Puawai Cairns, head of mātauranga Māori for Te Papa museum, writes about what biculturalism can and should mean in an institution like a museum. 

“Institutional biculturalism is often applied like makeup: it can create the appearance desired by both the wearer and the viewer, while beneath the surface the ravages of time remain. In the case of museums, the inherited ideologies of the western museology may be covered for public consumption, but after the performance, when the makeup is cleaned off, the old face remains as it has always been, the face of colonialism.”

When David Butts wrote these words in his unpublished dissertation Māori and Museums: The Politics of Indigenous Recognition 15 years ago, Te Papa was only five years old, a bright and shiny model of bicultural museum practice, heaving with new visitor-centric offerings. But was it an institution with newly applied makeup that merely provided better camouflage for colonial desiccation?

Museums Aotearoa have asked if I can write something about biculturalism to preface the preparations being put in place for the next conference in 2019, which is going to focus on the big ‘B word’. I’ve struggled with what to call this piece, so I’m writing about all the titles of biculturalism, and all those papers that are still to be written about this makeover sometimes gone wrong.

I had intended on giving this piece a suitably conference-y title like Biculturalism: a dissatisfactory inheritance, referring to the fact that sometimes biculturalism feels like a garment that has been handed down, like an awkward third-hand jersey that you don’t quite fit (Biculturalism: the unwanted hand-me-down).

I got caught up on whether this jersey should be termed a dissatisfactory or unsatisfactory inheritance. So I searched to find out what the difference is and Google spat this cheerful paragraph back at me:

“A sense of incompleteness, which leaves one feeling unsatisfied

A sense of wrongness, which leaves one feeling dissatisfied”

I mulled over the sense of incompleteness and dissatisfaction (Biculturalism: just enough to eat so you don’t starve). When is biculturalism bicultural enough to be satisfying? Is it when we have 50/50 equitable split or power between the Treaty partners? When there are more exhibitions nationwide that give more coverage of Māori stories and worldviews? When all your staff are bicultural (capacity, whakapapa etc)? Or when there is just enough of a presence of one Treaty partner in an institution to appear bicultural (as per the David Butts quote above) while not necessarily having a 50/50 partnership (Biculturalism: it may not be pretty but it gets shit done)? The vague expectations of biculturalism make it everything and nothing, it becomes the grand promise that never delivers a grand shift.

I reflected on the times biculturalism has actually helped me get shit done, remembering a moment when I cited biculturalism and our institutional obligations to it, in an exhibition meeting that advocated for more Māori representation. The strategy worked to a limited extent – I was able to add ever so slightly more Māori content – but it was not the ideal outcome. My arguments had to hinge on what value Māori content brought to a national conversation for non-Māori visitors, convincing decision-makers that non-Māori visitors would not be alienated by ‘too many’ Māori stories. In a bicultural framework, wouldn’t this also work the other way? That the other partner would have to make arguments that too many non-Māori stories would not alienate Māori audiences (Biculturalism: is it a one way discussion)?

There is also a sense of wrongness within a bicultural framework because it can disregard that other, older relationships exist – such as our whakapapa relationship and loyalty to Pacific people, who become either a voiceless part of the bicultural partnership or are placed in false opposition. Biculturalism locks you into a dialogical relationship, sometimes at the cost of more nuanced kōrero outside this binary (Biculturalism: it can be an exclusive conversation).

There is an anxiety that comes with being a bicultural partner and it chews at the heart of most Māori who work within a bicultural framework. By dint of our numerically lesser status within institutions, we become the bicultural Wikipedia, our opinions representative of the cultural other. This results in an ever-present anxiety, a fear that if you miss an email, miss a meeting, don’t agree to an invitation to be part of a steering group/expert panel, there will be no bicultural (read: Māori) opinion expressed. So you have to be on the ball, hyper-vigilant and, as a result, usually strung out (Biculturalism: there is no out-of-office-auto reply). This also exists with the requirement to carry out cultural protocols, to teach and educate the bicultural partner about te ao Māori while also navigating the demands of te ao Western workplace.

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Ehara i te mea pani, me haehae (it is not enough to wear it as painted adornment, it should be carved)

I want to talk about what biculturalism can be, as opposed to this partially achieved social contract. Biculturalism is a system that requires constant advocacy from both partners, to protect the integrity and promise of the partnership. It cannot exist if one party is exerting all their efforts to realise the aspirations of the other without a mutual agreement that this will be returned in kind. To fully determine a bicultural relationship is not decolonisation, it is not an appeasement, and it is not mana motuhake – it is keeping a promise. Biculturalism is a framework that requires allies, accomplices, compromise and respect. Just as we learn from the story of tā moko when the practice shifted from painting on to the skin to scarification, if an institution has adopted biculturalism as its driving framework, it is not enough to only wear it as a temporary face of make up, it should be carved into its structure, as an irrefutable and undeniable statement.

But once this is done, the challenge that we must answer is if we still believe that biculturalism is the best system to help us navigate where we want to go? (Biculturalism: terminus, or just a train stop before somewhere else?)

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 This article was first published in Museums Aotearoa Quarterly, December 2018.

A volunteer for the Indigenous Peoples Caucus at this year’s COP24 climate talks, Kera Sherwood-O’Regan reports back from Poland on the indigenous and human rights injustice that has just been delivered by the summit. 

