Knowledge Is a Blessing on Your Mind: Selected Writings, 1980–2020

By Anne Salmond

For fifty years, Dame Anne Salmond has navigated te ao hurihuri' travelling to hui in her little blue VW Beetle with Eruera and Amiria Stirling in the 1970s, working for a university marae alongside Merimeri Penfold, Patu Hohepa and Wharetoroa Kerr in the 1980s, giving evidence to the Waitangi Tribunal on the meaning of Te Tiriti in the 2000s. From Hui to The Trial of the Cannibal Dog to today' s debates about the future of Aotearoa, Anne Salmond has explored who we are to each other.This book traces Anne Salmond' s journey as an anthropologist, as a writer and activist, as a Pakeha New Zealander, as a friend, wife and mother. The book brings together her key writing on the Maori world, cultural contact, Te Tiriti and the wider Pacific much of it appearing in book form for the first time and embeds these writings in her life and relationships, her travels and friends.This is the story of Aotearoa and the story of one woman' s pathway through our changing land.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Nov 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9781776711093

Anne Salmond

Dame Anne Salmond is Distinguished Professor of Māori Studies at the University of Auckland and author of books including Hui: A Study of Maori Ceremonial Gatherings (1975, A.H. and A.W. Reed); Amiria: The Life Story of a Maori Woman (1976, A.H. and A.W. Reed); Eruera: The Teachings of a Maori Elder (1980, Oxford University Press); Two Worlds: First Meetings between Maori and Europeans 1642–1772 (1991, Viking Press, University of Hawai‘i Press); Between Worlds: Early Exchanges between Maori and Europeans 1773–1815 (1997, Viking Press, University of Hawai‘i Press); The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas (2003, Penguin UK, Penguin NZ, Yale University Press); Aphrodite’s Island: The European Discovery of Tahiti (2007, University of California Press, Penguin NZ) and Bligh: William Bligh in the South Seas (2011, University of California Press, Penguin NZ). Among many honours and awards, she is an International Member of the American Philosophical Society, a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy; in 2013 she became New Zealander of the Year and winner of the Rutherford Medal from the Royal Society of New Zealand.

Book preview

Front Cover of Knowledge Is a Blessing on Your MindHalf Title of Knowledge Is a Blessing on Your Mind

Hui: A Study of Maori Ceremonial Gatherings

‘I consider Dr Salmond’s book as one that must take a place of honour among the highest echelons of publication on Māori ethnology and anthropology.’ — George Marsden, Radio New Zealand

Eruera: The Teachings of a Maori Elder

‘It reads like a transcript of conversations such as one would have, not with one’s peers or even with a scholar, but with a younger person in whom one had utter confidence. The quality of the old man’s relationship with Salmond breathes a warmth into the pages which fully justifies the subtitle, The teachings of a Maori elder.’ — Sir Tipene O’Regan, Journal of the Polynesian Society

Two Worlds: First Meetings between Maori and Europeans, 1642–1772

‘The book as a whole, it must be said, is a stunningly comprehensive and polished work of scholarship that will be welcomed by academic and general readers. It is one of the most important volumes on Maori–Pakeha relations ever published and will provide a baseline from which future work in this area will be measured.’ — Michael King, Metro

Between Worlds: Early Exchanges between Maori and Europeans, 1773–1815

‘There is perhaps no scholar working in Oceania better equipped in knowledge, skills and sentiment to write between worlds history … That, I think, is the supreme grace of Anne Salmond’s Between Worlds – she begins with language. It enlarges every place of the encounter. It enlarges every aspect of native agency in her story.’ — Greg Dening, Australian Historical Studies

The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas

‘The Trial of the Cannibal Dog brings us the voyages of Captain James Cook as we’ve never seen them before. In Anne Salmond’s hands, Pacific exploration becomes an intricate drama of mutual discovery, with Polynesians having as profound an impact on Europeans as Cook and his men had on those they encountered. Salmond’s nuanced, multi-voiced book is a ground-breaking addition to the Captain Cook canon.’ — Tony Horwitz, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

Bligh: William Bligh in the South Seas

‘Anne Salmond’s gripping and definitive Bligh amply fulfils her wish to illuminate the full humanity of the past … She is especially good at describing the social and political life of both cultures, the quirks of individuals, the cultural ferment spurred by the arrival of foreign ships …’ — Ronald Wright, Times Literary Supplement

Tears of Rangi: Experiments Across Worlds

‘This book was an absolute joy to read. It engages in highly relevant and topical issues for all of us as New Zealanders. By anchoring our colonial history in contemporary issues of sovereignty and property, it has the potential to be a landmark book for Aotearoa New Zealand.’ — Jacinta Ruru, University of Otago and Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga

Book Title of Knowledge Is a Blessing on Your Mind

First published 2023

Auckland University Press

University of Auckland

Private Bag 92019

Auckland 1142

New Zealand

www.aucklanduniversitypress.co.nz

© Anne Salmond, 2023

ISBN 978 1 77671 109 3

Published with the assistance of Creative New Zealand

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand

This book is copyright. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior permission of the publisher. The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

Book design by Megan van Staden

Front cover: Ōpōtiki Beach, 2011. (Anne Salmond)

Back cover: With Eruera, 1980. (Marti Friedlander, courtesy of the Gerrard and Marti Friedlander Charitable Trust)

Image on p. v: Anne Salmond and Merimeri Penfold at the launch of Her Life’s Work, edited by Deborah Shepard, 2009. (Salmond Family Archive)

This book is dedicated to Merimeri Penfold

‘E paru i te tinana, e mā i te wai;

E paru i te aroha, ka mau tonu e.’

