[csaa-forum] On “New Zealand” “Studies”

[Danny Butt]

Kia ora koutou

below a draft paper I'm giving today (thanks to the magic of GPRS), in 
an extremely unusual setting in the penthouse of New Zealand House, to 
what looks to be a predominantly british crowd. Certainly, it feels a 
long way from home.

Any comments welcomed

x.d
--------------------------------------
On “New Zealand” “Studies”
Danny Butt <db at dannybutt.net>
Lecturer, Theory, Unitec New Zealand School of Design

Presentation to the 11th Annual day conference of the New Zealand 
Studies Association.
New Zealand House, London, 3rd July 2004.

 ‘The question of “Who will speak?” is less crucial than “who will 
listen”?’ (Spivak, 1990 p.59)

Good morning. It’s very strange to be in the centre of London with such 
an esteemed panel for a gathering about New Zealand Studies. I’m 
remembering Dean Hapeta, aka Te Kupu from Upper Hutt Posse, who talked 
about why he identified with his Maori genealogy over his British side. 
He said, when he is home he is welcomed for being Maori, but being in 
London and saying you have English ancestry doesn’t get you very far. 
And I'm thinking of the late kuia Rahera Windsor whose image we have 
here, becoming the Ngati Ranana, and imagining the challenges of 
cultural maintenance in the belly of the beast.  Anyhow, I’ve just come 
from Banff in Canada, another part of the empire, and that experience 
has changed this presentation a fair bit.

For the last six weeks I’ve been collaborating with two artists, both 
Maori, in a residency called Intra-nation at Banff Centre for the Arts. 
It’s been a real opportunity to reflect on the construction of 
nationhood, and a lot of the time I’ve been wondering why the hell a 
Pakeha like myself is going to London to talk about New Zealand, and 
thinking maybe I should write something on that. So rather than 
reiterating the excellent work David Slack and Pat Snedden have done on 
Treaty issues since I submitted my abstract, or spending twenty minutes 
paraphrasing Stephen Turner on historiography, or I thought it would be 
good to think about what we’re doing, right here, to contribute to the 
cultural struggles emerging in the New Zealand nation-state.

This feeling was especially prompted by two exhibitions at Banff’s 
Walter Philips Gallery. The first, curated by Candice Hopkins, 
showcased a number of Native American contemporary artists, including a 
fantastic video work by Jimmy Durham exploring relationships with the 
land and the contemporary art world. The second exhibition, immediately 
following, was by white artist Andrew Hunter presenting a “personal 
museum” of cowboy memorabilia he’d collected, exploring nostalgia and 
his childhood dreams of riding the trails in Banff’s Rocky Mountains. 
I’m not sure if the scheduling of the exhibitions was a sick joke, but 
in any case Hunter didn’t seem self-conscious about using cowboy 
iconography directly after the “Indians”. Maybe he never knew the 
Indians had been there, maybe the gallery was Terra Nullius. What was 
interesting about Hunter’s cowboy exhibition was that, representations 
of the Indians were nowhere to be seen. But what does it mean to be a 
Cowboy without Indians? What does it mean to discus Cowboys while 
forgetting their role in state-sanctioned genocide? Hunter is pretty 
savvy and is obviously aware that it’s not the 1950s any more, and 
after a few decades of identity politics he couldn’t get away with 
direct representations of Indians along side his lone rangers. So 
instead we get a complete *erasure*of aboriginal perspectives on the 
domestication of the Rockies. So while the exhibition was much more 
“aware” of the issues than TV shows like the Lone Ranger, the result 
was that the indigenous history of Banff was moved even further out of 
the picture.

The exhibition coincided with Canada Day and a national election, and 
declarations of patriotism were rife. It struck me that if Hunter’s 
cowboy project was in academia it would be called “Canadian Studies”. 
Hopkins’ exhibition of Native American artists would be “Native 
American Studies”, but her show is probably “unpatriotic” and not very 
approachable by those declaring their geographical affiliation by 
flying Canadian flags on their car roofs. So here’s a paradox: the 
concerns of Canadian Studies, Australian Studies, and New Zealand 
studies, to an outside eye, are more similar than different. The titles 
of these disciplines proclaims their difference from each other, yet 
the things which could *actually*distinguish them – aboriginal 
perspectives – are implicitly excluded. In my experience many Maori 
researchers are much more at home in international federations of 
indigenous peoples than in gatherings of “New Zealanders”.

