John Miller’s Photographs by Cassandra Barnett and Jon Bywater, with an introduction by Marina Fokidis
I visited photographer John Miller’s studio in 2015, on the recommendation of friends and colleagues who reside in New Zealand. I had just met with art writer Jon Bywater in Auckland, who confirmed the idea with great enthusiasm. Miller is of mixed English-Scottish parentage and of Māori descent, specifically Ngāpuhi iwi of central Northland. With his camera, he has documented the social and political struggles of New Zealand since the late 1960s, bringing an acute, sympathetic eye to the decolonial process catalyzed by the Indigenous peoples of this island nation.
When I finally met Miller, he was easily distinguishable in his military-style jacket equipped with multiple pockets to store rolls of film and equipment, his green hat on. Very few words were exchanged until we were inside his studio, a dark, modest space filled with books and archival material, where he suddenly greeted me in Greek, learned from a neighbor. Then, without delay, he kindly asked: “What do you want from me?” My own ancestors had migrated from Asia Minor to Greece due to the exchange of population stipulated in the inflexible and cruel Treaty of Lausanne (1923), so I was interested in learning more about the Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840 between around 540 Māori chiefs and representatives of the British Crown, and the contemporary understanding of its status as a living document. When I began to explain my interest, Miller put things in perspective. “All I can do,” he said, “is to show you some photographs from the last fifty years.”
And so began a four-hour tour of New Zealand’s history and struggle for social justice and the commons—via images taken in its streets, meeting houses, and government buildings—in front of Miller’s computer. His first photographs capture an anti-Vietnam War demonstration on the streets of Auckland in early 1967. There are many images of Māori protests at Waitangi taken over the years, as well as the peaceful Land March of 1975; the most recent photographs depict a repeated march protesting the Foreshore and Seabed Act of 2004. Miller, however, does not emphasize Māori struggles over other political events; instead, it appears that he wants to show the true complexity of his land. He laughingly showed me babies in early photographs that would become the leading political demonstrators figured in later images, and, in the same manner, members of the idealistic youth who would become “the establishment.” It was like viewing a family album, except here the gatherings were streets protests, political marches, riots, political conferences, and private meetings.
As Miller continued to show me his work, I came to see how his photographs, his words, even the ephemeral material pinned to his desk board record his integrity and his commitment to equality. He understands that his role is to be present with his camera, recording moments of history that are crucial notations for generations to come—and not only in New Zealand. When I returned to Athens, I thought it would be important to include some of Miller’s records in the ensemble of documenta 14. In the following pages of South as a State of Mind, alongside the texts of Bywater and writer and teacher Cassandra Barnett, his photographs might be read as scores for alternative ways of living together.
—Marina Fokidis
Documents Alive
by Cassandra Barnett
Reo
Begin with the karanga. We do not know her name, but we hear her high, wailing cry. It reaches effortlessly over car engines toward a vocal threshold zone, making audible our spiritual transition, raising goosebumps all down the line. The voice weaves hosts and visitors, walkers and ancestors together, and carries us over dangerous thresholds—unseen, sacred ones as well as visible, geopolitical ones.
A caption? Maori Land March, Ngauranga Gorge, October 13, 1975. A “thousand-eyed eel,” one poet called this long walk.1 More story? Five thousand marchers arrive in Wellington, thirty days and 640 km after their departure from Te Hāpua in the north, protesting Māori land alienation and the Crown’s dishonorings of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi—the Treaty, taken (by Pākehā) to authorize full-scale colonization of our Aotearoa whenua as a nation-state, New Zealand. Aotearoa, a Māori name for a land that was (and is) multiple, islanded, tribal, crisscrossed with deep and old relations. “We were mobile. … And our stories moved. And unless you’re walking you can’t really … understand where the anchors to the stories are and how they work.”2
So I shy away from big pictures, from informing and information. Instead of a bird’s-eye view showing the eel in its entirety, feel its closeness to you and me. Read the signs, the angles. The long line gets longer. Our auntie looks to the eel’s tale, its nose disappearing ahead. Raises her arms, green sprigs receiving and sending back the energy and warmth of the rōpū—not just a greeting but a ballast. Tautoko. Those in earshot pause, listen, absorbing the salve of her call. That’s Dr. Douglas Sinclair over there. Who else? The photograph wants more names, but I’m not sure I can get us there. Read John Miller’s orientation. Close enough to our caller and her companion to share their intimacy, connected but apart. The curve of the roadside links eel-eye to camera-eye, binds Miller to the group, folds us in too. At last the camera is in Māori hands, witnessing our strength, rendering us visible. We walk motionlessly, backwards into the future, alongside one another.
