7 Pakeha Identity of the South Pacific and Literatures

Ms. Saswati Saha

Content :

1. Introduction: Where is the ‘South Pacific’?

2. What is Pakeha?

3. The Issue of Pakeha Identity: Fixed or Fluid?

4. Pakeha Literature and Literary Culture

5. Summary of the Module

6. Reference

1. Introduction: Where is the ‘SouthPacific’?

The region of the South Pacific gets its name from the numerous European mapping that has happened post-contact history. The region has its own indigenous name. In the Maori language it is called ‘Te Moana Nui a Kiwa’ or the great ocean of Kiwa, the legendary Polynesian explorer and guardian of the sea. Earliest known European labels of this region, coined mainly by the late eighteenth century explorers, include ‘South Seas’ or the ‘South Sea Islands’. It is only after the Second World War that the term ‘South Pacific’ came into use, first used by the Western Alliance military forces during the war in the Pacific. However, the term South Pacific is quite misleading as Epeli Hau‘ofa points out, ‘not just those islands that lie south of the equator; it covers the whole region from the Marianas, deep in the North Pacific, to New Zealand in the south’. (Hau‘ofa, 45) But the label ‘South Pacific’ is widely used. Of late the term ‘Pacific Island Region’ has also come into use and has served to differentiate the smaller islands of the Pacific from their larger neighbours like New Zealand and Australia. This can be positively viewed as the sign of the socio-political independence  of these small islands. While all these European labels refer to the Pacific region as a whole, the Indigenous Pacific, as Michelle Keown points out has also been divided into three geocultural subcategories known as Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia. (Keown 13)  These labels were coined to imposed imperialist geographical and racial framework on the various people of the Pacific. The grouping together of the islands of the Pacific has always been a result of the profit motive of international agencies and multinational business corporations. As a result of which these small islands have become the sites of major experimentation, including testing grounds of nuclear weapons of the economic and political powers of the world. This has given rise to a corpus of protest literature in this region.

2.  What is Pakeha?

Any discussion on Pakeha literary genre is impossible without knowing what Pakeha means. A rough sketch of the Pakeha cultural identity is inevitable before beginning any discussion on Pakeha literature. Therefore this section will try to understand the term Pakeha. Pakeha is a term used to denote the white New Zealanders mainly comprising of the settlers from Europe. The first recorded use of the word Pakeha is in the Treaty of Waitangi. A Pakeha, initially, was a white man who came from England and settled and worked in New Zealand. Later the term came to be used more generally to denote any fair skinned person who was born in New Zealand. Mary-Ellen O’Connor (1990) defines Pakeha as “the dominant white race in New Zealand. This would cover anybody of Anglo-Celtic origin (England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales) and, as the integrated, Northern Europeans (Scandinavians, Germans, and Dutch), white American, Canadians and South Africans. But in order to understand a Pakeha, one must also understand the term Maori because a white New Zealander is a Pakeha only in relation to a Maori, or an indigenous Polynesian inhabitant of New Zealand. The term Maori was used by the indigenous population to describe them as ‘different’ from the European settlers but with time the term got adopted by the Europeans to describe the indigenous people. But according to living Maoris of New Zealand, a Moari do not primarily use the term to describe themselves but only use the tribe name as they are essentially tribal people. A Maori is a Maori only in relation to Pakeha thus denoting the linguistic, racial, ethnic and cultural difference between the indigenous people of Aotearoa and the European settlers. Michael King in his books Being Pakeha (1985) defines Pakeha as “denoting non-Maori New Zealanders.” (https://maorinews.com/writings/papers/other/pakeha.htm)

Some people consider Pakeha to be a derogatory term or an insult hurled at the fair skinned people of non-Polynesian descent in New Zealand. According to them the term Pakeha means ‘long pig’ or ‘white pig’. Some New Zealanders of white descent are reluctant to call themselves Pakeha , also because the term originated in a language that is not their own. Such people prefer words like Caucasians or New Zealand European. But both these terms are problematic since it covers wide range of people and second or third generation of settlers cannot be called Europeans anymore. However, considerably early records, dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, show the European missionaries and government officials also referred to themselves as Pakeha.

