Visit theallusionist.org/bequest to hear this episode and find out more information about it
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, am not going to play minigolf with language again after what language did to that windmill at the fourteenth hole.
In today’s episode we’re heading to Aotearoa New Zealand, to discuss gender identity and sexual orientation; there will be a swear. It feels weird to issue a content note for that when the episode also discusses corporal punishment and colonialism, which are significantly more offensive than an f-word.
On with the show.
ELIZABETH KEREKERE: The British, they had a textbook, they had a way they did things. They've refined that in cultures and countries all over the world. And so they just brought that here. And what I'm thankful about is we did retain our culture. We did retain our language. And my belief is that our ancestors had clues for us to find. A lot of my research, I believe, is detective work, to find the clues so that we can unveil what our ancestors thought.
HZ: This is Elizabeth Kerekere, a Māori scholar and LGBTQ+ activist.
ELIZABETH KEREKERE: I'm chair of Tiwhanawhana Trust, and we advocate for takatāpui, that's Māori with diversity in sexualities and sex characteristics. This is a Māori term. So it's not for non Māori. If you are Māori you can claim this. This is a Māori identity.
HZ: Elizabeth spent years studying this word, ‘takatāpui’. An English equivalent might be ‘queer’ in its current use.
ELIZABETH KEREKERE: So we use it as an umbrella term, but it's also an identity, people who claim it for themselves to say, “Actually, I'm all of these things.” It's also very useful for people who are in a space of change and are fluid themselves to not have to pin themselves down. Sometimes the English language can be inelegant and doesn't quite capture who we are. Takatāpui just means, "We are all of that. We have every potential."
HZ: The word ‘takatāpui’ has been revived since the 1980s.
ELIZABETH KEREKERE: So it means 'traditionally intimate partner of the same sex'. So we have adapted that today. So we've taken it from our ancestors and help place us in a clear framework that says our ancestors supported and accepted same sex relationships, but also in other research we've done, some fluidity around gender and sexuality. And of course, they were very sex positive. Which, of course, was very offensive to the English.
HZ: ‘Takatāpui’ was listed in The Dictionary of the Māori Language in 1832.
HEMI KELLY: The first Māori dictionary, one of the earliest dictionaries, the definition of that word is 'an intimate companion of the same sex'. But it's a little bit ambiguous as well, because the word ‘intimate’ can be interpreted differently.
HZ: Just note that the dictionary was compiled by a missionary, named Herbert Williams, so the style erred on the side of coy. A bigger clue came in a manuscript from the 1840s.
HEMI KELLY: By a Māori author, written entirely in Māori, where he tells the story of Hinemoa and Tutanekai, who are two ancestors, it's a very famous love story, who would have lived perhaps 400 years prior to him writing the story. And he uses the word takatāpui in there to talk about the relationship between the main male character in the story, Tutanekai, and his close companion, Tiki, of the same sex, his close companion of the same sex. ‘Takatāpui’ is the word that's used, and their relationship is very intimate. You can tell in the words that the author uses.
HZ: And takatāpui is an important word because it is linguistic evidence that fluid sexual and gender identities existed in Māori society, before New Zealand was colonised, before Christianity was introduced, and notions of cisgender heterosexuality were imposed.
HEMI KELLY: That word is the only evidence, in the language, that those kind of connections existed.
My name is Hemi Kelly, a lecturer in the Māori language, which is the indigenous language of New Zealand. I suppose all of my work is related somehow to the teaching and revitalization of the Māori language.
HZ: And the language needed revitalizing, because although it was the language of Aotearoa New Zealand at the start of the 19th century, it was about to face two centuries of attrition.
HEMI KELLY: So take us back, a little bit of a history timeline: so Captain Cook arrived 1769. The first European settlers to come here would have followed his voyage.
HZ: The Europeans were turning up and introducing such things as potatoes, guns, Christianity, infectious diseases, invasive species, and also the English language. And just as the stoats the English brought with them laid waste to the native bird population, so the English language threatened Māori.
And in 1840, the British further asserted themselves with the Treaty of Waitangi, which made New Zealand a British colony and gave the Māori the rights of British subjects whilst retaining their property rights - supposedly.