Again, hear a female voice.3 Weaving black and white together. After the long walk, the arrival. Whina Cooper, Te Whaea o te Motu, Mother of the Nation. Dame, national icon, National Party supporter too. As a child she walked six miles to school. As a teenager she filled the drains dug by a local farmer on leased land faster than he could make them, successfully preserving the mudflats as mahinga kaimoana. At seventy-nine, a taniwha in her own robes of state. Korowai and ruff. A microphone and a chair to lean on. Umbrella held aloft, for it rained that day, weeping waters as she delivered the Memorial of Rights and the petition of sixty thousand signatures. Exercising her right to speak. Finally, a voice. Not one more acre.
Also here, Te Roopu o te Matakite: Those with Foresight. White flag waving, emblem of unity, whatever splits may lie ahead. Echoing Te Kooti’s white war flag, and the flag of the United Tribes of New Zealand.4 I know a little, not much more than you. Beneath the pennant, Ngā Tamatoa. Beards, badges, black berets, drawing in the brotherhood. Finally, visibility. As photographs travel, details become emblems. Black and white become symbols.
“Documentary is dead,” the artists said. But look, it helped galvanize us! Photographs are spiritual thieves, our ancestors said. But even we who fear photography concede it has some uses. Like these: to hold the mauri, or life force, of those photographed.
[T]he mauri can’t be untangled or separated from the image just because the photographer takes it far away from its source.
To remind us of our accountabilities. To bring home:
A photographer who returns to a marae to share the results of their photographic ventures upholds th[e] principle [of face-to-face reciprocity].5
Also here, John Miller, unseen. Making this point of view, caring for all the unseen. Inviting us to ask, across time: What are our relations? I will answer. I was born that year. 1975, in London, to hippie parents steering clear of Aotearoa politics, squatting in the Queen’s backyard. That thousand-eyed eel unfurled as I, an elver, swam slippery and naked in my bucket on the floor. You might answer: We want to see, know, understand. We want captions. Because photographs need captions. Or because we have forgotten, become softly reliant on text and written memory. And those to whom Whina speaks to? No answer. They stall, government changes, Te Roopu divides, losing strength … But something has begun.
Whenua
In our revolution, a turn. From walking the land to occupying the land. Inwards. Homewards, for Ngāti Whātua o Ōrākei, tribe of the Auckland region. Oh, so many acres. The story? In 1850, operating on a heterogeneous economy of gifting, partnership, and utu, Ngāti Whātua “sells” three thousand acres of ancestral lands to the Crown. It isn’t enough. By 1900 the Crown reduces the tribe to a papakāinga block at Ōkahu Bay and Takaparawhā Bastion Point; by 1950 they are evicted even from there. Houses destroyed, wharenui burned to the ground. In 1977, the Crown earmarks the same ancestral land for a high-income housing development. Landless and outraged, Ngāti Whātua o Ōrākei dig in and peacefully occupy for 507 days, until seven hundred police, army, and navy personnel forcefully evict them again—every home and building bulldozed.6 A caption? Marg’s Hut, Takaparawhāu Bastion Point, 1977.
Shorthand story facts. What of Tātahi? What of Āpihai Te Kawau?7 And who is Marg? Not my tribe, not my taonga, not my stories to tell, for they belong to those who remember these names. Yet this image has been passed to me, perhaps bearing some of the mauri of Marg and her Takaparawhāu whare—hot potato. Unwittingly I enter the dance of accountability. How should I hold this?