The changing usage of the term Pakeha complicates the notion of ethnicity. If an ethnic group comprise of people who share common ancestry, culture and history, then Pakeha can never refer to an ethnic group as it comprises a mixed bag of fair skinned people of different ethnic or racial origin. Therefore the term Pakeha or Maori “offer us a way to differentiate between the historical origins of settlers, the Polynesian and European.” (https://maorinews.com/writings/papers/other/pakeha.htm)

3. The Issue of Pakeha Identity: Fixed or Fluid?

Stuart Hall, writing about modern cultural identities remark that it is rather fluid which develop in the border zone between older identities, labels their construction a self- reflective process, which takes place only in the context of difference. It is “a process never completed—always in process. It is not determined in the sense that it can always be ‘won’ or ‘lost’, sustained or abandoned.” (Hall and Du Gay 1996, 2-3) Identity can therefore can be described as arising not only from where, and who, one is at any given moment, but also from the place one has come from and from influences that stream back towards it, as well as from the destination towards which one is travelling. Hall states that modern cultural identities are transitory and are “increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic discourses, practices and positions.”(Hall and Du Gay 1996, 4) Identity, therefore, “is how one behaves at any stopping point along one’s journey, in interaction with all the other behavoiurs that one finds in this location.” (Hall and Du Gay 1996, 101).

Pakeha identity therefore is neither that of the colonizer, nor of the pre colonial but a predominantly unique and hybrid post-colonial subjectivity which might be constitutive of the two as well. Since the Pakehas constitute of the fair skinned population, therefore they come to be regarded as essentially the ‘bad’ oppressor who is responsible for exclusionary racisms. But as Paul Spoonley points out, “the question both theoretically and politically, is whether there is room for alternative conceptualizations of dominant group identity.” (Spoonley 1995 54) It is this image of being the ‘bad’ oppressor that deters the study of the “white men’s” relationship and their interdependence with the subdominant identities. (Smith, 56)

According to Maori cultural advisor and actor Rangimoana Taylor, “the word Pakeha can be applied to people who are willing to make a commitment to live here, the idea of bones of the ancestors does come into it, there must be no other place that they call home.” (Smith 54) John Bluck points out that there is an obligation inherent in the word Pakeha which is “a gift given by Maori born out of a relationship with them bound by some promises of partnership” as well as a word for “describing a people unlike any other who exist nowhere else.” (Smith 54). Therefore being a Pakeha cannot be politically neutral. Being a Pakeha would mean by definition a New Zealander who has agreed to be a Treaty partner of the Maoris and take their responsibility and perform their duties of the post-colonial people towards the Maoris. It simply does not mean wiping out the memory of being a colonist and therefore not taking responsibility of the actions ensuing from the process. It means that they now belong to New Zealand as much as the Maoris and have a culture that had developed from their experiences of being in Aotearoa. This will also mean that no other name describes their cultural identity and they now belong to no other place/space.

The boundaries around the Pakeha identity are flexible, fluid and permeable. Pakeha is an identiy that is not determined by lineage, but by living in a land and acting in the space which one inhabits. Therefore no one set of behavioral pattern or cultural attitude can describe Pakeha. However their culture is also significantly different from their lands of origin. Michael King in his books Being Pākehā Now: reflections and recollections of a white native (1999) writes:

 to be Pakeha on the cusp of the twenty-first century is not to be European; it is not to be an alien or a stranger in my own country. It is to be a non-Maori (sic) New Zealander who is aware of and proud of my antecedents, but who identifies and intimately with this land, as intensively and as strongly as anybody Maori. It is to be, as I have already argued, another kind of indigenous New Zealander.

There is an essential biculturalism in the identity of the Pakeha’s because they are mainly the people of the treaty. The Treaty of Waitangi put together two groups of people, the Pakeha who are dominant in history, power and majority and the Maori who are dominant in legacy and longer history of being indigenous to the soil of Aotearoa. The desired impact of biculturalism was to forget the colonial past of the Pakeha and Maori entanglement and to establish an equality of the two where both will be equally sharing the responsibility of being inhabitants of the region. But the economic and social backwardness of the Maori as compared to the Pakeha challenges any such notion of equality. The South Pacific region is essentially multicultural. The notion of biculturalism proves that the two distinctly different groups of people cannot accommodate the ‘other ‘in ethnic terms.

