Buchanan The Parihaka Album

Lest We Forget
1. Auflage 2010
ISBN: 978-1-77550-014-8
Verlag: Huia Publishers
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten

A photo album doesn't tell the whole story of a family and this book doesn't tell the whole story of Parihaka. Rather, it is a collection of snapshots, a patchwork quilt, a scrapbook, a mongrel record my own efforts to understand one of the most important and disturbing events in New Zealand history - the 1881 invasion of Parihaka - and its powerful, complicated legacy. Rachel Buchanan The Parihaka Album: Lest We Forget blends the personal and the historical. It tracks the author Rachel Buchanan's discovery of her family's links with Parihaka and her Maori and Pakeha ancestor's roles in the early days of the city that is now Wellington.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Buchanan, Rachel

Leseproben

Foreword

Like a flower deemed extinct that pushes to the surface and blooms, like a river that flows under a road or a mountain that moves, whakapapa makes the unimaginable real. No matter where I live or what I do, whakapapa is a pilot light that powers my writing and sustains my essence as a person.

This book is my first, and I was sure it would be my last. In my naivety, I saw The Parihaka Album: Lest We Forget as an end point, the conclusion of almost a decade of effort. First, there was the writing of a PhD on the historiography of the 1881 invasion and ransacking of Parihaka, then there was the rewriting of the thesis into a manuscript that met the requirements of HUIA, the publisher that my mentor, Parihaka historian Te Miringa Hohaia, had advised me to go with. I also gave birth to three children – and mourned a fourth pregnancy that ended in miscarriage – during this period. I don’t know how I did it. With my partner, Mike, I was raising the children in our home in Naarm/Melbourne, but I was also raising myself, as a mother and as a Maori person, and my historical research was as much a part of the process as learning to breastfeed.

The various streams of my life converged one afternoon in 2009 in a room in the Media Studies Department at La Trobe University in Melbourne’s northern suburbs. I was working on the final text for this book, responding to queries from the editor, Anne Else, but I was also caring for my three little girls because it was a ‘bring your kids to work’ day. A battle cry went out: ‘Let’s destroy Mum’s office!’ Little hands grabbed the chapters I had printed out and threw them into the air. Snow! Then the girls snatched papers off the floor and sprinted down the corridor towards philosophy, chortling and shouting, yelling at me to follow.

My darling potiki, Frances, has just turned eighteen, and I still haven’t caught up with her yet – or her wonderful older sisters. I’m still chasing children down corridors, children like Taare and Turia, Charles and Julia, a brother and sister born at Te Aro Pa in 1848 and 1853 on whenua that would soon be whitewashed as Wellington. Their mum was a refugee from Taranaki; their dad was a boat person from Birmingham. What were their lives like? Their mother, Arapera, was an uri of Taranaki, a beautiful woman who would eventually wear the raukura that signalled she was a follower of Te Whiti o Rongomai of Parihaka. Their koro, Hemi, was a rangatira of Taranaki iwi, and I recall Te Miringa telling me that Matua was known to be handy with a mere and a patu. Their uncles, Mohi and Te Awhi, would become ploughmen and fencers during the first spell of non-violent resistance at Parihaka (1879–1880).

Those little children, Taare and Turia, ran down different paths as they grew up in a new nation that crushed their mothertongue – te reo Maori – destroyed their papakainga (including Te Aro Pa) and derided their knowledge and skills. Taare stayed in Poneke; Turia returned to Taranaki. All evidence of their place of birth was erased, or so it seemed. The resting places of their Maori grandparents, Hemi Parai and Tawhirikura Karopihia, became unknown, or so it seemed.

As I document in ‘Pioneers’, the final chapter of this book, in 2005 Te Aro Pa emerged from its hiding place under old buildings on Taranaki Street. In 2017, an uri of Te Aro Pa, Debbie Broughton, displayed her poetry in light boxes at Te Aro (a Wellington City Council initiative, the light boxes are on Courtenay Place, close to the intersection with Taranaki Street). Debbie’s ‘Magical Maori Mystery Tour’ excavated Maori Wellington from beneath the rubble. I was glad to be asked to write a poem for one of the light boxes along with another uri of Taranaki, Professsor Alice Te Punga Somerville. Debbie’s light-box poems grew into The Ani Waaka Room (2022), a brilliant and oh-so-funny collection about ‘the re-Taranaki-fication of Te Aro Pa’.