As cultural studies in New Zealand has begun to emerge as a coherent 
academic tradition, thanks to the efforts of many who are here today, 
the decisions we make now potentially structure a great deal of future 
work. When preparing this paper I was thinking of Stuart Hall’s 
inspirational introduction to Culture, Media, Language, where he 
describes the Birmingham Cultural Studies project as springing from a 
frustration with certain methodological dead-ends in Marxism, 
sociology, literary criticism and film theory. I feel the same 
frustration with the approach to “New Zealand” being taken in “New 
Zealand studies”.

So I’ve changed the title of this paper to *On “New Zealand” 
“Studies”*. The title suggests two things to be explored: “New 
Zealand”, the nation-state, and “studies”, the process of academic 
labour. I suggest that New Zealand Studies often takes both of these 
terms to be self evident, and very few works in the genre take a 
critical approach to these terms But as David Turnbull (p99) puts it, 
“we are seldom aware of the ways in which our views of the world are 
ordered by suppressed social constructs…. boundaries, frames, spaces, 
centres, and silences which structure what is and is not possible to 
speak of.”

The result of these constructs is that the answer to “who listens” to 
New Zealand studies” does not include Maori, who have the most 
knowledge about New Zealand as a physical place; nor does it usually 
include much of the international academic community, who have the most 
knowledge about how to study things. I am proposing that this state of 
affairs is unsustainable and needs fixing. This might require putting 
some of our cherished beliefs about kiwi pragmatism second to issues of 
cultural justice and academic professionalism. And we are the only ones 
who can do it. Let me be clear that the stakes are high. If we fail, we 
are failing to be academics and failing as New Zealanders. As experts - 
rather than artists like Hunter - we cannot take a surface view of 
culture because we are scared of the implications of what lies 
underneath.

Martin Tolich calls this fear of what’s beneath “Pakeha paralysis”, and 
it springs from a phenomenon Elizabeth Guy noted, that the issues of 
colonisation have become so fraught that many white people feel 
“defeated before they start in their desire to engage with Indigenous 
people”. The fear is institutionalised in stories I have heard more 
than once about research directors suggesting that academics “avoid 
dealing with Maori issues”, to avoid having to negotiate with Maori 
over cultural ownership. But what in New Zealand is not a Maori issue? 
What part of New Zealand culture is not implicated in the colonial 
project of making the land into “New Zealand”?

Can I get a quick show of hands on how many of you have read Linda 
Tuhiwai Smith’s “Decolonizing Methodologies”? Here’s how it works for 
me as a New Zealand Studies text that should be seen as the paradigm 
for New Zealand Studies. Firstly, it’s a great ambassador. I can take 
it anywhere. I just passed a copy to an artist from Senegal, who loved 
it and found it enormously productive. I’ve corresponded with a 
researcher in Sydney working on issues of transnational adoption from 
the third world who is copying chapters from the book and passing them 
into her community. And so on. Everyone who reads it wants to come to 
New Zealand. Clearly, if in the humanities and social sciences we seek 
to deal with universal themes, this book is doing a good job of it.

Secondly, the book is as New Zealand as it gets.Remember that apart 
from the first couple of chapters of scene setting this book is 
predominantly from a Maori world view and written for Maori cultural 
maintenance and not for an international audience. For me, the most 
important thing this book does is show up the false distinction between 
regionalism and internationalism that is all too common in white New 
Zealand academia. After Smith’s book, I hope that it’s no longer 
possible for a good study of New Zealand to not *also*be a study of 
European imperialism.

But, as Spivak asked in my quote at the beginning of the paper, who 
listens to indigenous voices? Are we allowing philosophical agendas to 
be set by Maori researchers like Smith on the issues of nationhood and 
research?A quick scan of the citation indices in New Zealand studies 
will give us a fairly clear “no.” The work is more often sidelined to 
“Maori studies”. It’s the Pakeha paralysis again.

Pakeha need to get below the surface of New Zealand if they are ever 
going to call it home. Deep down, we know and feel this. And there has 
been a consistent call from indigenous people for Europeans to 
understand and recognise their relationship with the land, and this has 
often been expressed in terms of depth. The Australian Aboriginal 
author Paddy Roe says"You people try and dig little bit more deep / you 
been diggin only white soil / try and find the black soil inside". 
However, digging below the surface brings dangers for Pakeha who know 
that this digging will eventually take us into an indigenous 
space. What happens as we dig through to the indigenous world is that 
we are asked to give up control for a short time. We are asked to 
forget that there is a difference for a while and allow our 
accountability to belong to Maori epistemology. We rarely do this, 
being extremely scared about letting go of our values for a moment, but 
we could. It’s not like European academia is going to vanish while 
we’re away for a few days.