HEMI KELLY: The treaty was signed in 1840 between the Crown, the British Crown, and Māori leadership, Māori tribes, with the hope that the crown would give them some sort of protection, that they would still have full rights and ownership over their own properties and lands. The British had a different idea about what that treaty meant.
HZ: They also had a different treaty, effectively; it was written in both Māori and English, but the meaning of the two versions did not match.
HEMI KELLY: And actually, they didn't even honour that treaty. It was disregarded straight away. And they started to establish law in the country, establish acts that alienated Māori from their lands. There were then the Māori land wars in the 1860s through to 70s and the 80s.
If we think about the language, the loss of the language, one thing that I kind of put it down to - well, there are a lot of things, but in 1867, the Native Schools Act was established, which set up two schooling systems, one for European children and one for Māori children. And the language of instruction in those schools was English, and Māori children coming from only Māori speaking homes were punished for speaking their mother tongue, and a lot of elders who are still alive today talk about their experiences in those schools. Those schools were operating from 1867 through to 1969, so you can imagine over a hundred years of that systematic racism, of oppression of who you are as a person, your culture, being punished for speaking your language, the effects that that had on our attitudes toward our language.
HZ: What kind of punishments were they given for speaking Māori?
HEMI KELLY: The strap. The straps are the main punishment that I've heard about from from from elders who talk about their experiences. Being hit, being wacked, being strapped. But also that being shamed, that might have been worse, being shamed in front of your peers and also in front of the schoolmasters, as they might have been called back then. Those were some of the punishments.
The other thing that we put it down to when we think about the loss of the language was urbanisation, which happened after World War Two. The urban drift where Māori, prior to the 1940s, were largely living within their tribal communities rurally, and grandparents and parents and young people living in the same home and in the village, and knowledge and all of that was passed down from one generation to the next. And with the urbanisation, people started to move into the cities for work - that was all lost. The breakdown of society as it was, where people now lived individually. So you didn't have that intergenerational transmission of knowledge and language happening. And there was also the social pressure to assimilate and to be white. So that also led to the loss of the language.
HZ: When a language has power and privilege, the other languages in that place suffer. To trade with the English, got to speak English; to participate in parliamentary proceedings, got to speak English. It’s not a story unique to Aotearoa New Zealand; English didn’t become a global language by sitting on the sidelines waiting to be asked to dance.
HEMI KELLY: And my grandmother was a speaker of Māori, a native speaker, but she never passed it on to her children or to me, her grandchildren, because that idea of there being no value in the Māori language was so deeply ingrained in her mind, and in the minds of our people at that time, that they refused to teach it or to speak to their children because they wanted their children to succeed in an English speaking world. They wanted their children not to go through the same hardships and troubles that they went through. That attitude has largely shifted now, but that was the attitude just, you know, 50, 60 years ago.
And many Māori don't speak Māori, and that doesn't mean we are less Māori, but in knowing my Māori, my Māori tongue, I have a deeper understanding of why, of who, of how. And so in not knowing, or in losing the language or the language being beaten out of you, you lose not just the language, but you lose that connection to who you are as a person.
HZ: Connection to history, to cultural concepts - more than vocabulary dies with a language. When the language isn’t written, as Māori wasn’t before colonisation, and people are coerced into not speaking it, it only takes a couple of generations for some things to be forgotten or lost or permanently altered. And for the usurping culture to overwrite the prior one as if it was never there. Amongst the Māori concepts and traditions that were obliterated was takatāpui.
ELIZABETH KEREKERE: I'm so convinced that transphobia, biphobia, homophobia are such an integral part of colonisation, I reject that as a colonial construct, I reject it as racist.
As they took our land - tried to take all of our land, tried to take all of our language and suppress our culture, they also took our expressions of sexuality and gender. And that is important to us in a core part of our culture, especially because the way that the institutional racism, the intergenerational trauma that is the legacy of colonisation has impacted on us and the levels of discrimination against people with diverse genders, sexualities and sex characteristics, that we see that all of this, all of this was a massive attempt to cover up what was already there and pretend it never happened.
HZ: But amongst the evidence that it DID happen is inadvertently provided by the Europeans, documentation reporting settlers or sailors in decidedly non cis het entanglements with Māori people, and being shocked that this was not a problem in Māori culture, far from it.
