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Eminem
Eminem

ĀteaJuly 31, 2022

The day I found out that Eminem was the Real Slim Shady

Eminem
Eminem

What can the subversive genius of rap teach us about climate change? Quite a lot, it turns out, writes Nadine Anne Hura.

When my brother died two years ago, he didn’t leave a note, but he did leave a Spotify playlist in which I listened, for the first time, to ‘Space Bound’ by Eminem. I’d heard it before, but this was the first time I’d really paid attention to the lyrics. Disturbed, I went home and fell down a rabbit hole of fans and critics debating, line by line, Eminem’s undeniable skill with the English language. I read conflicting views about Marshall Mathers’ misogynistic, appropriative, homophobic and ablist personas. I pinged back and forth between the various controversies he’s been at the centre of over the past two decades, and wondered if I’d been living under a rock in some parallel universe.

I emerged from my room, bleary-eyed and confused, and asked my kids, older teens, if they knew that Eminem was actually Slim Shady, who was really Marshall Mathers.

Here is how they looked at me:

So you actually like him? I asked.

“Meh,” said my daughter.

“Retro nowadays,” said my boys.

But they could all, quite effortlessly, quote whole verses from ‘The Real Slim Shady’ and ‘Without Me’.

Thank god for my own ignorance. What would I write about otherwise? In my defence, Eminem was at his height when I was deep in the pages of Ranginui Walker’s Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou and listening to Radio New Zealand while breastfeeding. If I looked at him at all, I just saw a white dude shouting angrily about things that were irrelevant to my life.

But the more I asked around, the more disconcerted I became. It seemed that there were only three other people in the whole lower North Island who did not know that Slim Shady was Marshall Mathers, and none wanted to be interviewed for this story.

Apart from a deep burgundy shame, the one thing these social outcasts and I had in common was a lack of any real understanding or appreciation for rap. We had heard rap, we could identify rap, we could name a few 90s rappers. But none of us could say that rap spoke deeply to us.

Given words are my trade, I decided to sign up for a rap workshop with Allenzo Tamatoa. Not because of Eminem, but because the first step in overcoming ignorance is realising there is a whole world of things out there that you didn’t even know you don’t know.

My brief and humbling foray into rap

The community room at the back of the Living Waters Baptist Church in Ōtara was packed, mainly with aunties and cousins and little kids tearing through. When the free notebooks and pencils were passed around I smiled like a nerd and held up my journal to show I had come prepared. I took a seat in the back row and tried to follow.

Schemes, rhymes, beats, bars.

The words were familiar, but their interpretations new. I struggled to keep up. In one exercise, I felt like we were deliberately mining random words for what I would have thought were dad jokes or puns, in order to produce double entendre. These sophisticated word plays are intended to deliver one idea on the surface, while concealing a more ambiguous, often provocative message inside a pithy turn of phrase.

Then came the rhymes – something considered entry-level by serious poets, aka the literati, unless of course you’re Shakespeare, in which case you’re a genius. In rap, I learned that while rhymes are a distinguishing feature of the form, they are not, on their own, enough to carry a whole song. The skill of the lyricist, like Shakespeare, is the capacity to blend rhyme and double entendre to convey multiple, sometimes contradictory ideas at the same time.

It suddenly occurred to me, like a match struck somewhere in the periphery of this tiny brain of mine, that there was deep possibility and unbridled power in that idea. It was exciting. It was daunting.

We were all given 15 minutes to compose our own rap deploying these new skills. I squirmed in my seat and stared at my page:

Lying… lion… lie-in

It’s incredible how quickly arrogance can turn to humility, no? When the floor opened for sharing I tried to read my rap aloud with a kind of… attitude. But no-one was fooled. I had not written a rap. I had written a poem. A rhyming poem. Scorned by the literati, disqualified by the rappers.

There was an awkward smattering of applause to acknowledge my effort. One of the Aunties smiled showing all her teeth. She put up her hand to share after me. I could see her thinking: I can’t possibly be worse than that palagi woman.

As I sat there soaking up this talent for language I clearly do not possess, it occurred to me that these are the messengers of climate change we need. Not the Aunties specifically, and not the rappers solely, but anyone who has a facility with words and has the power to command an audience.

People from Pacific islands march as part of the world’s largest climate strike in Sydney on September 20, 2019. (Photo: PETER PARKS/AFP via Getty Images)

Are acronyms just sophisticated double entendre?

