up the vision of indigenous solidarity that means that I’m not really part of the problem there.

But of course I’m part of the problem. I’m there with my New Zealand passport being stamped by Australian customs, right? Once we go through that then I think there’s oxygen in the conversation. And maybe room in the heart, and the hard stuff, right?

When often, when you’re indigenous, you’re used to thinking about yourself as the oppressed guy and not as the oppressor. But this is part of it. Yeah. So I find that notion, that distinction between the event and the structure to be actually a really useful distinction.

Emalani: I just-- Oh, sorry. I just wanted to say one thing. And what I really appreciate about what Alice just said is as indigenous people it is really nice to be like, oh, we’re all indigenous. We’ve all suffered. So I’m not part of the problem. But I think as people who are not indigenous to Aotearoa, or if we go to places we are not Indigenous to, we have to grapple with those sticky and tough questions. We have to go into the yuckiness. [LAUGHS]

And so, in the book, and bringing up Patrick Wolfe, I talk about my own positionality here. And I just say, my being here is a structural fact, talking about structure. I was hired by a university. And as Wolfe said, in response to his own positionality as a non-indigenous person living and working in Australia, quote, ‘The fact of the matter is that I wouldn’t have had a university job if Indigenous people hadn’t had their land stolen from them. I live in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, in a city called Wellington, conscious of the fact that this land had to be drastically altered, streams culverted and disappeared beneath concrete, and people displaced in order for my home and workplace to now be here. I may not have pushed people out myself, but it is important to recognise how I’ve benefited from their removal.’

And so, it’s not me trying to-- and I teach my students about this, as well. I ask the question, what had to happen in order for us to be here? And it’s not a way of making people feel-- I don’t want to make people feel guilty, but I want us to be always aware of what it took for us to be here in a really real sense so that we can do the work to we’re here benefiting from colonialism. But how can we not be a further part of the problem?

And I think sometimes when we lean on indigeneity too much, and go, well, we’re all friends, and we all suffered, we can become part of the problem, so.

Alice: And I think once I came home, and I stopped being diasporic and then came home I actually realised that that reframing meant that I had to realise I was still diasporic, right? Because actually I’m Māori, but I’m notindigenous to every place which the New Zealand passport provides one citizenship to, right?

Like, there were other-- right? So I’m tangata whenua, and like, here I’m tangata whenua. I’m not manu whenua at Waikato. So actually going outside the state helped me realise the way that we naturalised being indigenous everywhere.

And I’m just going to say this, unpopular position though it may be, actually, those of us who are indigenous to cities know this, right, on some level, right? Because heaps of Māori from other places are really comfortable being like, well, I’m the Māori person here.

And that’s like, cool, but actually you’re the Māori person from there. [LAUGHS] And there’s an opportunity for that relationship to be a thing, but not for us to stand in for other indigenous people, even within our own country.

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