Pakeha Literature and LiteraryCulturev 

The Pakeha as the powerful settlers of the Aotearoa had an account of the European ‘discovery’ of the island which was circulated among all section of the people. Captain James Cook was regarded as the maritime hero whose heroic stories of the late eighteenth century were celebrated. The ‘benevolent’ missionaries and the pioneers from Britain were also regarded with similar reverence. Such settler’s myth continued with its popularity until the close of the twentieth century when a revisionist historical scholarship and historigraphical fiction emerged, which re-considered New Zealand’s past. The most important studies include Claudia Orange’s The Treaty of Waitangi (1987), James Belich’s The New Zealand Wars and the Interpretation of Racial Conflict (1986), historiographical novels such as Witi Ihimaera’s (Maori author) The Matriarch (1986) and C. K. Stead’s The Singing Whakapapa (1994). These works re-determine and re-assess the complex cross-cultural conflict between the Maori and Pakeha.

The first encounters between the Europeans and the Maori often lead to misunderstandings and hostility from both sides. When Dutchman Abel Tasman came in 1642 and Cook came in the year 1769, both the encounters are marked with bloodshed and war. These misunderstandings between the Pakeha and the Maori inspired a series of “revisionist’ poems produced by Pakeha poet Allen Curnow in the early 1940s. These poems were written when the country was celebrating the centenary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi and the ‘birth’ of New Zealand. The poems have a ‘more ambivalent attitude to the country’s emerging nationhood’. Unlike the predominant idea of the nation belonging to the Pakeha, the poem ‘House and Land’ describes New Zealand as ‘a land of settlers/ With never a soul at home’. The other poem ‘The Skeleton of the Great Moa in the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch’ (1943) uses the metaphor of the bird to show the migratory and impermanent nature of the settlers. Poems like ‘The Unhistoric Story’ (1941) and ‘Landfall in Unknown Seas’ further challenges the base of the settler’s identity challenging the mythical victory story of Tasman and Cook. ‘The Unhistoric Story’ with the line ‘It was something different, something/ Nobody counted on’ challenges the popular version of the history and makes a foray into the random violence and hostility that marked the coloniser’s encounter with the natives. 

One of the Pakeha text edited by Ken Arvidson in 2001 is a non-fiction tract produced by magistrate John Gorst The Maori King (1864). It documents the Imperial army’s invasion of the Waikato region in 1863 after the Waikato tribes had refused to sign the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. Waikato became the site of the Maori nationalism and Maori Kingitanga Movement. Although the King’s movement was essentially non-violent, the imperial administration saw it to be an act of rebellion and ordered military invasion. After the end of the clash, Waikato was confiscated to the imperial government. Although the author is a Pakeha serving as a magistrate of the government he has showed the courage of openly criticizing the manipulations of the government but he cannot be called a pro-Maori and he is also critical about their imitative nature.

Another Pakeha text during the colonial period that has shown ambivalence towards the Maori is F.E. Maning’s autobiography Old New Zealand (1863). Maning was a Pakeha- Maori who being a resident European trader married a Maori. Maning criticizes the land- hunger of the British imperialists and the evangelistic interventions of missionaries. He also could not escape the stereotypical representation of the Maori as cunning, cruel and ‘careless of life’.

By the end of the nineteenth century when most of the Maori lands were annexed by the European settlers, they too started to develop a sense of nationhood. They helped in the development of New Zealand not only by establishing extensive road and rail networks but also by granting female suffrage and national welfare reforms. From 1890s New Zealander meant both a Maori and a Pakeha. The political nationalism developing in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century gave rise to literary nationalism. From 1930 onwards the literature produced by the Pakeha could shed the British literary model and showed a distinctive local sensibility. Poets like Allen Curnow, Denis Glover and Charles Brasch rejected the earlier poet’s way of writing as “embarrassing colonial deference, outmoded verse forms, Georgian diction, and the ‘decorative’ use of native flora and fauna’. According to these set of modern Pakeha poets, the poetry emerging from New Zealand should be “realist, masculinist and attentive to the minutiae and distinctiveness of the local environment, rather than expressing nostalgia for the British motherland.” 

In Curnow’s A Book of New Zealand Verse 1923-45 (1945), he charges the established female poets like Eileen Duhhan and Robin Hyde of overt sentimentalism and an escapism reflected in their poems. He is in high praise for poets like R.A.K Mason and Walter D’Arcy Cresswell for the manliness, toughness and technical sureness that they introduce in their poems. A. R. D. Fairburn in his 1938 poem ‘Dominion’ reflects on the New Zealand culture and engages with the effects of the First World War and ‘the Depression upon New Zealand’s emergent sense of national identity. Fairburn thought the poems written in American should be a useful model for the new poems being written in New Zealand. But the poems that Fairburn and Curnow were writing resembled the Auden tradition of the 1930 Britain. In the genre of prose, short stories of Frank Sargeson tried to capture realism and sympathy for the “ordinary bloke”. This literary tradition continued in New Zealand until 1970s till Maori Renaissance made a mark on New Zealand literature.