The interesting thing about rap is that it uses language as a screen to either reveal or to conceal. Climate change, as a topic, isn’t that dissimilar.

For a start, there’s so much of it. It’s loud and densely packed and hard to follow. The language is almost always technical, economic, bureaucratic and political. News headlines, half a dozen a day at least in Aotearoa alone, are all written by, and for, people who already seem to have an excellent grasp of the subject – the same way everybody but me seems to know that Marshall Mathers is from Detroit and that two trailer park girls went around the outside.

There’s an endless stream of documentaries, podcasts, books, magazines, blogs, Facebook groups, TikTok threads and Reddit rabbit holes about global warming. Often, the solutions to climate change, despite being infinitely complex, are presented by government and politicians and farmers and activists with such conviction it makes anyone who has just joined the conversation feel ignorant.

How many of these acronyms or titles are you familiar with? IPCC AR6, NAP, Three Waters, WAI262, He Waka Eke Noa?

In order to understand what the government is doing, or not doing, to address climate change, you have to invest time (which you probably don’t have) to become fluent in the highly dominant language of science and politics.

It makes you realise, like I did when I discovered just how many people can sing Eminem songs at the click of the fingers, just how much power those who can turn a phrase really hold.

Language can be used to deflect, to strike, to exclude or to deceive. Or even, like Slim Shady, to ridicule. The less people understand or pay attention to the double entendre, the easier it is to confuse them.

You could even appropriate their own voice and language and have people disseminating your personal convictions dressed up as universal truths.

A non-scientifically robust experiment

Here’s a little social experiment for you. Ask the person next to you if they can name an Eminem song. Give them bonus points if they can quote any lyrics. Now ask the same person if they can tell you the significance of 1.5 degrees.

The results of my own, unscientific Instagram sample, were fairly predictable. Everyone could name an Eminem song, even people who flat out hate him. A friend was shocked to report that even her seven year old knew about the explicit rhymes of that guy Shady something.

But when it came to “1.5”, most assumed I was referring to degrees of separation (cute). Some had a hunch it was to do with climate change (“sea level rise and stuff”). But only a handful of people could connect 1.5 degrees specifically to the Paris Agreement’s target to limit global warming by 2100.

Once enlightened, a lot of people reacted the same way I did when I realised that Eminem is a word play on Marshall Mathers’ initials. But just because someone is aware the planet is warming (or that Eminem is a rap artist) and may even be prepared to join a climate protest or invest in an e-bike (name his songs or quote his lyrics), doesn’t mean they necessarily understand the complex science of climate modeling or the intricacies of international treaties (or double entendre).

My 20 year old son, who works on minimum wage in retail, says he “gets it”, referring to climate change, but just wants to know what he’s supposed to do about it. As far as teenagers go, he’s not especially environmentally conscious. He worries about the future, he’s smart, but he doesn’t obsessively read about climate change. Like so many people, he moves around in the world hearing the stories and seeing the images of wildfires and floods, but like me when it comes to rap music, the information and the details just aren’t speaking deeply to him. If this article had climate change in the title he would have scrolled right past.

The moral of the experiment? I think climate scientists need to work on their schemes.

The mighty Waikato River near Huka Falls.
The Waikato River: ‘Learning the names and the stories of the mountains and rivers you live in the shelter of is climate action.’ (Photo: Getty Images)

Art and Science: Waiting for the (apoc)eclipse

If colonialism was a universe, science and art would orbit each other like celestial planets. The world of art, inhabited by musicians like Eminem, is ignited by a multitude of tiny embers that spontaneously spark and travel vast distances, both in distance and time.

The world of environmental or physical science (which is to say, the science that a typical, English-speaking brain defaults to when it hears that word) is fuelled by a large, relatively contained centralised woodburner known as research and observation – not that many people feel its warmth directly.

In a Māori universe, everything is not compartmentalised this way. The kupu “toi”, usually narrowly translated as art, has multiple, applied interpretations. One of them is knowledge. Another is summit. Other definitions include source, tip, point, indigenous. No doubt there are more still.

The point is, art is knowledge. Mātauranga is deeply embedded in the things we make, the landmarks we name, the stories we pass down, the songs we sing.

In this must-listen Taringa podcast, Dayle Takitium, says it isn’t an accident that a Māori world view has been so drastically diminished. “The first thing the British did,” Dayle says, “in every country they have been to colonise, is take out the poets, the storytellers, the spiritual leaders. It’s a clue that they target the psyche before they target the land. They did that carefully and deliberately, swapping out our emotional and mental loyalty to one world view for another, until we are almost colonising ourselves because we bought into the system.”