Contents

Preface

1. A Scholar’s Life (2013)

2. Eruera: An Epilogue (1981)

3. Institutional Racism at the University of Auckland (1983)

4. Māori Epistemologies (1985)

5. Theoretical Landscapes: On Cross-Cultural Conceptions of Knowledge (1982)

6. Pathways in Te Ao Māori (1984)

7. Antipodean Crab Antics (1994)

8. Ruatara’s Dying (1999)

9. The Trial of the Cannibal Dog, or, Why Did Captain Cook Die? (1996)

10. Their Body is Different, Our Body is Different (2004)

11. McDonald Among the Māori (1999)

12. With Artists

Et La Tête: Casting Heads in the Pacific (2011)

Introduction: in Pursuit of Venus [infected] (2015)

13. Of Women

Women and Democracy (2014)

Once Were Warriors (2016)

14. Te Tiriti o Waitangi (2010)

15. On Environmental Questions

Tears of Rangi: Water, Power and People in Aotearoa New Zealand (2014)

Afterword: Think Like a Fish: Pacific Philosophies and Climate Change (2018)

16. Entangled Worlds: Kosmos Lecture, Berlin (2019)

17. What is Anthropology? (2019)

Notes

Bibliography of Anne Salmond Works

References and Sources

Glossary

Preface

In te reo, the Māori language, people often speak about different ‘worlds’ – te ao Māori and te ao Pākehā, the Māori and European ‘worlds’ or ways of living; te ao tawhito and te ao hou, the old and new worlds, before and after European arrival; te pō, the dark world of the ancestors, and te ao mārama, the world of light, the everyday world we all inhabit.

It’s a way of naming different realities, different ways of being. In between, there’s always a space of encounter and emergence, chaotic and uncertain – te ao hurihuri, for example, the spinning world between Māori and Pākehā, the life of the ancestors and contemporary experience. That’s a difficult, but fascinating realm to navigate.

As a Pākehā New Zealander who has spent a lifetime in these ‘in-between’ spaces, I have been shaped by those experiences, as well as by my own background and upbringing. Te ao hurihuri keeps on changing, and understandings are always incomplete and provisional. As an anthropologist, I’ve also struggled with the kind of distance that is supposed to underpin ‘objective’ scholarly accounts of the lives of others. In te ao Māori, where relationships are paramount, that’s a kind of betrayal.

At the same time, as my mentor Eruera Stirling once said: ‘Knowledge is a blessing on your mind, it makes everything clear and guides you to do things in the right way.’ Trained in the ancestral schools of learning as an orator and tribal expert, he saw knowledge as a light in the darkness, a way to find good pathways for oneself and the people.

This book traces my journey as a scholar. As I was taught, I have tried to treat knowledge as a taonga, a treasure, not a personal possession; and ‘a blessing on your mind’, a gift from others that makes things clear, weaving people together. When I’ve stumbled, I have tried to find that light again, and carry on. This series of articles reflects the volatile dynamics between Māori and other New Zealanders as well as my own shifting preoccupations – from Aotearoa New Zealand to the Pacific, and from relations among different groups of people to those among human beings and other life forms.

If the book is a hybrid account – half life story, half scholarly – that’s also true of my life – part scholar, writer and activist, part friend, wife and mother. As an anthropologist, I’ve been more interested in the lives of others, rather than my own. At the same time, I know that the articles I have written were shaped by key relationships, and the times in which they were drafted. Minor edits have been made to update the original articles for current conventions.

The brief narratives that introduce each article tell some of these stories, and pay tribute to the people, places and events that inspired them. The world keeps on spinning, however, and each generation seeks to craft its own futures. As the proverb goes: ‘Ka pū te ruha, ka hao te rangatahi’ (‘Set the old net aside, let the new net go fishing’).

1. A Scholar’s Life (2013)

Lives are lived, but they’re also stories, told to different audiences – friends and lovers, husbands and wives, children and grandchildren. For a granddaughter at bedtime, the plea to ‘Tell me a little girl story’ might prompt yarns about growing up in Gisborne, our large, sprawling family, the huts we built, the stories I told my twin brothers, my favourite hiding place in a walnut tree, adventures to the beach. A conversation with colleagues is very different, especially one that explores a scholarly career.

I’ve had a few of these conversations over the years, including an interview in 2004 with Professor Alan Macfarlane at the University of Cambridge about being an anthropologist in my own country, as part of an oral history project about the history of the discipline. I found that conversation intriguing, partly because I was trying to explain my experiences as an anthropologist in Aotearoa New Zealand to a colleague in Europe.

¹

The interview that follows, on the other hand, was conducted by colleagues Cris Shore and Susanna Trnka at the University of Auckland in 2012, as part of a project looking at anthropologists in New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific. The book in which it appears, Up Close and Personal: On Peripheral Perspectives and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge, asked how anthropologists who work at ‘the margins’, away from the ‘metropolitan’ centres in Europe and America, might make distinctive contributions to the discipline.

And yet, there’s the paradox, right there in the subtitle – a play on the idea that anthropology’s ‘home’ is in the metropolitan heartlands, while ‘the field’ is peripheral, on the edges of the world. For the people whose lives anthropologists often explore, the opposite may be true. ‘Home’ is in the Pacific, or South America, or Africa, for instance, and the anthropologists who visit the ‘field’ may come from far away, often from former colonial or neo-colonial powers. In settler societies, where indigenous descendants live side by side with ‘settler’ descendants, yet sometimes ‘worlds apart’, the paradox is inescapable. Questions of knowledge and power can’t be dodged – who will tell the stories, how, and for whom?

A discipline that tries to bridge the gaps between different ways of being will always find itself standing on existential edges. In te ao Māori, these ‘in-between’ spaces are generative, if risky, in whakapapa or on the marae, for example. In whakapapa, an all-embracing kin network, different beings come together to create new forms of life. On the marae, the ceremonial meeting place that stands between earth and sky, ancestors and descendants, tāngata whenua (local people) and manuhiri (visitors), ideas are exchanged and relationships are activated, for better or for worse. The same applies to Te Tiriti o Waitangi, where cross-cultural exchanges keep on shifting through the spiral of space–time.

