New Zealand Wars prisoners’ waiata remain a beacon of hope

Victoria University of Wellington researchers are recovering the artistic expression and intellectual history contained in a forgotten trove of Māori songcraft.

Arini Loader and Mike Ross on Victoria University of Wellington marae with a copy of the waiata at the heart of their research project.
Dr Arini Loader and Dr Mike Ross with a copy of the waiata at the heart of their project.

A statement of hope amid the worst of circumstances, expressed in a waiata performed last year for the first time in possibly a century, is one of the spurs for a group of Victoria University of Wellington researchers to make a short film celebrating the forgotten trove of Māori songcraft of which the waiata is part.

With its opening line requesting “Let the sun shine”, the waiata is one of 230, along with a selection of karakia (incantations), whakataukī (proverbial sayings) and narrative pieces, written down by prisoners captured in November 1863 at the battle of Rangiriri, a devastating turning point for Māori during the New Zealand Wars.

John McGregor, a guard on the prison hulk Marion moored in Auckland Harbour, asked the prisoners for the waiata and other pieces, the manuscript where they wrote them down eventually making its way into Governor Sir George Grey’s collection of Māori language material.

McGregor published the waiata in book form in 1893, under the title Popular Māori Songs. In his introduction, he says he had intended to transcribe them many years before but had only now found the time.

Dr Arini Loader, from Victoria University of Wellington’s history programme, and Dr Mike Ross, from the School of Māori Studies/Te Kawa a Māui, have been drawing on Popular Māori Songs and the original manuscript, which has lain buried in Grey’s collection for more than 120 years, in order to recover and reclaim the artistic expression and intellectual history the waiata represent.

“Moreover,” says Dr Loader, “we are taking up uniquely Māori styles, forms and language in order to tell New Zealand’s settler colonial history from the perspective of the first peoples of Aotearoa, from tangata whenua, from Māori minds and hearts.”

It is, she says, ironic the manuscript should be in Grey’s collection.

“Grey was the biggest collector of Māori language materials at the time. He dominated the field. It’s quite perverse that he’s the man who led the invasion of Waikato, and inflicted so much pain and suffering on Māori people and communities we still feel to this day, and yet he’s also the man who collected all this incredible material.

“We have to go and sit in his special collections to read the manuscript even though he had everything to do with why the people who wrote them down were in prison in the first place.”

When the prisoners gave McGregor the waiata, they did not know what was going to happen to them, says Dr Loader.

“There was a rumour the ship was going to be towed out to the ocean and sunk. They didn’t know if they were going to be lined up and shot. Neither Grey nor his ministers knew what to do with them.”

Being able to write, in a place where communication is restricted and censored, “can be something that keeps you going, keeps you sane, keeps you human”, she says.

The project has an extra layer of meaning for Dr Ross, whose iwi, Ngāti Hauā in eastern Waikato, fought in the battle of Rangiriri, including his great-great grandfather.

“As part of the project, I went back to Waikato and talked to elders in our tribe who know a lot about our history, but they didn’t really know anything about this manuscript. Looking at it, though, our tribe is mentioned in some of the songs and some of the place names in our geographical area are mentioned, so I assume they were written by our people.”

When a teacher relative of Dr Ross’s read a copy of the manuscript, they took one of the waiata, added a tune to it (the original having been long lost) and taught it to students at their school, Te Wharekura o te Rau Aroha.

“The thing about this particular waiata is it has a little introduction of four lines talking about the context of the waiata,” says Dr Ross. “It was written by a person in a desperate place and maybe that’s why the prisoner included it in McGregor’s manuscript; they were also in a desperate place.

“But the first line of it is a statement of hope—it says: ‘E whiti e te rā’ (Let the sun shine).”

Attending a student performance of the waiata, Dr Ross found this line resonant.

“Sitting and watching these young people sing that, knowing some of the families they came from and their links to the families of the men listed as taken prisoner, I thought this is really something—the hopes and dreams of those people in the 1860s have in some ways been realised, with their descendants continuing to sit on this land, singing those words hoping for a better day while demonstrating that better day in a school they have set up for their young people.”

At the same time, say Dr Ross and Dr Loader, the waiata also speaks to the road that remains to be travelled and offers hope for unfulfilled aspirations.

With a $20,000 grant from the team leading Victoria University of Wellington’s ‘Enriching national culture/He Whenua Haumako’ area of distinctive strength, the two researchers are working with Ngāti Hauā, including iwi member Hoani Hotene, and Willie Franco, a PhD student from Te Kawa a Māui, to make a short film showcasing the waiata to a wider audience.

“I think if we do a good job here, not only my tribe was involved in the battle, there were a number of other tribes, and that might allow other people to think about how they could tell the story as it relates to them,” says Dr Ross.

Dr Loader, winner of the Royal Society Te Apārangi’s 2018 Te Kōpūnui Māori Research Award for her innovative scholarship illuminating taonga, says, “In an era when public debates periodically surface about Anzac Day and Waitangi Day, national identify, public spending, resources and Treaty of Waitangi settlements, the New Zealand public is ripe for vigorous and more informed discussion and debate concerning our shared colonial past and our distinctly unsettled present.”

She, Dr Ross, Hoani Hotene and Willie Franco aim to complete their film in mid-2019.