So what can you do?

The arbitrary separation and subjugation of the artistic disciplines in Aotearoa is a problem for humanity. For Papatūānuku, it’s a crisis. My son, who can sing all the lyrics to ‘Lose Yourself’, asked me how I expected him personally to influence the trajectory of the 1.5 degree target of doom, which is a fair but hard question to answer. What can the least powerful do about global warming? Is it right that people with already limited resources should have to sacrifice to fix a problem they didn’t cause?

Dayle acknowledges it can be difficult, but paradoxically, she also says it’s simple. Chances are, you’re already doing it.

“Go outside, take off your jandals, put your feet in the soil.” Healing and protection of whenua can be as simple as sinking your bare feet into soil. Reconnecting with the source that provides us with life. The truth springs from, and will forever be retained by, the land.

By that frame, learning te reo Māori, is climate action. Overriding our own internal shame to revitalise and reassert the language of our ancestors, te reo rangatira, which natively normalises the knowledge that most of us carry subconsciously and spiritually, is climate action. We know that everything past, present and yet to come is connected, though we may need to look to poets rather than the scientists to articulate exactly how.

Learning the names and the stories of the mountains and rivers you live in the shelter of is climate action. Immersing yourself in the tapestry of colour beneath your feet is climate action. Listening to the stories of Māui, and Hinenuitepō and Tāwhaki and Māhuika, and paying attention to the practical ancestral wisdom that is revealed with each fresh retelling, is climate action.

Protecting the integrity of our whakatauki from misuse and appropriation, which, like Eminem’s raps, will long outlast the memory of 1.5 degrees, is climate action. In the same vein, honouring the promises of Te Tiriti as opposed to the principles is climate action. This would see a return of whenua and taonga to hapū for the protection and benefit of all our mokopuna.

And finally, not being embarrassed to ask when you don’t understand the jargon of climate change. Chances are, there are thousands of other people out there who also don’t. Participating in conversations about climate change, like rap, requires a certain literacy. There’s so much assumed knowledge and specific language and it doesn’t speak deeply to everybody. Not only that, the subjects can sometimes feel irrelevant to your daily life, or simply more than you can cope with. But fatigue and shame and overwhelm have a way of excluding us. Deliberate or not, it’s a convenient situation for those who hold the power to decide where money and resources go.

This puts an onus on those who live and breathe the science and data and policy on a daily basis, and have years of contextual experience, to recognise their own internal biases and address them. Not just by being prepared to feel foolish while discovering all the things they didn’t know they don’t know, but by actively recognising and supporting the skills, wisdom and talent of artists – like Allenzo – as practitioners of knowledge in their own right.

This is the terrain of Dayle’s PhD, in that Taringa podcast I really urge you to listen to. “Self-determination lies in the conscious reinvestment in and prioritisation of the keepers of the narrative – the artists, the storytellers, the poets, the composers.”

“With the belief,” Dayle says, in a line worthy of the finest rappers, “of the weight of a hundred thousand tūpuna behind them.”

This is Public Interest Journalism funded through NZ On Air.

Keep going!
Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

InternetJuly 29, 2022

Inside the fight for Māori data sovereignty

Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

Small organisations around Aotearoa are placing Māori values at the forefront of their digital services. For IRL, Shanti Mathias talks to some of those working towards a version of the internet that prioritises the needs of indigenous people. 

Initially, Kaye-Maree Dunn (Te Rarawa, Ngā Puhi) wanted to make Indigicoin, the world’s first indigenous cryptocurrency. As a veteran of the Māori social development world – she’s also worked in community housing and the Māori Land court  – she was intrigued by the possibility that blockchain technology could help create more equitable financial outcomes for Māori communities. 

When she met software developer Ben Tairea (Ngāti Nurou, Kuki Airani) at a hackathon, the plan changed: how could they help different iwi and hapū access vital information about their whakapapa without placing that information at risk of exploitative, offshore companies? 

“We set out to design a decentralised system for archiving traditional knowledge and storing genealogy and whakapapa,” she says. The result is Āhau, a tool designed for Māori individuals and groups to store information about their ancestry; she and Taiera are the directors of the company. Dunn is quick to differentiate Āhau from other “off the shelf” genealogy services, such as ancestry.com. 