Likewise, anthropology’s work ‘across worlds’ is uncertain, but potentially creative. As I look back, I see how lucky I’ve been in the generosity (and sheer calibre) of those with whom I have lived and worked. I have known and been inspired by some extraordinary people. They’ve taught me almost everything, not least the limits of my own understanding. I owe them a huge debt of gratitude.

Places have also shaped my inquiries – Te Moana-nui-ā-Kiwa, the Pacific Ocean, crossed by my own ancestors from the western isles of Scotland and Yorkshire, and by the ancestors of others from island homelands whose stories I heard on marae; Aotearoa New Zealand, and later Tahiti and Hawai‘i, sparking a fascination with voyaging and exploration; Tūranganui-ā-Kiwa (Gisborne), my home town; our villa in Devonport, Auckland; Cambridge in the United Kingdom; and Waikererū, our place in Te Tairāwhiti, the East Coast, with its streams, river and forests.

And garages, of all places – from my grandmother’s garage in Hataitai in Wellington, where as a little girl I used to rummage through my great-grandfather’s archive of sketches and papers; to our garage in Devonport, where this search through my own archives has gone full circle, taking me back to the beginning.

My life as an anthropologist has sometimes been heart-wrenching and frustrating, but it has always been a privilege, and a glorious adventure. The articles in this collection have been selected as signposts on the journey, although they’ve been updated or augmented in places. In telling the story, I’ll let Cris and Susanna, with their questions, lead the way.

Anne Salmond: Anthropology, Ontology and the Māori World

Cris Shore and Susanna Trnka

This interview conducted by Cris Shore and Susanna Trnka was originally published in C. Shore and S. Trnka (eds), Up Close and Personal: On Peripheral Perspectives and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge (pp. 58–72). Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2013. It has been augmented and updated for this publication, with their permission.

Let us begin by asking you about your intellectual biography and, in particular, how you discovered social anthropology.

Well, I’d have to go back a long way to the time when I was a little girl, and I used to go down to Wellington to stay with my grandmother. I was taken off to the Dominion Museum to look at the model pā (fortified village) made by her father, James McDonald. My great-grandfather was a photographer and artist around the turn of the twentieth century, who became the acting director of the Museum. He’d been riveted by Māori life; learned to carve, and participated in numerous projects led by the Dominion Museum, including some early expeditions to Māori communities instigated by Āpirana Ngata, a visionary Māori politician and iwi leader from Tairāwhiti.

James McDonald (or ‘Mac’, as they called him) worked with an early generation of New Zealand ethnologists, including Elsdon Best (whose books he illustrated with his photographs) and Te Rangi Hīroa (Sir Peter Buck), who were recording ancestral Māori ways of life. His particular interest was in making films and taking photographs to capture ‘traditional’ tikanga, especially Māori art. He kept notebooks in which he recorded different customary practices. There were several cartons of his papers in my grandmother’s garage, and as a little girl, when I got really bored, I used to poke around and read through these marbled notebooks, which also contained wonderful sketches of scenes from Māori life. So at the age of eight or nine I became curious about the intriguing stuff in these mysterious cartons.

I grew up in Gisborne, where the population was (and still is) about fifty–fifty Māori–Pākehā. Because of my great-grandfather I was always curious about Māori life, but in those years there was no real way to participate in it, because the two communities were quite divided. I mean, they coincided on the farms, at school or in sport, but otherwise very little. Mum (Joyce Thorpe) was a bit of an exception, though. She was friends with Peggy Kaua and Lady Lorna Ngata, Āpirana Ngata’s daughter-in law; and when I was sixteen and won an American Field Service (AFS) scholarship to go to the United States, Mum asked Peggy and Lorna to teach me some action songs. They did, although I think they were a little amused by my efforts. I was deeply impressed by these women. I thought they were just amazing.

‘He Taua! He taua!’, by James Ingram McDonald, 1906. (Salmond Family Archive, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, APG-1443-1/4-G)

While I was in the States, at Cleveland Heights High School in Ohio, I was invited to speak to groups like Kiwanis and Rotary about New Zealand, and when they asked me about Māori life, I realised I was just talking off the top of my head, almost making it up. I had learned a couple of action songs, I could swing the poi, but I felt ashamed that I was talking about something that I didn’t really understand. So I decided, ‘Okay, when I get home, I’m going to learn Māori and I’m going to find out about this part of my country.’

At the end of that year in the States, all of us AFS scholars were put into buses and travelled around the country for a month, staying with local families. That was the Camelot era, a golden time in America.¹ The trip ended in Washington, where almost two thousand AFS students sat on the White House lawn, and President John Kennedy addressed us. He was a brilliant speaker and very charismatic, telling us that as young leaders, we could change the world by reaching out across different countries and cultures. He swept us away, and we cheered our hearts out.²

When I came back from the States, I went home to Gisborne, because I had six months before starting at the University at Auckland. I took a job in the local museum, cataloguing the Māori collection, and started to learn the language from George Marsden, who was teaching at Gisborne Boys’ High School. I loved the reo, and thought to myself, when I get to university, I’ll continue with Māori by studying anthropology, so that’s what led me in that direction. For me, studying Māori and studying anthropology were always one and the same.

Anthropology at the University of Auckland was a very exciting subject. I could study linguistics, physical anthropology, archaeology and social anthropology, as well as Māori studies. We had these magnificent teachers – Ralph Bulmer, an ethnobiologist from Cambridge; Hugh Kāwharu, who had studied social anthropology at Oxford; Bruce Biggs, the Pacific linguist; Hirini Mead, who specialised in Māori art, tikanga and language; Roger Green, a leading Pacific archaeologist from Harvard; Patu Hohepa, a brilliant linguist and ethnographer; and Merimeri Penfold, who taught te reo and later became a very close friend. It was a great department.