Return to what is visible, to what you have been given, the surface of this image? Trust the photographer to whom this moment was entrusted? Return to the joy of the uplifting colors, uprising colors, and the collaged glass windows. When is a trig station a home? When it has feet planted in the earth and four walls. When it squats, forgetting to survey. When it is inhabited with aroha. Reach for Ranginui, reach for Papatūānuku. Te Kooti’s cross flies again. Fill what was drained and watch the color flood back in. Tell me this isn’t the most beautiful hut you ever saw. Pass it home if you can.
Pay attention to the names. From the weeping waters of Waitangi to the bleeding sky of Rangitoto, the volcano-island straight out from Takaparawhāu. Our place names looked forward as well as back. But this mountain’s full name is Te Rangi-i-totongia-ai-te-ihu-o-Tamatekapua, The-day-that-Tamatekapua’s-nose-was-bloodied. Tamatekapua, the variegated cloud, captain of Te Arawa canoe, was given his bloody nose by my own tupuna, Hoturoa, captain of our canoe Tainui, in an altercation over Hoturoa’s wife. Is this a migration canoe in this photograph now, perhaps Ngāti Whātua’s Māhuhu-ki-te-Rangi? Magicked up by two mokopuna entering their whakapapa, holding fast to waka, maunga, and moana, ready to launch when the call is made? Nameless only to me, they paddle on in the shadow of their maunga.
Not my stories but my childhood snapshots look just the same—we are peers—and I weave myself in until the connection grows. I was two, returning to Aotearoa with my parents on another waka rererangi. Photos of the London squat and skinny-me washed in a bucket worried my Nana and Granddad. They dug deep, bought tickets, summoned us home from the center to this outskirt of British imperialism. Photographs have power. We settled in Tāmaki Auckland, a stone’s throw from Takaparawhā, the conversations of my parents and their friends turning to local matters. Bastion Point. Almost three, my ears were starting to tune in, for (unlike Land March) those words still ring memory bells now. A child playing in dinghies, seeing Rangitoto on the horizon, on her own slow journey toward her whakapapa and tūrangawaewae. Meanwhile, day 507 draws close.
Tāngata
If a photograph needs text, here is some: Amandla. Unite against Racism. Amandla, the Zulu and Xhosa word meaning “power,” which became a rallying cry of the African National Congress (ANC) and its allies against apartheid in South Africa. It resonates with our own power word, mana. If that doesn’t fill the hunger, a caption: African Freedom Fighters banner, Springbok tour protest, Auckland, 1981. But an emptiness persists, the image remains adrift. The anonymous seen face only punctuates the shielding of all the others. Here photographic surfaces double as blockades. Here lines are drawn differently. The passage to connection is not smooth. What has since changed?
During the 1981 Springbok rugby tour to New Zealand, both Māori and Pākehā protested vehemently in sympathy with black South Africans suffering under apartheid, and in anger at Māori players’ long exclusion (as nonwhites) from touring South Africa. The cultural melee got a shake up, the state cracked, pushed back. A need for helmets and shields. The issues were no longer just local, let alone just Māori. International relations were at stake. Miller observes, “The batons of riot squads and the firing of tear gas canisters—or worse—do not feature in any of my Māori protest photos.”8 Māori empowerment, like Māori self-sovereignty, was sidelined both in and out of the media, and thus “[a]ny perceived threat to the unitary state [was] effectively denied.”9 Miller’s Springbok tour archive (covering six of the North Island tour venues) indexes the mobilized masses, graphic banners and placards, fences toppled and cars overturned, blows dealt, a combative police force, the polarization of the nation.
Instead, focus on this: On September 12, 1981, four years to the day after Black Consciousness Movement founder Steve Biko’s brutal eviction from life under police custody in Pretoria, the third and deciding Springbok-All Blacks rugby test went ahead in Auckland. But Biko was present.
My Mum’s sister, who had lived in South Africa, was a protestor at the Waikato match, one of hundreds on the field who forced the game to be canceled, and was deeply affected by the experience. Then in 1985, a Biko banner visited our hometown of rural Matamata, where Mum and Auntie grew up and Nana still lived—another South Africa rugby tour, another protest, this time violently overcome. Matamata was and is a rugby town.