“Co-creation and co-design has been critical to our approach,” she says. “Because we’re working in the space of genealogy we are very concerned about the sanctity of this sacred knowledge of our tūpuna, our elders and whānau being online.”

Incorporating and acknowledging tikanga within Āhau was vital from day one. “Genealogical information is tapu, and needs to be handled carefully; it shouldn’t be handled near food, which is noa,” Dunn says. As they developed the repository, the designers said special karakia and considered fasting as they wrote code. Their values were integrated into the company’s constitution, setting up processes for what would happen if there were disagreements during the project. Collective input was also prioritised; the service was co-designed with the communities that would use Āhau. “This is a grassroots technology,” Dunn says. 

At a technical level, Āhau is a distributed application, which means user data is stored only on their own device or within networks of their choosing. Users can access information online and offline; a Pātaka, or cloud server, is integrated into the technology, giving the user choice about what information is uploaded and who can access it. The software is also open source – Dunn’s dream is for other indigenous communities around the world to be able to adapt the software for their purposes. “I want Āhau to be a ubiquitous piece of software across our communities to help access support, tribal knowledge, and government financial services,” she says. The application isn’t quite there yet, but “it’s a doorway”.

Digital mana motuhake could change what the internet looks like for the better. (Image: Tina Tiller/Getty Images)

Āhau and its privacy-first decentralised infrastructure is part of a movement for Māori data sovereignty, part of a global conversation about what indigenous sovereignty looks like online. Honouring Māori rights in the data realm is an urgent issue: the government in Aotearoa holds huge amounts of data about Māori, and there are fears that this could be abused with facial recognition technology, or that the government’s agreement with Amazon Web Services will prioritise offshore profit over Aotearoa-based data protection.

While the applications to digital technology are newer, the story of who holds information has always been about power, says Tahu Kukutai (Ngāti Tiipa, Ngāti Kinohaku, Te Aupōuri). “The powerful collect information in a way that benefits themselves,” she says, pointing out that censuses have historically been a means to count the population for military conscription and taxation. The professor of demography at the University of Waikato, also director of ​​Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga, the Māori centre of research excellence, has worked extensively to understand data sovereignty in a Māori context. She founded Te Mana Raraunga, the Māori data sovereignty network, and working with the Iwi Chairs Forum to establish a relationship with Statistics New Zealand to manage iwi data. (However, she spoke to me in a personal, research capacity.) 

In the colonial context, including with censuses, data is something that is taken from people and pooled by the government to maintain control of people and land. As land sovereignty asserts the rights of traditional owners, rather than the state, to have rangatiratanga over the whenua, data sovereignty does that for information. “The rightful authority for indigenous data is not with the state, but with indigenous people,” she says. 

Tahu kukutai sits on a couch and looks at the camera smiling
Tahu Kukutai has been working in the field of Māori data sovereignty for many years (Photo: Grant Maiden/University of Otago Press)

There are specific policy changes at the central  government level which could help improve data outcomes for Māori, says Karaitiana Taiuru (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Rārua, Pākehā), a researcher who specialises in mātauranga Māori and digital sovereignty. “I’d like to see a Māori equivalent of the Privacy Commission to deal with legislation protecting Māori from [data] bias,” he says. “We need to normalise our tikanga and traditional knowledge – I’d like to see kaumatua and mātauranga experts who are involved in the community, not academics, be part of decision making.”

The 2018 census epitomises why the government needs to rethink how they gather and use Māori data, Kukutai says. Its digital-first approach has been blamed for around 30% of Māori being left out of the official count, a result which could have negative funding impacts on Māori populations for years to come. The government has “an appetite to engage with Māori data sovereignty,” she says, although processes to do this have largely not been formalised. She says that good data governance drives the government towards higher data standards that are good for everyone, “especially communities that are over-surveilled and stigmatised”.

But responsibly dealing with indigenous data is too urgent to wait for government action. “True transformation is outside the kāwanatanga system,” Kukutai says, referring to how the system of government agencies engage with information about Māori. “Government has a hard time [giving up] control and stepping aside.” 

Another organisation not waiting for the government to assert their Māori data sovereignty is Te Hiku Media, a Far North-based iwi radio station turned multimedia organisation. In 2018 Te Hiku Media launched a competition to gather recordings of people speaking te reo Māori through their Kōrero Māori app, in the hope of developing a speech-to-text programme to transcribe the thousands of hours of archival recordings held by the radio station. Within 10 days they had received hundreds of hours of language content – enough to develop a transcription app with a remarkably low error rate. This corpus of recorded data is incredibly valuable; Te Hiku Media had to fend off corporations hoping for access to it to develop their own Māori language resources. 