Although New Zealand granted female suffrage to women as early as 1893, the assessment of feminist impact on literature was made as late as 1970s. Robin Hyde is one of the most prominent female authors who battled mental illness. Her poetry was marked wilth a chaotic escapist hysteria. Her semi-autobigraphical novel The Godwits Fly (1938) gives a view of the New Zealand society revealing the way in which “class divisions between Irish, English and other immigrant groups in Wellington were altered by the Depression and by international socialism’. She also takes up the issue of Pakeha nationalism and how a local aesthetic pervaded the culture among the Pakeha in the 1930s. She points out the changing of the Pakeha attitude towards the Maori which marks a shift from what works like ‘Ranolf and Amohia’ (1872) by Alfred Domett and The Greenstone Door (1914) by William Satchell portrayed.

The other most important female writer is Katherine Mansfield who wrote about her childhood spent in Wellington in her The Garden Party and Other Stories. The stories like ‘The Garden Party’ and ‘The Doll’s House’ explore the class divisions that ‘problematised idealized myths of social inclusion which, during and beyond this period, were circulated in order to promote New Zealand as a utopian ‘better Britain’. Her unfinished novel Maata is named after her Maori girlfriend with whom she appears to have had a sexual relationship. Her 1912 story ‘How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped’ engages directly with the Maori culture.

But her stance on the Maori is quite ambivalent – she mostly describes them as ‘fat and laughing’ and seem to have an abundance of food and children.

Jane Mander’s 1920 novel The Story of a New Zealander River decribes the experience of a Englishwoman who married a Pakeha man and settled in New Zealand. She criticizes the ‘False secularized Puritan code of respectability imported from Victorian England’ that used to get imposed upon New Zealand. John Mulgan’s novel Man Alone (1939) describes a Pakeha man’s solitary journey in the alien landscape and is a typical settler’s writing. The settler’s narratives often carried a thread of how a white man/woman had to battle against the ‘savage spirit of the country’ as in Janet Frame’s 1966 novel A State of Siege, where a retired female teacher is found dead while on a solitary sojourn in an island where she was terrorized by persistent knocking on the door by an unknown intruder. She died as someone threw a stone at her through her window. Frame’s another novel The Carpathians engages with the Pakeha-Maori relationship and explore Pakeha cultural ‘schizophrenia’ and various forms of social marginalization. The female writers are a significant presence in the literary arena of New Zealand and balance the masculinist bias of the male authors and poets.

Summary of the Module 

In this module we have learnt about the geographical region of ‘South Pacific’ and specifically the region of Aotearoa. We have learnt about the Pakeha community of New Zealand, its heterogeneity and how its identity develops as a result of the encounter with the Maori or the indigenous population of the region. A section on the Pakeha identity politics talked about how the Pakeha identity is neither that of the colonizer, nor of the pre colonial but a predominantly unique and hybrid post-colonial subjectivity which might be constitutive of the two as well. The following section concentrates on the literatures of the Pakeha which had evolved and developed over the years from an objective take of the white skinned explorer-coloniser’s on the savage islands of the South Pacific to a more subjective belongingness of a Pakeha to his homeland of New Zealand which has a completely local essence shedding off the characteristics of British literature.

Reference:

• Du Gay, Paul and Stuart Hall (eds). Questions of Cultural Identity. London: Sage, 1996.
• Hau‘ofa, Epeli. We are the Ocean: Selected Works. Honolulu: University of Hawai Press, 2008.
• Keown, Michelle. Pacific Islands Writing: The Postcolonial Literatures of Aotearoa/ New Zealand and Oceania. Oxford: OUP, 2007.
• King, Michael. Being Pakeha Now: Reflections and Recollections of a White Native. Auckland: Penguin Books, 1999.
• Ranford,            Jodie.            “’Pakeha’,            Its            Origin            and            Meaning”. https://maorinews.com/writings/papers/other/pakeha.htm
• Smith, Adriann Anne Herron. Seeing Ourselves on Stage: Revealing Ideas about Pakeha Cultural Identity Through Theatrical Performances. University of Otago, 2010.
• Spoonley, P. “Constructing ourselves. The post-colonial politics of Pakeha”. W. Wilson and A Yeatman (eds.) Justice and Identity. Antipodean Practices. Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 1995.