This was in 1964, and I had just turned eighteen. It was as though everything happened at once. I joined the Māori Club; I had a lot of friends there. Outside of the university I also met two senior elders, Eruera and Amiria Stirling, who were from Te Whānau-ā-Apanui and Ngāti Porou iwi on the East Coast, and became my teachers and mentors for the next twenty years.

It was quite unusual in those years for Pākehā students to become immersed in te ao Māori. As I remember, in Māori Club there was just one other Pākehā member. For me, it became a passion. I was absolutely fascinated. I wanted to learn about everything Māori. The Anthropology Department was a great place to do that, because there was quite strong Māori engagement. One of the interesting things our professor, Ralph Piddington, did was to introduce us to Māori ethnography and the possibility of thinking about Māori life in a contemporary setting.

My fellow students included people like Pita Sharples, Sid and Hana Jackson, Donna Awatere, Maxine and Hone Ngata, who later became prominent leaders in the ‘Māori renaissance’. Witi Ihimaera was also a friend of mine. Still, it was almost pre-political when I first came to the University of Auckland. We went to rugby matches, had parties and had a fantastic time. It wasn’t until a few years later that the Māori renaissance really took off, with Hana’s petition for te reo, debates about the Treaty of Waitangi, land rights and the protests at places like Bastion Point. All that happened after I’d been around for a while, and my friendships were already pretty strong by then.

Thinking back to that time, who were the most important people or authors who shaped your thinking?

There were those great academics, my scholarly teachers who taught me a huge amount. But equally I would say Eruera and Amiria Stirling, because they also became my teachers. Eruera Stirling was a tribal historian, orator and scholar in the wānanga tradition, and one of the leading elders of his generation. He had very strong ideas about knowledge and the responsibilities that came with it. Eruera viewed knowledge as a treasure: he called it a ‘blessing on your mind’. Scholarly activity was essentially a matter of how you live your life. It wasn’t just gathering up information for your own enjoyment or pleasure; it was something to work with in the world.

It was unusual for a Māori elder of such seniority – he was among the leading elders of his time – to mentor a young Pākehā girl, as I was then. During my first year at varsity he and Amiria took me under their wing, and taught me over the next two decades, which was pretty amazing. It was a very different kind of education and I was thrown in the deep end. To teach me tribal history, Eruera would sit me down on the living room floor with very long sheets of paper and get me to record whakapapa.

He was trying to teach me how all the different iwi were genealogically linked and the key marriages and alliances between them. This was so that when we went to the marae, I’d know my way around. He did a lot of that kind of thing. Then they started taking me to marae and speaking Māori to me, so I was also learning Māori with them.

Amiria and I were terrific friends. She was a lot older than me; when we met she must have been in her sixties, and yet we were really close. We had the same sort of sense of humour, and enjoyed being together. She was a marvellous storyteller – and I was a fascinated audience. We laughed about a lot of the same things and we both liked growing flowers. It was curious how many things we had in common. I was in awe of Eruera. I looked up to him and was intimidated by him for quite a while, because he was this austere and quite reserved elder. He was a tohunga, someone who dwelt in the world of the ancestors, and that is a realm in the Māori world where you have to tread carefully. So I used to tiptoe around.

But when he started teaching me, taking me to marae, I would drive him and Amiria to gatherings in my little blue VW, and in the car he’d spend the time rehearsing whakapapa, telling tribal history and getting ready for what he’d say on the marae. We had this sort of ‘travelling university’ going for a long time. Over the years they took me into their family. I called Eruera ‘Koro’ and Amiria ‘Nanny’, like their grandchildren, and they signed their letters ‘Na o tipuna’ (from your grandparents, senior relatives). They became godparents to our children, and gave each of them Māori names.

How did these encounters change your view of the world?

It gave me a different sense of my own country. For example, I could walk out and look at a mountain or a hill that I’ve been looking at all my life, and all of a sudden I’d see a different landscape. Now, I’d sometimes know its Māori name as well as its European name – it’s not ‘Young Nick’s Head’, a headland in Gisborne which was the first place named by Captain Cook, it’s ‘Te Kurī-a-Pāoa’ the dog of Pāoa, one of the first Polynesian explorers to arrive in New Zealand, who claimed it by naming it after his dog.

Portrait of Eruera Stirling, 1975. (Marti Friedlander, courtesy of the Gerrard and Marti Friedlander Charitable Trust)

There’s a ‘double history’ here, another way of seeing the places in which I was living every day. Feeling like that about your own country all of a sudden is unsettling. It’s not exactly Alice in Wonderland, or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but it’s almost like that: walking into another world. Everything I thought was stable and familiar started to take on radically new meanings. That sense of wonder has never left me. It’s awesome, but it’s also difficult. I’ve been studying this stuff all my life and will probably continue till the day I die, because there’s so much to learn. Once you get immersed in tribal histories and genealogies, the subtleties of language, the art forms and the tribal landscapes out there, it’s a mind-bending, never-ending adventure.

Tell us about your main research interests and how these have developed.

My first scholarly work was as a linguist. When I was in my early twenties I went to Honiara in the Solomon Islands, and wrote a generative grammar of Luangiua, one of the Polynesian Outliers, a large atoll off the north coast of the Solomon Islands. This was under the supervision of Professor Bruce Biggs and Dr Andy Pawley, who gave us a rigorous training in generative linguistics, almost like the mathematics of language, based on the work of Noam Chomsky. I loved working with the language, and started with Noella Kakapenga from Luangiua (Ontong Java), who was a student at Queen Victoria School for Māori Girls in Auckland.

