South Pacific Festival held in Tahiti

Tu Tangata, Issue 24, 1 June 1985, Page 37

South Pacific Festival held in Tahiti

Despite the opposition of some Tahitian independence groups and a change of venue from Noumea, the South Pacific Arts Festival gets underway in Tahiti later this month.

The postponement of the Noumea venue because of civil war, has meant a reduction in the Maori contingent from 123 to 63 performers.

Organisor, Tungia Baker is even more adamant that the Festival needs to be staged despite the political meddling that is taking place in the Pacific. She says Maoris should step out of the cushioned environment of their papakainga and see the need to assert a Pacific awareness rather than stay under the cloak of colonialism.

Tungia believes Maoris have become part of the colonialism that the Pacific peoples have shed or are in the process of trying to shed.

"The growing Maori voice against the Treaty of Waitangi not being honoured, is part of this shedding of the cloak.

"But our Maori people haven't defined any commitment to the peoples of the Pacific, we should take the initiative into this world, a world that is the new strategic and commercial centre for nations."

Tungia says instead of Maoris asserting a kind of cultural arrogance that says, ‘here I am, this is what I have to offer,' they should be open to sharing in the expression of art, allowing others to have a different interpretation of that expression.

She’s aware of a backlash against Maoris from some Pacific peoples. Tungia says this came from Maoris who tried to tell Vanuatu people how to deal with colonialism, when the Maoris had no experience to go by.

"You see our environment is so different, we’ve had it easy.”

Because of this arrogance, no Maori women were invited to speak at the recent Pacific womens conference in Vanuatu, she said.

The holding of the South Pacific Festival in Tahiti has come in for fire, as did Noumea, and the reasons given are similar.

Two Tahitian independence groups contacted Tungia opposing the festival being held. They both purported to speak for the people and said the festival would give support to anti-inde-pendence feeling and a nuclear Pacific. It was also suggested that the customary chiefs of Tahiti should have called the festival and not the governmental body, The Territorial Office for Cultural Action.

But Tungia counters by saying she had to dig round behind the scenes to find that the independence groups didn't appear to speak for the majority and that she disagrees not with take presented but with the timing.

“I believe it's with korero ngakau ki te ngakau that a breakthrough is made, through the multi-nationalism that pervades the Pacific. That's the big problem. when colonialism was shed, multinationalism becomes the next pitfall." When asked if expecting a cultural

festival to redress the balance in the face of such odds, Tungia was optimistic.

"Well that’s the landscape, but it’s one of many landscapes and not the only one. Art is a universal environment that is not unique to individuals. It belongs to a people. Its energy force is overt and lasting, whereas political energy comes and goes.

That’s why, she says, the Festival experience has attracted the ire of independence and nuclear-free groups, it draws that sort of reaction.

"While the shifting political sands create the sort of take that is coming to the fore, art has to be political, all art is political, just like Wahine Toa and The Bone People were political statements.”

And Tungia is bitter about the way the Noumea venue for the Festival was scuttled. She says the Kanaks wanted the Festival, but the white right-wing movement pulled the rug out from under them by withdrawing essential services like sanitation and water from Festival accommodation.

And Tungia sees big differences between Noumea and Tahiti.

In Noumea the High Commissioner was the kingpin but in Tahiti the French High Commissioner is like a ‘man-o-war’ without guns.

It’s an autonomous French territory rather than a dependant.

All politics aside, Tungia is keen for Maoris to not only dip their toes in the Pacific but also be prepared to swim for it.