If we are genuinely concerned about Maori and Pakeha "talking past each 
other" then it's only people who are connected and experienced in both 
worlds who are going to point the way through that. While a large 
number of Maori understand European world-views, most Europeans are not 
so comfortable spending time in Maori worlds. Let us be clear that 
these world-views are incommensurable, although they are related. Maori 
and Pakeha construct what the feminist philosopher Lorraine Code calls 
different "rhetorical spaces", "... whose territorial imperatives 
structure and limit the kinds of utterances that can be voiced within 
them". The academy has spent a century coercing Maori into 
demonstrating knowledge of European concepts that have for the most 
part not served them well. I think it might be useful for us to turn 
the tables for a bit and enter the Maori rhetorical space. This would 
mean resetting our research agendas to respond to the concerns of Maori 
knowledge production identified by Bishop and Glynn: tino 
rangatiratanga; mana whenua and mata waka; kawa/tikanga; knowledge as 
“taonga tuku iho” - a treasure from the ancestors to the people; whanau 
and processes of whakawhanaungatanga. Let us ask: how many of us can 
discuss our work in the terms of these concerns? For myself, the answer 
is “not much, yet”. But I do see this as central to being able to truly 
claim some New Zealandness to what I do. And I don’t believe that this 
is totally incompatible with the spirit of enquiry in the humanities, 
although I am aware that so far the humanities haven’t done much to 
justify such a claim.

Who listens? For us to build a New Zealand Studies worth its name, we 
need to be listening to Maori, and producing work that they will listen 
to. My suggestion is that most of us on the white left, including 
myself, are not particularly well equipped to do this. But if we don’t 
learn to listen to Maori and have them listen to us we will never get 
below the surface of what New Zealand is. For myself, it’s been 
learning from Maori epistemology, politics, and culture that has 
provided me with the strongest sense of why I live in Aotearoa. Washing 
dishes in the back of the wharekai, or marching across Auckland’s 
harbour bridge on a hikoi - these are the experiences that give me 
insight into what it means to be where I live, to call New Zealand 
home.

Let me be clear that this is not a desire to be Maori. My engagement 
with Maori only makes me even more self-conscious of my cultural 
difference, my upbringing as a white Australian. But I am suggesting 
that the only way of understanding what it means to be Pakeha in New 
Zealand is in dialogue with Maori. And it is only through understanding 
who we are that we can start to understand the cultural processes in 
New Zealand that we are part of. Michael King’s experiences allowed him 
to realise that the question of Pakeha identity was crucially 
underdeveloped. But his methodological error was to pretend Pakeha 
identity could be seen in isolation. In deciding to focus on Pakeha in 
the 80s, he stopped listening to Maori (though he didn’t stop writing 
about them), and Maori more or less stopped listening to him. As Barry 
Barclay has noted, the results of King’s failure mean that his hugely 
popular “History of New Zealand” reinscribes the falsehood that James 
Cook’s voyage was primarily one of discovery and not colonisation, by 
neglecting to mention the explicit instructions Cook received to take 
possession of lands for His Majesty. Obviously, for reasons I find 
unfathomable, Michael King didn’t think these were important. For 
Maori, I suggest that they probably were.

We don’t need to repeat King’s errors, if we are prepared to look at 
ourselves through Maori eyes and listen to ourselves through Maori 
ears. As a few decades of feminist theory has amply demonstrated, to be 
able to see from multiple points of view, while never entirely 
comfortable, can be a position of power. Deloria notes that “Western 
European peoples have never learned to consider the nature of the world 
discerned from a spatial point of view.” His criticism is well taken, 
but we can turn that into a positive if we rethink this as our 
potential to see the world from *multiple*points of view. But to do 
this we need to give up our false authenticity. This goes against 
everything in the kiwi ideology. We need to move from being settled in 
settler culture, to being unsettled, to understand the fragility of our 
position. Our colonial history denies us indigeneity, but it allows us 
other kinds of transnational relationships that are extra-ordinarily 
powerful. Through these relationships, Pakeha have a lot to offer the 
Maori world - the real New Zealand - if we are prepared to do it in 
ways they want to listen to. But to get to a point where Maori will 
listen to us, we need to be prepared to learn what they want to hear. 
These are basic conversational manners.

As Stephen Turner has put it, the challenge for Pakeha is not to 
“increase our knowledge of Maori culture.” The challenge is to pick up 
poi. If we take up that challenge, we are probably going to look pretty 
stupid for a while as we get the hang of it. We might have to go down 
to the kohanga and get some four year olds to teach us. But if we are 
going to have a New Zealand worth studying, one that we can call home, 
I see no other option.

[references omitted, available on request]

x.d

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