I grew up to be Māori after all, to have a tūrangawaewae I can take my son to—who is also African. Lucky ones. How is this not connected? How are these images not a part of the collective remembering that has kept the Treaty alive, upheld our values of reo, whenua, tāngata—even when buried inside Pākehā frames and views? A text of questions. How do I connect back to this “before my time”? Beyond the written and imaged record. Beyond hegemonic narratives of dualism, of regimes and revolutions, police states and uprisings. Beyond Western documentary and art conventions. It is not enough to add captions to documents. Not enough to read the composition aesthetically, for its punctum/s. Can I, with my late-learned, still-colonized Māoritanga, help connect these taonga to whakapapa, mine or others, and help preserve the mauri? Become more than a viewer or a writer, become, too, a witness, a relation, a loving ballast, alive to these taonga-documents, and help pass these people, whose images have been so useful, home, to where their stories and names are known?
Miller wrote to me recently, in a humble but excited way, of opportunities to return some of his Waitangi photographs to Waitangi, and his Parewahawaha meeting house photographs to Bulls. In the words of Māori filmmaker and writer Barry Barclay,
Are not these things we value … called taonga by us? … Treasures, some of them, with a mauri? … We once had taonga. We once had guardians. We once had keepers.10
Miller is a keeper.
Māori Glossary
A
āhua · Appearance, likeness
Aotearoa · Māori name for New Zealand
aroha · Love, affection, empathy
H
hapū · Subtribe
hīkoi · March, walk, trek, journey
K
Kaikaranga · Caller (of the karanga)
karanga · Ceremonial call of welcome
kāwanatanga · Governership, authority, dominion, rule
kōhanga reo, te · Māori language preschool (lit. “nest of language”)
Kōrero · Speech, narrative, story, conversation
korowai · Cloak made of muka (flax) fibre
kōwhaiwhai · Painted scroll ornamentation
M
mahinga kaimoana · Seafood gathering place
Māhuhu-ki-te-rangi · Ancestral canoe of Ngāti Whātua
mana · Authority, spiritual power (gifted to humans by the atua/gods)
manaakitanga · Hospitality, generosity, support and care for others
Māoritanga · Māori culture, beliefs, practices, way of life
marae · Courtyard or open area in front of the wharenui where formal greetings and discussions take place; complex of buildings around this area
marae ātea · As above, but specifically the courtyard (not the complex of buildings)
maunga · Mountain
mauri · Life force, vital essence, material symbol of a life principle, object in which this essence is located
moana · Sea
mokopuna · Grandchild, descendant
N
Ngā Puhi · Tribal group of the Northland region
Ngā Tamatoa · “The Warriors”: a Māori activist group promoting Māori rights, fighting racial discrimination, and challenging violations of the Treaty of Waitangi. Active mainly during the 1970s
Ngāti Whātua · Tribal group of the area from Kaipara to Tāmaki Makaurau (present-day Auckland)
Ngāti Whātua o Ōrakei · A hapū of Ngāti Whātua, with its rohe/territory mainly in Tāmaki Makaurau (present-day Auckland)
P
Pākehā · New Zealander of European descent
papakāinga · Original home, village, communal land
Papatūānuku · Earth, Earth mother, wife of Ranginui
pouwhenua · Supreme tohunga/priest, leader; boundary post
R
rangatira · Chief, leader, noble/esteemed/high-ranking person
Ranginui · Sky, God of the Sky, husband of Papatūānuku
Rangitoto · An island volcano in the Waitemata harbour, full name Te Rangi-i-totongia-ai-te-ihu-o-Tamatekapua/The-day-that-Tamatekapua’s-nose-was-bloodied
reo · Voice, language, tongue
rōpū (var. Roopu) · Group, party, entourage
T
Tainui · Ancestral canoe of several tribes including those from Waikato and the King Country