ELIZABETH KEREKERE: The absence of punishment, because not only do we have the Māori narratives, we have the European record, their own record that said, "They don't have a problem that people were in same sex relationships. They don't have a problem that people are engaging in bisexual activity. We don't like this. These are things we have to sort out." And we have that from not only missionaries, but from other sailors, whalers, that is was very clear that they weren't happy about the situation. And so they introduced punishment. They made us illegal. They pathologised us. And all of those things were consciously done. And after the treaty was signed, when they did bring more soldiers in and the settlers started swamping our country, then it just starts to flow throughout the whole country. And they took over our country in an act of war and many instances of violence.
HZ: How did they manage to erase gender identity and sexual fluidity and pretend that it never existed?
ELIZABETH KEREKERE: So there were some practical things they did. So they punished any fluidity or open signs of sexuality, of sex positivity. They made it so it was a moral one, dirty and wrong. And for a lot of our people, they rejected it, they ignored it, it didn't matter. But gradually, you wear it down.
HZ: What kind of punishments were they using?
ELIZABETH KEREKERE: Jail was the main one, because I think we were similar to the English in that, say, someone who was assigned male at birth wearing woman's clothes would be arrested for disorderly conduct. And so there were those things that happened. Generally, though, for a long, long time, and even after the treaty was signed in 1840, our communities existed quite separately, meaning many of our people, including my area, were quite distant from major pākehā settlements because they wanted different things generally and different spaces - they wanted all the spaces, to be fair.
HZ: That's the English!
ELIZABETH KEREKERE: You know, they've got a style; they've got a strategy.
HZ: There's never enough space.
ELIZABETH KEREKERE: Never, never; never enough resources that they come and take. Yeah, we kind of just got on with it. Our people saw that they had a problem with it, so they just protected their own family who were takatāpui, and not talk about it. And my thinking is that we did that for so long, we've forgotten the reasons. We remember to keep it quiet; we remember to protect; we forget why.
HZ: There was no English equivalent for some Māori terms and concepts, so some translations were off; some were altered by the language being forced into a writing system that couldn’t accommodate all of its characteristics; and some things were deliberately not translated. Some by the English, but:
ELIZABETH KEREKERE: A lot of that actually was done by Māori. We did that. And I know that some of it was because they'd embraced Christianity and the homophobia, biphobia and transphobia inherent in that. But actually for others, I think it was still part of them trying to protect it, to say, “we're fine with our family who who are like this and other people, not a problem; but we know that the colonisers do not like this. The missionaries very much do not like this. Therefore, we just won't talk about it any more.” And so I believe both those things were operating - but they kept it there anyway. They didn't remove it. And so that says to me, “We can't do anything with this in the context we're in; we're trusting that later on, one of you can.”
HEMI KELLY: There's not a lot of literature, really. There's nothing to go on. If there were narratives, there's not a lot, if any, that remain that inform us about the nature of those connections, pre-European times.
ELIZABETH KEREKERE: Because of our oral traditions, we had many different types of songs. And there was one particular type, which was derogatory songs, where we made fun of people and we hassled other people. There were none of those songs which spoke about fluid, sexuality and gender.
HEMI KELLY: There are a couple of stories, and then there are a couple of carvings, where you see this one carving in particular, we see two male figures embracing. So Christianity swept across the country and there was not only this bowdlerization, the sanitization of our language, but also of our art forms. And a lot of our carvings, we have ornately carved houses, Māori were very proud of their meeting houses and would ornately carve the outside and the inside, the interior of these houses, with figures that represented ancestors. And those carvings have been described as the literature of Māori, the Library of Māori, because people could read into them and tell a story and talk about those ancestors based on the carving. And a lot of those carvings were very, I suppose, sexually explicit, perhaps; you could see the genitalia, Sometimes they're engaged in sexual acts. And remember, this is all telling a story. So there's a story attached to all of these depictions. And so those were also eradicated in a lot of tribes, particularly in the north, where the missionaries set up and had a stronghold in the north, where carvings were eradicated altogether. You don't see any carvings in the north anymore. But some of the tribes that were harder to penetrate are where we see these remnants of what was, and yeah, the missionaries did try to eradicate those things. And then also some of our people did as well.