At the same time Pita Sharples was doing his Master’s in linguistics, and working with another of the Outlier languages, Sikaiana. Bruce Biggs had a project to reconstruct Proto-Polynesian as an ancestral language, and the daughter languages of Luangiua and Sikaiana had not yet been recorded, so he got funding for us to do the fieldwork. When we went to Auckland airport to fly to Honiara, Dad came with me. I was only twenty at the time, and when Bruce arrived to see us off, Dad fixed him with a steely glare and told him that I’d better come home again safe and sound.

When we arrived in Honiara, I met up with Noella, but when we went to catch the missionary boat to Luangiua, one of the biggest atolls in the world, the missionaries wouldn’t let me go on board, saying it would be too dangerous for me to go to the island. As the boat sailed away, and I stood on the wharf, crying, some of the Luangiua people saw me waving goodbye to Noella, and invited me to go to their village on the outskirts of Honiara.

Pita was also in Honiara, working with the Sikaiana people on their language. The Luangiua people would tell me all these amazing stories, which I would tape, and sometimes they’d compete with the Sikaiana people, to see who could record the most tapes for Ani or Pita. Every day I’d cycle to the Luangiua village, just past Chinatown, with fish or pineapples hung over the handlebars of my bike, and sit for hours in their houses up on stilts by the beach, listening to stories, collecting words for a vocabulary or trying to work out the grammar.

I have vivid memories of that time. On my first day in the Luangiua village, I went to Chinatown beforehand and bought a lavalava. It was bright blue and not colour-fast, as it turned out. When the women took me for a swim, I put on the lavalava, trying to fasten it with a knot at the top. Every time a wave hit me, the knot unravelled, so I’d sink underwater and tie it up again. They noticed this, and the next time a big wave hit me and I went underwater, one of the women yelled out ‘Mangō!’ (‘Shark!’). Of course I shot up in the air, leaving my lavalava behind, floating on the surface.

When I looked around, I saw that the women were lying in the shallows, laughing and slapping the water helplessly. They were all bare-breasted, and I think they’d wondered whether there was something wrong with white women, because they always covered up their tops. I had to laugh, too, although it was pretty embarrassing. To cap it all off, when I walked up the beach I looked down at my legs and saw that they were turning bright blue, streaked with the dye from the lavalava.

We also sang a lot. For the younger people, it was cool to be able to sing songs in other languages, even if they couldn’t speak them – ‘Mehe mangu lele’ – the popular Māori song ‘Mehe manu rere’, for example. I’m not sure where Luangiua people picked that one up, maybe from Kiwi soldiers during World War II. I also learned a couple of songs in pidgin. When I returned to Auckland three months later and started writing a grammar of their language, I thought, ‘What a strange way to record this experience!’

It was like time-travelling back to earlier times in Māori society. The language was quite close to Māori, and most of the Luangiua people couldn’t speak English or pidgin, they were tattooing their bodies, cooking in the ground, and death was happening in the village. Sometimes there were feasts, with fish caught from canoes, grated taro and coconut puddings baked in umu (earth ovens), and singing and dancing on the beach, with the men thumping lengths of giant bamboo on the ground to keep time.

Honiara was a strange place. One of the Luangiua families worked for a missionary family, and they were all packed into a little concrete hut out the back, cooking rice and corned beef for dinner on a gas ring. Many of the Europeans were refugees from former British colonies, and they operated a kind of apartheid in the town. One day I got thrown off a beach because I was sitting there with a Luangiua friend, collecting terms for seashells. Apparently the beach was supposed to be segregated. So was the Honiara Hotel. The men wore white shirts, and white pants and long socks, and Pita and I called them ‘white gods’. They gave me a hard time, because I spent most of my time with Polynesian people. I got an inkling of what it’s like to be on the wrong side of a colour bar, and it wasn’t fun.

That time with the Luangiua people was very short, but it made a huge impact. Because they couldn’t speak English, if I wanted to ask about anything I had to jump into their language. Because I could already speak Māori a bit, that made a difference. When I came back to Auckland, Merimeri laughed at me, because I was talking very slowly, and speaking Māori with a Luangiua accent. When I wrote this quasi-mathematical grammar, which was published by Mouton in the Netherlands, it was all very nice, but I thought, ‘I’m not going to write like that again. Only ten people in the world will read this.’ How could such an incredible experience be reduced to such an arid account?³

After that, I decided to study sociolinguistics – how life and language intersect. I went to the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, because it had spectacular teachers in that field, including Dell Hymes, William Labov, Ward Goodenough and Erving Goffman. I spent a very concentrated eighteen months in Philadelphia, doing my PhD papers. I lived in International House, where most of my friends were students from Latin America. Conchita de Antuñano, an opera trainee from Mexico, took me to a rehearsal with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Richard Bonynge, and Joan Sutherland singing Norma – it was brilliant.

That was a strange time to be in America. It seemed like another country. The Vietnam war was underway, with many student protests. I had a teaching fellowship, and once while I was giving a class in the Administration building, it was occupied by student protestors. Another time, one of my students told me that her essay was late because she’d been arrested for having a bomb under the fridge! Conscription was underway, and very few of the guys in my class wanted to go and fight in Vietnam. On another occasion, when students from all of the universities in Philadelphia marched to the JFK Plaza downtown to listen to Noam Chomsky and others speaking, I went with some friends. When we got to the Plaza, you could see rifle barrels pointing down at us from the tops of all the buildings.

Inter-racial tensions were also running high, and the University of Pennsylvania campus was near a black ghetto. Not long after I arrived in Philadelphia, a notice was posted in International House, saying that local families from a school in the ghetto had offered to host students for a day. I signed up, and when the day came, took a cab to the address. After a while we were passing tenements boarded up and covered with graffiti. It looked very bleak. The young girl and her mother were warm and welcoming, but when we sat down to lunch, a man came down from upstairs, all jumpy and strange, and tried to persuade me to go with him to a bar. When I excused myself, saying I had come to visit the family, he got very angry and said that I wouldn’t go with him because he was black.

