Goddesses and Grandmothers
Hinetītama, the Dawn Maiden, the first human born of a woman, an ancestor who lies deep in our mitochondrial past, questions her paternity. She, daughter to Hineahuone, the Clay Formed, and wife to Tāne-Māhuta, who separated the primeval parents, wonders who her own father might be. Curious, she asks Tāne. Evasive, he suggests she consult the pou of the house they share. At this moment, doubt crystallises to terrible knowledge, and it is revealed that her lover is also her father. Shaken but unbowed, [for who knows what laws were in place, when the world was young, when there were only two human women and no human men? After all, who did Adam and Eve’s children breed with?] and having all the information at hand, she decides to abandon (or at least, transcend) this realm. Tāne, grief-stricken, attempts to persuade then pursue her. She, resolute in her decision, decrees that he will assume responsibility for their children: humanity, that is. She, as Hine-nui-te-Pō, Great Woman of the Night, will safeguard us in Rarohenga, when we slip free of these bodies, leaving tied flax knots in our wake along the coast north to Te Rerenga Wairua and diving deep where oceans meet as the kuaka scream their elegies. She, having assessed the situation and possible responses, determines her future and becomes a goddess.
* * * * * * *
Mahuika and Murirangawhenua sit together by the fire. Recalling their grandson, Māui, and his recent antics, Mahuika remarks with satisfaction that, as they had predicted, the time had come for humans to receive fire permanently, to use as they themselves did, instead of returning each morning to receive a new flame. Long had the two grandmothers discussed the manner in which this should happen; certainly, a request or an attempt to obtain it must occur before Mahuika would merely hand over such a powerful tool. This would demonstrate readiness to accept and use fire in all its various ways; the child cannot use the taiaha until they are mature enough to take it up. For their own reasons, they decide it will be Māui who receives this gift. Because the ways of the world then were strange and wonderful, as this conversation occurred in one place, in another, Māui finds himself wondering where the little cooking flame that must be replenished each day really comes from. This leads him to Mahuika’s cave, where, in the playful and indulgent manner in which one humours a toddler in a game of hide and seek, she pretends not to recognise him, allowing him to ‘trick’ her into giving him her fingernails made of flame [which, by the way, grow back you dipshits] the last of which, in a final flourish, she flings at him (although he is in no danger, no more than a child being thrown into the air and caught safely again). Certain trees catch alight, but in the rains that Māui calls up from his uncle, fire retreats to the heart of the tree. (These are the trees we use to make fire, and the fire’s retreat to the centre speaks to the effort required to extract it again) It is Prometheus in a nutshell, with one important exception; it is the grandmother who is really the ‘hero’ of this tale. But the very idea of a hero is Western, rooted in Greco-Roman ideals, and always demanding an enemy Other against which
[for such a being can never, must never, be a whom, but must always remain an object]
heroic (read: violent) acts can be performed. Isn’t it strange that the conditions under which heroes emerge always entail a justified violence on behalf of the Hero? The ‘real’ moral to be extracted here, if anything, is that heroes are often irrelevant, if not dangerous, and that grandmothers have profound powers.
* * * * * * *
Later, Murirangawhenua and Mahuika sit by the fire. Murirangawhenua seeks again her sister’s thoughts on the growing, expanding, yet becoming more finely textured, nature of human knowledge. She wonders if, just as the time came for humans to master fire, it is right that new kinds of knowledge be made available again, after the requisite effort has been made. The issue at hand is this: Murirangawhenua possesses both an upper and a lower jaw-bone; jaw-bones of course, being powerful symbols of particular kinds of knowledge. The upper jaw-bone represents knowledge of a celestial nature, is fixed in place, and therefore represents kawa, which is also fixed. The lower jaw-bone represents terrestrial knowledge, and because it moves during laughter, song, and speech, also represents tikanga, which is fluid and contingent. Together, they comprise significant bodies of knowledge. What knowledge can safely be entrusted to mortal hands? The sisters decide that only the kauae raro, the lower jaw-bone, will be given to humanity. This is the knowledge that Māui uses to restrain the Sun, artfully lengthening the days that all might have time to accomplish their daily tasks. He also uses this knowledge to direct his fishing line to Te-Ika-ā-Māui, birthing an island.