HZ: There is some evidence in music.
HEMI KELLY: The example of this was, that I can think of, was an old lament, it was a song to lament the passing of someone, and in the song, the lyrics there say, 'Ko te tama i aitia e tera wahine e tera tangata.' 'You were the youth who was sexual with that woman, and with that man.' And so this person that they're talking about was obviously sexual with both women and men. In a later edition of some of these songs being republished by a Māori author in the 1920s, you know, after decades and generations of oppression, he changed the word 'aitia', which means to be sexual, means to fuck, 'the youth who, you know, had sex with that woman and with that man,' he changed that to 'hug', 'awhitia', so 'the man who was hugged by that woman and that man.' So it did happen through colonization, starting with the colonizers, and then it was carried on by our own people. Moving into the 1960s and 70s, the years with the revitalization of our language and culture started, we started to uncover some of these truths and reclaim some of these words that had been lost.
ELIZABETH KEREKERE: So one of the things I focussed on in my research was around what we call whakataukī, the kind of like proverbs and sayings, because I love language and I love the succinctness of the whakataukī. And so I did my research around, oh, over 200 of these whakataukī, anything that talked about relationships, about gender, about sexuality, about sex. So we would commonly use genitals specifically to refer to other things. But we used nature, fire, water to talk about sex. And we had a whole lot of different ways that we talked about relationships and our responsibility inside a family and for your people. Now, it took me quite some time to figure out the language and unpack all of the places where things were purposely not translated. So it was there right in front of us.
I'll talk about two types of imagery that I found in the whakataukī. So the first one was about water. So it's to talk about emotion and feelings inside relationships. And so it's that powerful, that tumultuous kind of feeling that would often be used, but also the calm pools of water. So they would talk about how your partner made you feel and and kept you calm and safe. And so there's a really beautiful range of water things. Actual sex itself, our people used fire. And many actually of the whakataukī, they were very much about a male and female; they're very specific. Or they would use metaphors that referenced the receiving and the giving, meaning male and female, and that kind of, you know, heterosexual intercourse kind of way. But what I found in my research is that those extended out. The same imagery that was used in them occurred in other places. So the whakataukī I found, ‘Nga korero ahiahi o Hinewha’, that referred to the fires of just woman, of women together. So we're talking specifically in that instance about polyamorous sex between women. And so if there's one of those, there must be more of those. All we need to know is that it existed. Our people had a phrase for it. And it has come down through hundreds of years to us.
HEMI KELLY: But if we go back to talking about gender, in Māori, it's interesting, there's not a lot of - well, we have the word for 'him or her' or 'he or she' is the same word. So you weren't always very - it wasn't important to be very explicit or clear about whether the person was a him or a her, traditionally. You understood by context, because the word was the same, which is 'ia'. So in eavesdropping or reading just one passage of text, you might not understand whether the person was male or female, but in understanding or hearing the whole context, you would know. So that's an interesting part of our language, when we think about gender.
ELIZABETH KEREKERE: We don't have gendered pronouns. We do have some terms that are male or female specific. But a lot of the stuff that happens is around of relationships and construct of family. So words like mother, father, gendered roles: we didn't have those. And that was, of course, something else colonisation brought: the nuclear family. So where we saw a generation looking after a following generation, suddenly, people were being pigeonholed, taken away from their community and support bases to have one man, one woman - married, preferably - with their little children in their house. So we didn't have terms for mother, father. We do have words for sister or brother; we have multiple words for sisters or brothers; but we don't have words for daughter or son. The words we use for them can be used in other contexts. And so those are words we had to create once the English came.
HZ: Hemi Kelly has recently been helping to create new words to expand Māori’s queer or rainbow lexicon.
HEMI KELLY: There was a document that came out just recently, it's called Supporting Aotearoa's Rainbow People, and it was a practical guide for mental health professionals working with rainbow people - Aotearoa is the Māori name for New Zealand. And there was about three of us that worked on that document in translating some terms that hadn't yet been translated into Māori. So we sat down with the list of 'kupu', of words, like intersex or agender, binary, non-binary, you know, all of these terms that hadn't yet been translated into Māori, and we now have words for those words. So we are still in that space of creating words, all the time.