Since 2021, Debbie has performed as part of Te Aro Pa poets, a collective that also includes my sister, Hana Buchanan, and me. In February 2024, Te Aro Pa poets were a headline act on the opening night of The Performance Arcade festival in Wellington, and the stage was literally at Te Aro, between Te Papa Tongarewa and Waitangi Park. I was not able to be there in person, so our youngest brother, Joe, agreed to be a kairiwhi and read a few pieces in my place. We held a zui to plan the performance, and our various children popped in and out of the online meeting. The youngest child, aged five, had just started in te reo Maori immersion strand at kura. As our korero unfolded, I realised that every single person on the call, except for me, was a Maori speaker – children included. I stopped the zui to give a speech about how wonderful it was to be the odd one out and to invite them all to ignore me and korero Maori! They refused. All of them are very modest about this taonga and don’t even like to be described as fluent speakers of te reo Maori, but I just feel absolute awe at what they have achieved as uri of Te Aro Pa where the paepae has been bitumen for a long time. Iti noa ana, he pito mata.

Te Aro Pa has re-emerged in other ways too. In ‘Pioneers’, I describe our quest to find the resting place of Hemi Parai, a Te Aro Pa rangatira (of Taranaki iwi) who passed away in 1877. For many years, Dad, Takuta Leo Buchanan (a paediatrician), had been obsessed with locating our tupuna. In about 2007 or so, Leo and I met Nick Perrin, a member of the Friends of Bolton Street Cemetery. As I write in this book, we had no luck that day, and my own archival research, in the Wellington City Council Archives, offered hints but nothing more. In 2022, Nick got in touch with my sister, Hana, to say that Hemi Parai had been found. In cemetery records, he was listed as ‘Hari Pry’ because the sexton had recorded the information given orally ‘and misheard enough to get the spelling wrong’. Nick Perrin advised that our tupuna was the first burial in a row of three grave plots, ‘which were in a very prominent location on the main path through the cemetery (but removed for the motorway between 1968 and 1971)’. We mihi to Matua and his other close relatives whose places of rest were so cruelly disturbed by the construction of the motorway. The final resting place of Hemi’s first wife, Tawhirikura Karopihia, remains unknown, for now, as does the resting place of their daughter, Arapera Rongouaroa.

The re-publication of The Parihaka Album – as a physical object made from paper and as an e-book – is a further example of Te Aro and Taranaki determination to remain in view as a challenge to the bureaucratic, cultural, spiritual, historical and political norms in the nation’s capital.

Even though it has been out of print for over a decade, this book has continued to find its way into the hands of influential readers, including Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Tupuola Tufunga Efi, the Samoan Head of State from 2007 until 2017, and Pakeha academics such as political scientist Professor Richard Shaw and Dr Patty O’Brien, an Australian historian. In 2017, Tui Atua invited me to Samoa to help launch Patty’s book Tautai, a biography of independence leader Ta‘isi O.F. Nelson. It was a tremendous honour to speak in Apia about the direct connections between the non-violent resistance to colonisation enacted at Parihaka (1879–1881 and ongoing) and the non-violent resistance to colonisation of the Samoan Mau (which came to prominence in the 1920s in protests against the New Zealand government).

Like me, Richard Shaw grew up in Taranaki, and our paths first crossed in the early 1980s when we were both in the New Plymouth Operatic Society’s production of The Wizard of Oz. I played Dorothy, and Richard played the Tin Man. Richard’s history-memoir The Forgotten Coast (Massey University Press, 2021) is a forensic examination of how his family directly benefitted from te pahuatanga, the invasion and ransacking of Parihaka. One of his ancestors was a member of the armed constabulary who invaded the pa, and Richard traces how ‘grants’ of confiscated land made his poor Irish ancestors rich. While it is normal for Maori historians to relate our work to our whakapapa, it is rare for a Pakeha scholar to do so, and I am glad that The Parihaka Album encouraged Richard to take this journey.

As will be clear by now, The Parihaka Album was not a conclusion; it was a prelude. The book led me to establish – or strenghten – relationships with whanaunga such as Te Miringa Hohaia, Honiana Love, Neville Gilmour, Lindsay McLeod, Tony Ruakere, Matua John Te Wharematangi Baxter, Alice Te Punga Somerville and her whanau, Debbie Broughton and others, creating a pathway inside myself that has enabled two more books on Taranaki to come forth. Te Miringa, Neville, Lindsay and Tony have all passed now, as has Takuta Leo Buchanan, and The Parihaka Album may also be viewed as a memorial to their fire, their skill and their manaakitanga.

Finally, The Parihaka Album is special because it introduced me to Hon. Mahara Okeroa, a whanaunga who was raised at Parihaka. At the last minute, Matua Mahara was asked to launch The Parihaka Album. His initial response to this request would surely be summed up in one word: hoha! Yet the work got under his skin. I recall the way Matua’s korero magnified parts of the book that I had seen as asides. I had made a joke of the fact that my grandmother, Rawinia Queenie Agnes Buchanan, had refused to use her Maori name. Instead, she was Ra, Mrs B or simply Flossy. But Matua recognised this refusal for what it was, a survival mechanism, a defence against racism, a mask. I recall looking around...