Takaparawhāu · Bastion Point: a coastal piece of land in Orakei, Auckland, overlooking the Waitemata Harbour
tāngata · People
taniwha · Water spirit, monster, powerful leader; taniwha take many forms including eels
taonga · Goods, treasure, anything prized
tautoko · Support, backing, agreement
te ao Māori · Māori world
te Arawa · Ancestral canoe of tribes of the Rotorua-Maketū area
te Hāpua · The most northerly settlement in the North Island of Aotearoa
te Whaea o te Motu · The Mother of the Nation
Tiriti o Waitangi · Treaty of Waitangi; first signed on February 6, 1840, by representatives of the British Crown and various Māori chiefs from the North Island of New Zealand, which resulted in the declaration of British sovereignty over New Zealand in May 1840
tupuna · Ancestor
tūrangawaewae · Place where one has rights of residence and belonging through kinship and whakapapa
U
utu · Cost, reciprocity
W
waka · Canoe
waka rererangi · Airplane (lit. “canoe that flies in the sky”)
whaikōrero · Oratory, speechmaking
whakapapa · Genealogy, lineage; the reciting of genealogies (lit. ˝to place in layers“)
whanaungatanga · Relationship, kinship, family connection
whare · House
wharenui · Meeting house, house of the ancestors
whare tangata · House of humanity, womb
whare tupuna · House of the ancestors, meeting house
whenua · Land
Māori Control of Māori Things
by Jon Bywater
The European compass was unknown to the navigators who first populated the vast sea of islands that comprises Oceania. However, the importance to them of the positions of the rising and setting sun, and midpoints between these—oriented also (as they were for Mediterranean sailors) to winds, as well as to tides, and the movements of the stars—means that in many Polynesian languages the word tonga is a more or less exact equivalent to south.11 Setting out from what is now known as Southeast Asia, ancestral Lapita voyagers explored to their southeast, against the prevailing trade winds to allow themselves an easy return journey, whatever they might find. The hard-won discoveries of theirs and their Polynesian descendants reflect this general trajectory in place names still in use: Tonga, the southernmost group of the islands of central Polynesia, and Rarotonga, the main island of the Cook Islands group, likewise named for the direction from which it was first approached (“raro” meaning “below” or in nautical terms “leeward”).
The Māori name for the very southernmost islands in the ocean Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan called Pacífico also records a seafarer’s perspective: Aotearoa, “the land of the long white cloud.” Freshly painted in 1981, a long orange graffito photographed by John Miller in Auckland, New Zealand, is a play on this usual translation. It points a finger at a general “wrongness” of the more recently arrived and now majority white settler population, but more specifically, at the nation’s implicit support for apartheid South Africa by hosting a tour of their national rugby team that year.
Typical of Miller, the image records a public space claimed by a noninstitutional voice; but by far the majority of his archive depicts people together, meeting, discussing, demonstrating. His coverage of the opening of the whare tupuna Parewahawaha at Bulls, north of Wellington, in 1967, affords a glimpse of a particular form of collectivity that informs his work. The community facility we see here is a modern marae, “a symbol of tribal identity and solidarity.”12 Viewed in this frame as they crowd around the marae ātea, in their home knits, hats, and short backs and sides, the community that coheres in this space—a meeting place not only of those individuals and groups living but also of their tupuna—is based in conceptions and practices of ownership and responsibility structured by whakapapa and whanaungatanga.