Some of the Te Hiku Media team, with Keoni Mahelona on the far left, at their radio station. (Photo: supplied)

The next stage is Rongo, an app that launched earlier this month. “We’ve built Rongo to improve te reo Māori pronunciation – there’s a risk that English will impact the sound of te reo, and that’s already happening,” says Keoni Mahelona, the chief technology officer of Te Hiku Media. Mahelona, a native Hawaiian, has used his background to build values of sovereignty into Te Hiku’s tech platforms. The app will allow people to practise their te reo pronunciation by speaking into their phone and receiving feedback. All data entered into the app is covered by Te Hiku Media’s Kaitiakitanga licence, which is based on values outlined by Te Mana Raraunga. “Your data is only ever used for the benefit of Māori and Māori education,” Mahelona says. “Third parties using our tools are prohibited from doing surveillance, doing any bad shit or unethical things.” 

Mahelona contrasts Te Hiku’s work with the international language learning app Duolingo, whose indigenous language offerings – including ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi – are built on the labour of indigenous people, without sharing the profits. “Is there any better expression of American capitalism [than] a corporation profiting from teaching the language that was beaten out of our people?” he asks rhetorically.  

Indeed, while there are some inroads to be made with indigenous data sovereignty and governments, it’s much more difficult to ask big technology companies to respect people’s rights to their data. “You have more sovereignty if you build your own platform, it’s harder to effect changes to those mainstream products,” Mahelona says. Te Hiku Media have chosen to host videos themselves, rather than embedding YouTube links on their website. “There is mana in the stories we tell and we can’t give it away to American platforms,” he says.

To make these digital alternatives to big tech possible, digital expertise in Māori communities needs to grow, Dunn says. “We need more indigenous developers, designers, technologists, tech architects, archivists…” she says. It’s a long list, but it’s vital to develop these skills. “We can create a new industry to protect the memories of our elders – our culture, language, and history. That is a real gift for us to have in New Zealand and around the world.” 

Exercising indigenous data sovereignty requires building technological expertise in Māori communities Photo: Getty Images

The movement to assert indigenous data sovereignty online presents an alternate way of being online. The Web 2.0 era, characterised by the dominance of enormous social media platforms filled with user-generated content, is homogenising. No matter where you live, if you use Google or Facebook, the architecture and interface of these platforms are the same, even if the content or language is different. These corporations have profited because they’ve treated all user data, no matter who generated it or why, as a commodity. For instance, Instagram gets away with prioritising video in its feed despite users wanting to see photos because it is more interested in convincing its funders that it can beat TikTok than serving the users it already has. 

Systems like Āhau and Rongo are based on a completely different ideology: they are designed for specific people, in specific places. The goal is not to profit by increasing the scale but to continue to serve that community’s needs. It’s a contrasting vision of the internet, localised and customised to serve a small group of users very effectively. Because the intent is not profit or scale, individual and community users with specific needs are valued over lines on a profit sheet. “We have a small user base because we’re going slowly – I want my own family, my own community to trust Āhau,” Dunn says. For her small organisation, that trust is much more valuable than for big tech, who increase users by making their services a default for communication. 

But while all users, indigenous and otherwise, could benefit from digital services focused on creating and maintaining trust, a clear profit model doesn’t necessarily exist yet. Te Hiku Media receives public funding; Āhau has received a range of grants, and while the service will remain free, Dunn hopes to generate income through providing extra data storage, and perhaps looping back to her initial idea of an indigenous digital currency in the future. While big tech remains dominant for now, there is enormous potential for a diverse range of indigenous technology alternatives which are integrated with indigenous values. 

“Data is an extension of who we are, it’s an extension of what we value,” says Kukutai. Seeing how Te Hiku Media is prioritising  data sovereignty, as well as the many smaller projects with incredible potential, gives her hope for how mokopuna may be able to express mana motuhake through data in the future. “Data can be a powerful enabler for doing and thinking differently … it can bring us together, make us more accountable to each other, it can create benefits and distribute them more equally, it can make us better stewards of te taiao and everything in it,” she says.

“But that needs a dramatic disruption of how we think about and interact with data – what Te Hiku is doing is a step towards that.”


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