A group of Pasifika community leaders invites us to think differently about practising cultural traditions in a country we’ve migrated to.

Kava ‘o Aotearoa only holds one kava ceremony a year. In 2019, their first ceremony was to stand in solidarity with the Muslim community after the terror attack in Christchurch. In 2020, the group held a kava ceremony at Auckland Museum for the launch of the new Te Ao Mārama space, which houses the largest kava bowl in the world. And in 2021, the ceremony took place in the sea, as a climate-awareness exercise after the America’s Cup. 

While kava is practised across many Pacific countries, this particular kava ceremony has been designed specifically to be performed in Aotearoa.

Who is Kava ‘o Aotearoa and what do they do? The group is made up of three prominent Pasifika leaders in the community – Pakilau Manase Lua, Christine Nurminen and Therese Mangos.

Lua is the Pacific advisory group chair at Auckland Museum as well as the chairman of the Pacific response coordination team of the Pacific leadership forum, a group that helped the community during the pandemic with social and financial support as well as more general things such as navigating the immigration process.

Nurminen spends most of her time as the international portfolio manager for the Pacific region at Oxfam New Zealand. Mangos is the director of Pacific Vision Aotearoa, a community whose work includes composting workshops and introducing gardens and how to care for them at churches and schools.

Together, the three pioneers co-designed Kava ‘o Aotearoa, a group that meets annually to practise a pan-Polynesian kava ceremony, and who are profiled in an upcoming documentary short of the same name. They’ve been practicing for three years – each time to mark a significant event in the country. 

Kava is a crop in the Pacific islands, where the roots are used to produce a bitter drink that’s traditionally consumed at ceremonial events. It’s one of the most important customs in the Pacific where attendees sit in a circle or semicircle and take turns drinking kava in a coconut shell cup. In Fiji, a yaqona (kava) ceremony would be seen at important social, political or religious functions and similar practices can be seen in Sāmoa and Tonga. For Sāmoans, the ceremony includes speeches and oratory from chiefs and distinguished guests.

Kava ‘o Aotearoa carefully selected components of how kava is performed in the Pacific, designing a unique ceremony for the Pasifika community in Aotearoa to follow. “The kava in Tonga, do that in Tonga and same for Sāmoa, but we’re in Aotearoa and we can’t come here, perform our kava and ignore the fact that we’re on Māori land.”

Last year, director Josh Teariki Baker was asked by Kava ‘o Aotearoa to film their dawn kava ceremony that they held on a waka in the sea near the Maritime Museum. The event was to raise awareness of the climate crisis in the Pacific region, following New Zealand’s America’s Cup victory. Baker says they also wanted to reflect on the fact that Pacific people revolutionised the way people travel on sea, yet it was colonised and taken over by the western world. “With no acknowledgement to Pacific people,” Baker says. “That kava ceremony was an acknowledgement to the Pacific and its history and that’s what sold me on wanting to do a doco on the group,” he says.

That same year, Kava ‘o Aotearoa wanted to praise the work that Pania Newton and her whānau did in terms of land rights and protecting Ihumātao by inviting them to a kava ceremony and placing mana whenua in a position of high regard. Baker approached the group to film the ceremony for Someday Stories and got their approval.

Producer Maria Tanner says what she observed was Kava ‘o Aotearoa recognising that as Pacific people, they’re physically disconnected from their island homes yet still yearn to practise being Pacific through the kava ceremony. “The group is non-invasive because they realise that they’re not from Aotearoa, but they wish to be a Pacific Islander in this space. However, they don’t want to do an act of colonisation of tangata whenua here, so what they did is invite them and make them the most honoured guest in this space,” she adds.

How this kava ceremony differs from traditional kava ceremonies is it incorporates elements from Tonga, Fiji, Sāmoa and the Cook Islands. That includes the chief orators who stand with their staff or to’oto’o (talking sticks), a practice from Sāmoa as well as the turou, a welcoming gesture by the kava ceremony hosts to the guests, an element from the Cook Islands and Tahiti.

For Baker and Tanner, if Kava ‘o Aotearoa were going to respectfully put tangata whenua at the forefront of their ceremony, they too were going to adapt a similar vision with the film. “It would be a missed opportunity if we didn’t include the voice of tangata whenua in this doco, even though it’s about the [kava] group,” Tanner says. The film documents the kava ceremony at Ihumātao and features Newton.

Tanner calls the group Pasifika cultural guardians because they activate change in a space, in a very gentle and Pacific way. “They’re cognisant because they look around Aotearoa, a place where they’ve laid their roots down and notice that the country is changing rapidly, more cultural groups are coming into the space and their response is ‘what do we bring to the conversation?’ rather than ‘how can I dictate this conversation?’” Tanner explains.

Baker says he had to earn the trust from Lua, Nurminen and Mangos. “It was a process where I had to explain the concept of filmmaking, story rights, the legal aspects to the project and throughout the many discussions I realised that their stories are precious and we need to approach it accordingly,” he says.

“The group were involved every step of the way, we wanted them to be,” Tanner says. “They’ve seen the rough cuts of the film and they’ve been great when it came to giving us feedback,” she says. 

Baker adds: “The massive smiles on their faces when they saw the final product was just amazing to see.”

Kava ‘o Aotearoa can be viewed online at Someday Stories on Wednesday August 31, 2022.

This is Public Interest Journalism funded through NZ On Air.