He ran back upstairs, and the mother went after him. There was a lot of yelling and crashing, and then he came downstairs again, waving a gun. The young girl hid me behind the fridge, and then led me out onto the street, where people had gathered. I hardly had time to get scared, but I felt very white indeed in that crowd. Windows were smashed upstairs, with more yelling, then a police car arrived. The police kicked down the front door, and brought out the man with his arms handcuffed up behind his back. Someone called me a cab, and I went back to International House feeling shell-shocked.

The next day, the mother rang me and asked me to come back the next weekend. She was very upset about what had happened, so I agreed. She and her daughter took me to a church service with beautiful singing, followed by a family gathering with a feast, and quite a few elders present. They told me that the man had been high on drugs, and he was there, looking very hang-dog, and apologised for what he had done.

Despite the dramas I enjoyed my time at Penn, but I’d met Jeremy just before I left to go to Philadelphia, so I did my papers in record time. Ward Goodenough, a fatherly type who specialised in ethnoscience and worked in Yap in Micronesia, agreed to supervise my thesis. I already knew what the topic would be. Earlier, when I’d told Eruera that I wanted to do a PhD, he said that if I really wanted to understand the Māori world, the marae was the university for me now. I decided that when I returned to New Zealand I’d write a sociolinguistic study of hui.

When I returned from Philadelphia, Eruera promised that he and Amiria would take me to marae around the country, and said I should go to the New Zealand Māori Council and ask for their permission to do the fieldwork. He and Amiria came with me, which made all the difference. Over the next two years I attended about seventy hui, mostly with Eruera and Amiria. He was quite right: this was the best way to learn about te ao Māori. Going on to marae all over the North Island with the old people, listening to the karanga, the exchange of whaikōrero (speeches) on the marae and the waiata; walking along the hongi line, pressing noses with local people; eating in the wharekai; sleeping in meeting houses, and listening to tribal stories and speeches until late into the night; learning about tapu and how to behave myself.

We went to places that most Pākehā didn’t get to visit, especially in those years; and I loved it. We attended the Koroneihana (Coronation) and poukai with Te Ata-i-rangi-kāhu, the Māori Queen and her elders, on marae linked with the King Movement; Ringatū services; weddings, tangi and political gatherings. Jeremy came on many of these trips, and took a superb series of photographs.

I have so many memories of those hui – travelling on the bus with the Tainui kaumātua and kuia to Marokopa, for example, and hopping into a small dinghy with members of the Queen’s brass band to cross the river. There was hardly any freeboard, the dinghy had an old Seagull engine on the back, with a stick for a choke, and halfway across the river, the engine conked out. The current was quite fast, and as it carried us out towards the sea, the kuia stood on the riverbank, laughing and calling out, ‘Haere rā! Haere ki Hawaiki!’ (‘Farewell, farewell to Hawaiki!’) I had a very expensive Nagra tape recorder from the University of Pennsylvania, and I thought, if I have to swim for it, that’s going to get wrecked! Fortunately, the man with the stick got the engine going again, and we were rescued. When we got to the other side of the river, there was a sled drawn by a horse waiting to carry our bags to the marae. Jeremy was with me for that hui, so I have the photographs to prove that it happened.

Another time I went to a Ringatū Twelfth with Eruera Manuera, a friend of Eruera and Amiria’s. They used to shut down the marae for several days for a Twelfth, and there was a pirihimana (policeman) on duty to make sure that no one came in or out. I stayed for most of the hui, but I had a family function to go to, so I asked for permission to leave early. Since I was Pākehā and not a member of the church, the pou tikanga (the head of the church) agreed; but one of the kuia was a bit nervous about it, and hopped in the front seat of my little blue VW to make sure I got out alright.

When I put the key in the ignition and turned it, it broke off, right inside the ignition! She cried out, ‘Aue! He tohu!’ (‘Alas, an omen!’), and I had to go back with my head down, and explain to the pou tikanga what had happened. I stayed for the rest of the Twelfth, and then rang for a tow truck and got towed back to Whakatāne, where Jeremy picked me up. When I told Eruera about it, he wasn’t at all sympathetic. He just said, ‘You’re lucky it only hit the key!’

Marokopa ferry, 1971. (Jeremy Salmond)

Marokopa beach buggy, 1971. (Jeremy Salmond)

Pōwhiri, Tokanganui-a-noho, Te Kūiti, 1971. (Jeremy Salmond)

Pōwhiri, Coronation, Tūrangawaewae, 1971. (Jeremy Salmond)

Whaikōrero, Ruka Broughton, Ōhinemutu, 1971. (Jeremy Salmond)

Waiata, Ōhinemutu, 1971. (Jeremy Salmond)

Waiata, Ngāti Whātua, Connie and Bill Davis (centre) at Manutuke, 1970. (Jeremy Salmond)

Hākari, Tikitiki, 1970. (Jeremy Salmond)

I also remember attending the tangi for Bishop Manu Bennett’s mother, near Rotorua. On the last night, the pō whakamutunga, they sang all her favourite songs and had a kind of concert, to make sure she had enjoyed her last night on Earth. The whare was packed with bishops, and one kuia went outside and put on a black jersey, with her legs through the arms of a black cardigan, and the rest of the cardigan tied up in a kind of pompom behind. She was quite a big woman, but very graceful.

As she came floating through the door of the meeting house, doing a mock ballet, she went spinning around the whare until she came to where the bishops were sitting, did a pirouette and then swept her arms down towards her feet, shaking the black pompom right under their noses. That brought the tapu of the woman and the tapu of the ministers together in a clash that made everyone laugh so hard that they were almost crying. It was like that, in those years. No TV, and people had songs they would sing, or skits they’d perform to entertain each other in the evenings on the marae.