Early in the same year that he photographed Parewahawaha, Miller covered his first political demonstration, sparked by the visit of South Vietnamese Premier Nguyễn Cao Kỳ.13 He was still at school and borrowed the camera he used from his uncle. The national cultural landscape he has gone on to document,14 often at the nexus between te Ao Māori and political action, reached a turning point with that same year’s Maori Affairs Amendment Act. In the simplest terms it was a last straw. Boldly increasing the state’s powers to acquire Māori land, it was recognized by Māori as “the last land grab,” another step in a long story of dispossession since the advent of colonial rule in 1840. A bill that had been unanimously opposed by Māori organizations, national, regional, and local, was nonetheless passed into law. In the face of the government’s ability to ignore established channels of consultation with Māori, an awareness of international collective organization against discrimination, exploitation, and state violence—including the anti–Vietnam War and U.S. Civil Rights movements—inspired an emerging generation of political leaders to take up strategies of direct action, to risk making people uncomfortable in order to be understood.15
The group Ngā Tamatoa became the public face of a new wave of Māori activism.16 Tied to the columns of Parliament House in this early demonstration, their banner repeats a long-standing demand for self-determination in a more recent idiom. Their business on this occasion was the delivery of a petition requesting the inclusion of Māori language in the national school curriculum. Facing the camera, Tame Iti of Ngāi Tūhoe was one of very few in his generation who had grown up as a native speaker.17
Ngā Tamatoa also declared their own national Māori language day, te Ra Nui o Te Reo Māori, marked in this demonstration in St. Kevins Arcade, Auckland, advocating in Māori, “Learn Māori.” The idea of a national day was taken up officially to become te Wiki o Te Reo Māori, Māori Language Week, now observed annually since 1975. Such energies led in turn to the founding of the first kōhanga reo in 1982, and ultimately the Māori Language Act that belatedly established Māori as one of the nation’s official languages in 1987.18
Land rights were also eventually recognized. Ngā Tamatoa politicized the anniversary of the first signing of te Tiriti o Waitangi. They attempted a flag burning on Treaty Grounds at Waitangi in 1971 that Miller was present to photograph, after which they staged various creative actions at the official celebrations, promoting the slogan “The treaty is a fraud” as a statement of the government’s ongoing neglect of Treaty principles. In 1973, for example, they wore black armbands in mourning at the loss of Māori land. Through a media presence and direct contact with politicians, they helped to catalyze popular awareness that culminated in the watershed Māori Land March of 1975, with its catchphrase “Not one more acre of Māori land.”
Miller photographed the hīkoi on the last of its thirty days as it arrived into Wellington after traversing the length of the North Island enabled by the manākitanga of two dozen marae along the route, who provided shelter for the fifty core walkers who made the entire journey and their supporters. The action drew together Māori across many political differences, and won a broad base of Pākehā support. The Land March together with protests against more specific historical injustices, including the occupations of contested land at Takaparawhā Bastion Point (1977–78) and Whāingaroa Raglan golf course (1978), led to the empowerment of the Waitangi Tribunal in 1985—a decade after it was set up—to consider retrospective claims against breaches of te Tiriti. These claims have been settled from 1992 onwards, leading to the return of land and financial compensation to iwi.19
To summarize so much so briefly runs an obvious risk of suggesting these issues might be resolved and of underplaying the suffering that underlies them. Protest photography as a genre raises a parallel one. Picturing stances that may now appear on the right side of history, that may have the potential glamour of clothing and hairstyles disjoint from the present, can tempt the viewer to romanticize the struggles witnessed in them. While depictions of explicit violence must be received critically also, an image like the one that follows of police beating protestors during the 1981 Springbok Tour offers a reminder of what civil disobedience can put at stake. The central place of sport, rugby union in particular, in the national culture, generated a profound intensity of feeling. The splashes of red in this shot are paint not blood, but two thousand people were arrested, some badly injured and some jailed.20
Fifteen years later, some of the same police riot gear issued in 1981 is still visible in Miller’s shot of Waitangi Day protestors attempting to reach the Treaty Grounds across a road bridge.21 The flag flown by them here, designed in 1990, is a symbol for te tino rangatiratanga; a phrase key to understanding Māori claims for self-determination. It is cited from the second of the three articles of te Tiriti. While the English version of the first article stated that Māori were ceding “sovereignty,” in the Māori text this was rendered as “kāwanatanga,” a cognate of the transliteration of “governor,” kāwana, more suggestive of government or administration. The second article promised “possession” but in the Māori “te tino rangatiratanga”—absolute authority, arguably a closer rendering of ”sovereignty”—over their land, territories, and everything of value to them (“o ratou wenua o ratou kainga me o ratou taonga katoa”).22 The significance of the variance between the two texts has been contentious, but in 2014 a Waitangi Tribunal report concluded that the rangatira who signed te Tiriti in February 1840 did not cede their sovereignty.23
After a decade of treaty settlements, in 2003 the Court of Appeal of New Zealand ruled that Māori could seek customary title to areas of Aotearoa’s foreshore and seabed. In response, the government proposed legislation removing this right. Here we see marchers on a hīkoi organized the following year to mark opposition to it, symbolically modeled on the action of 1975. Cyril Chapman, who for its final section bore the pouwhenua that headed the 1975 hīkoi, holds a laminated print of himself gifted to him by Miller. Despite the outcry, the Foreshore and Seabed Act was passed.