HZ: How did you go about it? Do you go for a direct translation or something different?
HEMI KELLY: In some places we went for a direct translation. Some words had already been created within the community organically, that just kind of sprung up, and a good example of that is for a trans woman, 'whakawāhine' is used in the community. And there was no official group or body that sat down and said, “Okay, what's the word for trans woman?” - that just appeared from within the community.
ELIZABETH KEREKERE: So whakawāhine for our trans women and tangata ira tāne for our trans men. And those are very spiritual tunes about the spirit and the spirituality being a core part of your identity and who they are, regardless of how they were assigned at birth. And so we also encourage people with the language skills with the research to find new ways and new terms - because different tribes had different terms.
HEMI KELLY: Also it's kind of the test of time, like if the Māori-speaking community doesn't like a word, if it doesn't fit, it will disappear. And so if it's apt, if it's suitable, if it makes sense, it'll be used and it'll last the test of time. And so whakawahine is one that has, it's been around for a while now and it's used. But where we saw words like intersex, yeah, we kind of did a literal translation. So you go back to the English word, the etymology, looking at what that means, 'inter' 'sex', and then translating it from there.
HZ: It feels like a lot of responsibility.
HEMI KELLY: Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, you have the right group of people working on it and you debate and you put out your idea and it gets contested and you go back and forth and - so there's a lot of thought put into it. And then it's put out there, you know, and if, like I said, if the community use it, it's there to be used, but if not, then perhaps another term will just appear.
ELIZABETH KEREKERE: We are geographically small, there's only five million of us. But actually our rainbow communities work really closely together. So we actually work really, really hard to ensure that our language is quite consistent. So if I'm writing anything about anything intersex, I'm working with the Intersex Trust. Whatever they say, I will use that language; for our trans and non-binary people, I will use their language. And then they use ours when we're talking about Māori stuff. That's the key. It's actually a willingness and a mindfulness about language, about respecting each other and where we come from. We create our own language, but the behaviour has been here and the feelings have been here since humans have existed on this planet.
HZ: Elizabeth Kerekere is an activist and scholar and chair of the Tiwhanawhana Trust. Find out more at takatāpui.nz.
Hemi Kelly is a lecturer in the Māori language, and has a podcast called Everyday Māori, which is available in the pod places. You can also find him on instagram @EverydayMāori and the facebook group A Māori Phrase A Day.
I’ll link to Elizabeth and Hemi’s work at theallusionist.org/bequest.
And coming up in today’s Minillusionist, Hemi talks about the writing systems of Māori.
MINILLUSIONIST
HZ: Māori presumably is not meant to be put into a Roman alphabet, or that kind of writing system.
HEMI KELLY: Yeah, this is interesting - I was just having this conversation the other day with a friend about creating our own alphabet, and what that would look like, because Māori was an oral language; there was no writing pre-European times. There was a lot of artwork and carving and different motifs that were perhaps some sort of orthography or writing, but there was no writing as such. And so when the early European arrivals came, they started to document words, write down words based on their own alphabet.
And in teaching the language, this is always something I've thought about: it would probably be a lot easier if we had a different alphabet because we have the majority of people coming to learn the language are English speakers, native English speakers. And when you pronounce a word and ask them to say it back, they do it with no trouble at all. But when you put a word in front of them that's written with the English alphabet, they immediately revert back to the English pronunciation of those vowels, and they mispronounce the Māori word, because the vowel sounds are different. And so I wonder if we did have our own alphabet, how much more successful our language revitalization efforts would be.
And is it too late now? We're in 2020 now, and so all of our literature is written in the alphabet that we have now. And so is it too late to revert to something else or to change the writing system? I'm not sure. We'll leave that up to future generations maybe.
The Allusionist is part of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of the best independent podcasts around. Find them all at radiotopia.fm.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
auscultation, noun: the action of listening to sounds from the heart, lungs, or other organs with a stethoscope.
Try using it in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. The music is by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com. Thanks to Claire Mabey of the Verb Wellington, and to Ian Steadman.
Find allusionistshow on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. And to hear every episode, read transcripts, find out more information about all the topics and the guests, see the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words, visit theallusionist.org.