Another time, a kaumātua who was very angry with the tāngata whenua for some reason went to the bank, and changed his koha into sixpences. Instead of putting his koha in an envelope and putting it down on the grass, he grabbed the sixpences out of his pocket and threw them all over the marae, and the local kuia had to go on their hands and knees and scrabble around in the grass to pick them up.

There were endless dramas at those hui, and so many great stories. Every hui, and every marae, was different. I began to realise that each hapū had its own histories, its own art styles, its own protocols. After a while I thought to myself, ‘I have to respect the patterns of what’s going on here. If I’m going to write a book about this, it has to be one that people can read and that’s true to these gatherings.’ So in the end I structured it according to the major sequences in a hui. The book itself followed the stages of the ceremonies that I witnessed taking place on marae.

I began my account with an historical examination of how these contemporary gatherings are both similar and different to the way they used to be. Then I went through, step-by-step, what happens in the different kinds of gatherings once you enter a marae. I had a wealth of taped transcripts of speeches, chants and songs of different hui to draw on. People in the Māori world liked the book, because if you have to go to a hui, it’s great to know what’s going to happen and what resources you might need to perform well in those settings.⁴

Wedding waiata, Waitangi Day, 1971. From left: Vern Penfold, Lewis Moeau, Lady Lorna Ngata, Great-aunt Marjorie McDonald, Tilly Reedy, Eruera and Amiria Stirling. (Salmond Family Archive)

Towards the end of the research, Jeremy and I got married. We invited all of our friends, from university, Māori Studies and Architecture School, and both of our families and Mum and Dad’s close friends, and Dad put up a marquee in the back yard. Our wedding featured bagpipes played by one of my brothers, family speeches, and whaikōrero and waiata led by Eruera and Amiria.

My next book came out of my friendship with Amiria, and our time together visiting marae, when she’d told me so many riveting stories. Not long after we returned to New Zealand in 1973, a friend of Amiria’s, Mrs Hoeft, came around to their place with a copy of a little red book that she’d written called The Tail of the Fish, about growing up in the Far North and Māori life in that part of the country. When Amiria showed it to me, she said ‘Ani, I think we could do a bigger one than that’ [laughs]. I said, ‘Hmm, I bet we could.’ That’s how I got into oral history.

As I said, Amiria was a fantastic storyteller, and I thought that the story of her life would make a great book and it would be fun for us to do it together. I had my daughter by then, who was named after her – Amiria Manutahi. She was just a little baby and sat on my lap while Amiria filled some thirty tapes with stories.⁵ Because we knew each other really well, I would often just say, ‘Nanny, tell me the one about …’, because I’d remember a particular story that she’d told me in the car or when we were bored in the middle of a hui. We’d sit there chuckling, laughing, even crying sometimes.

My idea was that instead of putting an anthropological template on her stories and ramming her life into some kind of theoretical framework, why not let people share her life in her own words? Once we started working together, I gave a departmental seminar called ‘The Effacement of the Ethnographer’, discussing the ‘double bind’ of an anthropologist working at home, caught between anthropological framings that seemed alien in Aotearoa, and Māori framings that seemed alien in international anthropology. In the end I decided to get out of the way, as much as possible.

I had to edit the raw transcripts a little, because otherwise the language might have sounded ungrammatical or repetitive in places. But I also wanted to capture Amiria’s turns of phrase and the things that made her speech so engaging and special. My aim was to write it so that anyone could pick up that book and hear her voice, and get some idea what it was like to be in te ao Māori, this other dimension of New Zealand: what it was like to be a Māori woman, raising her children on the East Coast, going through tragedy and triumph, and then shifting to Auckland with Eruera after losing their eldest son.

Three Amirias: Amiria Stirling, Amiria Salmond and Amiria the book, 1976. (Geoff Thorpe)

In short, how did she experience her life? It seemed to work. People were able to read the book and think ‘What a fabulous woman’, or ‘This is what it’s like to live as a Māori’. The book also won a literary award. Most importantly, Amiria loved it. She gave a fantastic speech at the Wattie Book of the Year awards, and loved signing copies of the book and the personal relationships that came out of it; the people who read the book, and wrote to her or rang her up to talk about it.⁶

For me, another important goal of writing was to break down social barriers. When I was travelling with Nanny and Koro I saw a lot of things happening that I hated. I saw people being disrespectful to Māori. There was a lot of raw prejudice in those years. People treated the Stirlings – whom I revered and loved like my own grandparents – as if they were a lower form of life. I couldn’t bear it. I thought, we’ve got these different dimensions in this country, and I’ve started to explore the Māori one and found so much richness and depth. Yet other people are dismissing this way of living and saying ignorant things about it that don’t make any sense at all. So part of my project was to try and change that dynamic.

How did all this connect with the wider shift and radicalisation that was occurring in anthropology at that time?

The agenda that started to happen in the Māori world in the 1970s was more radical than anything that was going on in anthropology at that time. While Amiria and I were working on her book, things like the Land March and the occupation of Bastion Point were underway. Many of my friends from university – including Pita Sharples, Pat Hohepa and Ranginui Walker – were leading the charge, followed by a younger generation including Taura Eruera and Ngā Tamatoa, who were fighting for Māori land rights, the survival of the language and equality with Pākehā. Eruera Stirling was close to Ngā Tamatoa and involved in many of their activities as a kaumātua.

At that time, it was very difficult to reconcile what I was learning about international anthropology with the political activism that was going on in New Zealand. I had a love–hate relationship with the discipline. Quite often, what was being written in the metropolitan capitals seemed a very long way away from the sorts of things I was dealing with as an anthropologist in my own country, and much more complacent, even smug.

And anthropology at this time was often being accused of being the ‘handmaiden of colonialism’.