In the spirit of the event, Miller’s photographs of 2004 deliberately echo his 1975 coverage, but his body of work as a whole is testament to continuities and a momentum of knowledge, experience, and skills that provide a firm rebuttal to the politician’s spin that the same people turning up again and again might suggest some lack of integrity of purpose or grounding of their causes.24 Deployed in this way, its dignifying and memorializing function positions it in the service of the marginalized. Moreover, Miller’s practice can be understood through the concept of whakapapa, in the respect that it rehearses lineages, sequences, giving weight to the facts of who was where, when, and with whom.
In person Miller is an indefatigable storyteller. He honors such information with his capacity for detailed recall. Driving with him to spend this year’s Waitangi weekend camping at Te Tii Marae, he pointed out the spot where he and his mother, while hitchhiking north, had stopped for patriotically colored red, white, and blue ice creams especially produced for the Queen’s visit to Waitangi in 1963. We were there with artist collective Local Time to present a selection of his protest photography, and over the three days that Te Tii was open to the public.25 His conversations with visitors, including many of those depicted in the photographs, brought home to me how, in pursuing what he considers it important to document, he has been on the journey, slept alongside and shared food with the participants. The people involved are a primary audience for the work. At the same time, as images, they have the power to invoke different communities, one after another, as they hold us together, offering us access to places and times we might not otherwise be able to see as clearly.
1 Graham Lindsay, Thousand-eyed Eel: A Sequence of Poems from the Māori Land March 1975 (Taylors Mistake, Christchurch: Hawk Press, 1976), n. p.
2 Pita Turei, Te Araroa: Tales from the Trail, series 2, episode 3 (Scottie Productions, 2015).
3 Women, the whare tangata, have the power of transition, of crossing from the sacred to the profane, and back again. This is fundamental to our role as kaikaranga. But here Whina Cooper is delivering a kōrero, not a karanga. Whaikōrero was thought by many to be a male domain, a custom Whina challenged.
4 Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki (ca. 1832–1893) was a Māori leader and visionary, the founder of the Ringatū religion and a guerrilla fighter. He used a number of distinctive flags as symbols of power, including Te Wepu and the war flag Te Pōrere, both featuring a crescent moon and a cross.
5 Natalie Robertson, “Can I Take a Photo of the Marae? Dynamics of Photography in Te Ao Māori,” in UNFIXED: Photography and Postcolonial Perspectives in Contemporary Art, ed. Sara Blokland and Asmara Pelupessy (Heijningen, Netherlands: Jap Sam Books, 2012), p. 103.
6 If the Land March played its part in the birth of the Waitangi Tribunal, the situation at Takaparawhāu Bastion Point empowered the commission of inquiry to hear historical land claims, of which Ngāti Whātua’s became the first to be heard. In 1988, the government agreed to the Waitangi Tribunal’s recommendation that Takaparawhāu be returned to Ngāti Whātua. Marg Jones, a Pākehā supporter from Australia, appropriated the Lands and Survey Dept. trig station for her occupation dwelling. George McMillan, Commissioner of Crown Lands at the time, mistook its purpose, angrily denouncing its use as a privy on his return to his office from an inspection trip. From conversation with Miller, May 2017.
7 Both significant ancestors of Ngāti Whātua with connections to the history of Takaparawhā.
8 John Miller, “John Miller: Media Peace Award Recipient 2003,” Photoforum 69 (December 2003). Online: www.photoforum-nz.org/index.php?pageID=27.