* * * * * * *
Why is it then, that the tattered remnants of these traditions found in written ‘anthropological’ works, uniformly describe Hine-Nui-Te-Pō as fleeing in shame from her encounter? Why are Mahuika and Murirangawhenua reduced to mere satellites in their own stories, obediently orbiting a central male figure around whom all the important and noteworthy events occur?
[and worse, why do so many of our own retellings reproduce such debased interpretations?]
These are rhetorical questions. I consider it taken as given, thanks to the scholarship and efforts by wahine toa such as Aroha Yates-Smith, Donna Awatere, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, Leonie Pihama, Jessica Hutchings, Kuni Jenkins, Ani Mikaere, Ngahuia Murphy, Naomi Simmonds, and too many others to name, that the misogyny of 19th Century Britain is bound up in the colonial project and that there have been particular impacts on Māori women that Māori men, protected to some degree by shared qualities of masculinity, have escaped. This is not to suggest that Māori formulations of masculinity have not been contorted and re-framed; only that, until recently, many Māori men appeared to enjoy participating in formal processes of power that wāhine remained excluded from, without doing much to remedy the situation. I get that their own power would have been limited in the colonial context, but this does not (entirely, if at all) exonerate them.
Much is made of Kate Sheppard, who is generally held to be responsible for universal suffrage in New Zealand. But little is spoken of Meri Te Tai Mangakāhia, who insisted that, in addition to merely voting, women, Māori women in particular, should have the power to make rules. Mangakāhia was less concerned with buying into an imported system that oppressed women and much more interested in reasserting the rights wāhine enjoyed that began to wither under the twinned glare of the Church and the Crown. But it is Sheppard who gets the $10 note and celebrations. What does that say about us a nation?
It has become tiresome to recite the myriad harms and insults inflicted upon the mana of Māori women and our material circumstances, too often in connection with the contempt displayed by the patriarchy for ‘womens’ work’. This connection will no doubt be elucidated by the Mana Wahine Kaupapa Inquiry which finally commenced in December 2018, some quarter of a century after it was initially lodged by a host of Mana Wahine stalwarts including Dame Whina Cooper, Mabel Waititi, Lady Rose Henare, Dame Mira Szászy, Dame Areta Koopu, Donna Awatere, Paparangi Reid, and Ripeka Evans.
It has been a big year for the Inquiry: $6.2 million was allocated under Budget 2019 to progress it, and Te Rūnanga o Ngā Toa Awhina – the Public Service Association, which represents those employed, directly or indirectly, by the government - successfully lodged Claim Wai 2864 which “calls on the Crown to address inequities in employment suffered by wāhine Māori”. Claimant Georgina Kerr stated that:
It’s fantastic the Tribunal will hear our claim. It calls out the Crown for its failure to address injustices that have relegated generations of wāhine Māori to low paid jobs with working conditions that leave them extremely vulnerable... This includes the failure of the education system to adequately prepare wāhine Māori for meaningful employment, the failure to eliminate bias and discrimination in the workplace, and the failure to consistently fund services that should be enhancing the lives of Māori wāhine and their whānau. (1)
Addressing these matters is long overdue, and other commentators have noted that the Crown’s delay in hearing this claim could itself constitute evidence of the claim.
All of this is vital and important to any Mana Wahine project. But one aspect of colonisation that has gone largely unexamined is the effect that Māori culture had on Pākehā. We’re accustomed to thinking of colonisation as strictly one-way traffic, a big fish swallowing a little fish. The truth however, as truths often are, is more complicated than this. In what ways did we influence them? What barbed hooks catch in the gullet, refusing to be dislodged? What Māori microbes have become embedded in the Pākeha gut? Do you really think it a coincidence that the first country to declare universal suffrage is the one where, for almost all its history, women had held considerable status and power, able to lead, fight, arbitrate disputes, and own, inherit and dispose of land?
Māori women, as our atua wāhine before us, were not and are not passive recipients of our fate. Because it descends from them and resides within us, although it can be insulted, our mana can never truly be taken from us. Let me be clear; material conditions must change, and they will not change themselves. But it is in exercising our mana that change occurs, and we find examples of that everywhere, from our oral traditions to the mahi that those around us are doing in the present moment.
Magical transformations exist in Māori thought, and new problems sometimes require old solutions. Beyond dealing with the fallout of over a century of systemic discrimination, the global spectres of climate change and rising inequality demand localised Mana Wahine solutions. Possibilities for such solutions can only begin to emerge by foregrounding the particularities of the experiences of wāhine Māori. Let goddesses and grandmothers show the way!