Yes, but the curious thing was that in New Zealand, many of my colleagues who were leading the charge on Māori issues were trained as anthropologists. Bob Mahuta, Pita Sharples, Hugh Kāwharu, Ranginui Walker and Patu Hohepa had all trained in anthropology. Given this situation, it wasn’t easy to see anthropology as the handmaiden of colonialism in New Zealand, although Ranginui started to express that point of view. However, I’m not sure that any of the others did.

It’s also true, though, that in the late 1970s, there were fierce debates over the role of anthropology in our department, and across the country. At Auckland, that was sparked off by Titewhai Harawira, who gave a withering presentation in a departmental seminar about the links between anthropology and power, and by our staff and students, many of whom were caught up in controversies like the Land March and the occupation of Bastion Point.

Our sons, Steve and Tim, were born during those years. I was heavily pregnant with Steve when Eruera invited me to walk with him and Amiria on the Land March in Auckland. As we crossed the Harbour Bridge, everyone was marching in step, and the bridge began to sway, I could see the expansion joints in the road opening and shutting, and hoped that I wouldn’t fall over. When Tim was born in 1977, Eruera named him ‘Tamati Pōtiki Whakarakaraka’ (the special youngest child), which turned out to be true. Although I’d hoped I might have another daughter, Tim was our last child.

I had three kids under five and was teaching half-time at the university when Eruera said, ‘It’s time for us to do my book now.’ I put everything aside as much as I could – not the children obviously. It was the only time I’ve had student complaints, actually, for essays not being marked on time! [laughs]. Eruera had taught me so much, and I was indebted to him in so many ways that I couldn’t say ‘No.’ He wasn’t well, and was worried that he might not have time to pass on his knowledge to a younger generation. So we just did it, and he took me into his realm.⁷

Every time we taped, Eruera began with a karakia. We had to follow strict rules of tapu. I couldn’t tape if I had my period and we had to stay away from food, so as not to break any tapu restrictions. He was from a world in which the ancestors were present and real, and he carried me a long way into it when we worked together. It was like being his student, but it was difficult, because I was a young Pākehā woman with three small children, and his world, with its power of tapu, can be quite frightening. Tapu is not just an interesting concept to write academic papers about; it’s a living force.

In Eruera’s world, he’d talk to his ancestors and things would happen. He was very selective about what he wanted to publish, and there were a lot of things that we didn’t include in the book. At the same time, he shared his thoughts about many contemporary issues. He had strong opinions about what was going on in New Zealand and the relationships between Māori and Pākehā. Eruera became a kaumātua for young urban radical leaders, guiding them in ways that were in keeping with tikanga, and was very involved in the protests at Bastion Point and Raglan Golf Course.

In 1979 when some of our students, He Taua, were charged with rioting, after they’d attacked a group of engineering students who’d refused to stop performing a drunken parody of the haka, Eruera defended them in court. He tried to get the judge to understand the gravity of the insult by explaining the tapu nature of the haka. All of these things went into the book.⁸

After the meeting held in the quad at the Student Union to discuss the ‘haka party incident’, I wrote an article about it in Craccum, including a story that Tim Shadbolt told to illustrate the nature of racism in New Zealand:

The forum in the Quad was one of the most interesting events in this University for years. I didn’t enjoy it much … There was more open bigotry and racial aggression than I’ve seen at Auckland University ever.

One thing I did enjoy was Tim Shadbolt’s story about his uncle Maurice. Maurice Shadbolt, according to his nephew, would hate to be thought a racist, and so would we all – even the engineers and the taua. But one time[,] when James Baxter died at Jerusalem, Maurice Shadbolt was called to the tangi up the Wanganui River.

That evening at the Marae, he went out to the car to collect his sleeping bag, and when he looked for it, it was gone. ‘Good grief,’ he thought, ‘the bloody Maoris have stolen my sleeping bag’, so he got into the back seat and went to sleep in a huff.

In the morning when he woke up, there were four elders standing silently around the car. He got up and followed them into the meetinghouse, and there in the position of honour beside Jim Baxter’s body, was the sleeping bag, where it had been laid out the night before.⁹

A Kiwi summer with our children, 1980. From left: Amiria, friend, Tim and Steve. (Jeremy Salmond)

With Eruera, 1980. (Marti Friedlander, courtesy of the Gerrard and Marti Friedlander Charitable Trust)

The Raglan Golf Course occupation, 1978. Eruera and Amiria Stirling in the tent, far right. (Salmond Family Archive)

Eruera Stirling with members of Ngā Tamatoa at Hine Māhuru meeting house in Raukokore; Sid and Hana Jackson on Eruera’s left. (John Miller)

Throughout the 1970s, I was struggling to bring the things I was learning from Eruera together with the scholarly ‘Western episteme’. There were times when I really did wonder whether it was possible to accommodate these two worlds in the same person. That is, in my own mind [laughs]. Because there are things that happen in the Māori world that shouldn’t happen if you’re operating within the Western episteme. In te ao Māori, ancestors are real, and a power, and if you offend or cross them, it’s dangerous. Tapu can kill people, or drive them mad.

In 1980, the manuscript of Eruera was finished, and Eruera read it through, and was happy with it. Later that year, I went to Cambridge University with our family on sabbatical leave as a Nuffield Scholar. I had a brilliant time in Cambridge. It was fabulous to have the space just to enjoy the family, and to think, read and talk to the wonderful people there, people like Marilyn Strathern, Edmund Leach and Stephen Hugh-Jones, and the PhD cohort.

In some ways, King’s College felt familiar. It was like te ao Māori in many ways, with its carved dining hall and chapel, ancestral portraits and communal living in college; its rich ceremonial life, love of music and veneration for knowledge. As a kind of joke, when I returned to Auckland, a much less ancient and more secular university, I wrote my leave report as an ethnographic account of Cambridge, with its canoe races on the River Cam, its men’s and women’s houses (many of the colleges were still segregated at that time), its learned