It’s 2.58am on Sunday in Kraków, Poland. After an intense 48-hour final day at the COP24 Climate Negotiations an hour and a half away in Katowice, myself and thousands of other climate nerds are poring over the new text that will shape the way states combat the looming climate crisis.

While much of New Zealand has spent the past two weeks winding down to a summer Kirihimete, a weird subset of the global population – diplomats, activists, indigenous leaders, vegan pamphleteers, journalists, exasperated looking baristas, and let’s not forget the Polish Policja – have been occupied round the clock in a conference where world leaders finally came (more or less) to an agreement about how to move forward together on climate change.

The COP21 conference in 2015 saw the creation of the Paris Agreement, with states around the world agreeing to work collectively to limit global temperature rise to “well below 2C”. This year’s conference has seen the development of the ‘Paris Rulebook’ which gives the agreement substance, and setting out how it will actually be implemented.

Coming to consensus on such an important plan sounds like a great win for global diplomacy. The catch? Achieving that consensus included hacking a huge human rights-shaped hole out of the heart of the agreement.

Human rights references in the Paris Agreement were hard fought for and won by global civil society campaigning, and indeed the hard work of many of our Māori activists. This commitment to rights has been echoed again and again throughout the Katowice conference, with many groups, including the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change and our homegrown rangatahi rōpu, Te Ara Whatu, campaigning directly for rights to be front and centre.

Despite numerous recommendations from human rights experts and advocates, references to human rights were gutted from the text, with the exception of the preamble and a chapter on carbon markets, which Brazil effectively blocked until 2019.

This situation is made all the more bitter by the proposal to strip rights from the text coinciding with Human Rights Day, the 70th Anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. It also happened immediately after the parties (states) and indigenous peoples celebrated a supposedly historic step forward with the adoption of the Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples Platform during the first week of the talks.

Poetic.

It’s now 12.43am Tuesday, and the extra two days or so of reflection has only made the gravity of this situation clearer. I’m still not really sure how to process the last two weeks, let alone this  heavy issue of human rights. Tonight, I’ve been thinking about the stories we tell about climate change. We are quick to remind “non-believers” that climate change will affect everyone, and it’s true on one level. But on another, we know it is already affecting some more than others, and this weekend’s decision to write rights out of the text makes that cut a little deeper.

We know that marginalised groups such as indigenous peoples, disabled people, women, and those in developing nations have contributed least to climate change, and yet bear the brunt of its effects. Look to the recent Camp Fire in Paradise, California to see that even “disasters” discriminate. Many of those who perished were elderly and the disabled, for whom escape was literally inaccessible.

Over the last two weeks, I’ve also heard indigenous people from around the world share their own stories of climate change. Those aren’t stories set in the future. They’re not talking about what will happen in five or ten or 20 years. They’re sharing how climate change is already on their doorstep and in some cases, threatening to knock the door down.

Kaidynce Storr, a 17-year-old from Tuktoyatuk in the Canadian Arctic, told a room full of our indigenous caucus that her “home is sinking” and how she fears that, six feet away from the eroding coastline, the house is “one storm away from falling into the ocean.” Other youth from her rōpu shared how the traditional knowledge they learned from their elders no longer matched the ecosystem they saw before their eyes, as the permafrost thins, as algae blooms create dead zones in their awa, and as their traditional fishing spots are now home to different species of fish than generations before them.

As the communities on the frontlines of climate change, and the communities leading the way in climate solutions, we deserve to be directly involved in decision making that affects our communities. Yet looking at the text that has come out of COP24, we barely feature. Stripping human rights language, and especially direct references to indigenous rights, opens a channel for countries to railroad indigenous and human rights in the name of climate action.

Sidelining indigenous rights under the guise of clean development is not a novel opportunity either. Under the Paris Agreement’s predecessor, the Kyoto Protocol, the Panamanian government attempted to claim carbon credits under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) through the Barro Blanco Dam. The dam development, however, repeatedly excluded indigenous communities from information and decision making about the dam, and forced indigenous Ngaäbe people from their homes. While eventually withdrawn from the CDM in 2016, this, and other such cases set a dangerous precedent and make it even more important that human rights remain at the core of these climate negotiations.

Thinking about what has been cut out of this agreement, the apocalyptic image that is stuck in my mind is the prospect of our own wāhi tapu back home being desecrated to make way for solar plants or wind farms. It can be easy to think that something like that wouldn’t happen in Aotearoa, and for sure, there are other protections in place that would hopefully prevent such flagrant disregard for our indigenous rights, but if there’s one thing this COP has taught me, it’s that we can’t take anything for granted.

The erosion of rights starts out slowly, and subtly, and this disappointing outcome for the Rulebook should be a reminder that we cannot take these rights for granted. We cannot simply rely on the good faith of states. We should take note that the country responsible for punting the one rights-inclusive part of the Rulebook to later negotiations is also the one who just elected a President who has promised mining on indigenous Amazon whenua, amongst other anti-environmental, anti-indigenous, and anti-human rights kaupapa.

While we are right to be proud of UNDRIP, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and other protections we have in place in Aotearoa, it looks likely that our indigenous cousins in Brazil, and elsewhere around the world have a steep uphill battle ahead. Having spent the past three weeks surrounded by indigenous strangers from around the world who very quickly became whānau, I’m reminded that while we need to step up the mahi and keep te ahi kā burning, we also need to both tautoko as well as draw strength from our indigenous whānau across the globe.