9 Ibid.
10 Barry Barclay, Mana Tuturu: Māori Treasures and Intellectual Property Rights (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2005), p. 65.
11 Malcolm Ross, Andrew Pawley, and Meredith Osmond, The Lexicon of Proto Oceanic: The Culture and Environment of Ancestral Oceanic Society 2, The Physical Environment (Canberra: ANU, 2007), pp. 136–37.
12 Cleve Barlow, Tikanga Whakaro: Key Concepts in Māori Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 73.
13 “John Miller: Media Peace Award Recipient 2003.”
14 Alongside his peer Gil Hanly, Miller’s body of work as an independent photojournalist is an exceptionally complete record of political activity in Aotearoa over the past fifty years. See Nina Seja, PhotoForum at 40: Counterculture, Clusters, and Debate in New Zealand (Auckland: Rim Books, 2014), pp. 91–105.
15 Ranginui Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou: Struggle Without End (1990; repr., Auckland: Penguin, 2004), pp. 203–09.
16 The Black Panther Party influenced the unapologetic stance of Ngā Tamatoa, the young warriors, and more explicitly their associates the Polynesian Panthers. See Melani Anae, Lautofa luli, and Leilani Tamu, eds., Polynesian Panthers: Pacific Protest and Affirmative Action in Aotearoa New Zealand 1971–1981 (Wellington: Huia, 2015), and Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou, pp. 209–12.
17 The Native Schools Act (1867) and the Native Schools Code (1880) saw Māori in schools gradually removed from the colonial English-style school system of the previous century. Subsequently, Māori children were punished for speaking their first language at school, and the urbanization of the Māori population separated them even further from Māori-speaking environments.
18 Aroha Harris, Hīkoi: Forty Years of Māori Protest (Wellington: Huia, 2004), pp. 44–57.
19 Ibid., pp. 58–87.
20 A fuller view on the events was quickly published in 1981, see Thomas Newnham, By Batons and Barbed Wire: A Response to the 1981 Springbok Tour of New Zealand (Auckland: Real Pictures, 1981), and later, in 1984, by independent journalist Geoff Chapple in his comprehensive 1981: The Tour (Wellington: Reed, 1984). The protests are an important example of the two-way nature of the conversation between activism in Aotearoa and the rest of the world. They had impact internationally, in particular when South Africans watched the cancellation of the Waikato game live on television. Nelson Mandela told Dame Catherine Tizard during his 1995 visit to New Zealand that when prisoners on Robben Island in South Africa heard protests had forced that game to be called off, it was “like the sun came out.” Trevor Richards, Dancing on Our Bones: New Zealand, South Africa, Rugby and Racism (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 1999), pp. 249–53.
21 The ongoing challenge to the government presented by protest at Waitangi has been met with a controversial refusal by the prime minister to attend this year and last. See Leonie Hayden, “Waitangi 2017 Media in Review: A Change Is Gonna Come,” Mana (February 2017). Online: www.mana.co.nz/news/waitangi-media-in-review-a-change-is-gonna-come.html.
22 Claudia Orange, The Treaty of Waitangi, rev. ed. (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2011), p. 31.
23 Waitangi Tribunal Report WAI 1040, He Whakaputanga me te Tiriti / The Declaration and the Treaty: The Report on Stage 1 of the Te Paparahi o Te Raki Inquiry (2014), p. xxii.
24 Like that which ignored the Foreshore and Seabed protests, the succeeding government has been dismissive of demonstrations, using the talking point that a proportion of the turnout is made up of “professional protestors” or a “rent-a-crowd.”
25 For the Auckland iteration of the exhibition Politics of Sharing: On Collective Wisdom, co-conceived by Elke aus dem Moore and Misal Adnan Yıldız, the collective Local Time (www.local-time.net) worked with John Miller on Local Time: Waitangi 2-Feb-2017 – 6-Feb-2017 1000+1300. See online: www.artspace.org.nz/exhibitions/2017/politicsofsharingoncollectivewisdom.asp.