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Established 2022, Moana Vā are ready to make an impact in their Pasifika rainbow community. (Image: Archi Banal)
Established 2022, Moana Vā are ready to make an impact in their Pasifika rainbow community. (Image: Archi Banal)

SocietyJune 18, 2022

A Pasifika rainbow community is making waves in Ōtautahi Christchurch

Established 2022, Moana Vā are ready to make an impact in their Pasifika rainbow community. (Image: Archi Banal)
Established 2022, Moana Vā are ready to make an impact in their Pasifika rainbow community. (Image: Archi Banal)

Established earlier this year, Pacific LGBTQIA+ group Moana Vā is among the organisations coming together to celebrate Christchurch Pride this month.

Growing up in Ōtautahi Christchurch wasn’t easy for Suli Tuitaupe. Not only was he a person of colour in a relatively white and conservative city, he was also gay. 

Through his teens and into his twenties, Tuitaupe never let others know that he was attracted to the same sex. His family belonged to a church that was not accepting of the LGBTQIA+ community; meanwhile, the racism he was experiencing left him with little of the confidence he needed to feel safe with who he was. “Although my mum loved and supported me, there was always that thought of, what would the church think?” he says via Zoom, his background showcasing a horizontal rainbow of colours, parted in the middle with waves.

That image is the logo for Moana Vā, a collective founded by Tuitaupe that wants to be a place of belonging, mentorship and support for the Pacific rainbow community in Ōtauhahi. The group also welcomes families and allies, a first for the city.

Moana Vā have created a ‘vaka’ to navigate the waves of Pacific pride. (Photo: Supplied)

Since March, Moana Vā has been hosting Koko nights – “koko” being the Sāmoan term for cocoa, one of the hot drinks on offer. The aim of these nights is to create a safe space for connection; during Christchurch Pride, on Monday June 20, there’ll be a special “open door” Koko night where you can win prizes, meet the team and members of the community. Even better, it’s a free event for all ages.

Tuitaupe says Moana Vā grew out of conversations with family members and friends of the Pacific rainbow community. He heard stories like that of a mother whose Sāmoan partner struggled to accept their lesbian daughter, and a father whose son had to go overseas to come out. 

Tuitaupe, now a registered nurse, says that while heading overseas may be extreme, leaving their home town is a common story among rainbow LGBTQIA+ – or MVPFAFF+ (mahu, vakasalewa, palopa, fa’afafine, akava’ine, fakaleiti, fakafifine) – in Ōtautahi. “It’s hard for our Pasifika in Christchurch to be themselves and so you find individuals going up to Auckland because there’s a very strong fa’afafine collective there and there are also areas such as K Road where you can just be yourself,” he says.

Cake cutting to acknowledge their virtual launch of Moana Vā. (Photo: Supplied)

Tuitaupe has some data showing how hard it is to come out in Ōtautahi. For the recent Manalani Project, researchers gathered data and survey information for and about the Pacific rainbow communities. “They noted that when they went around the motu to places like Gisborne, Tokoroa and Otago, there was a sense of togetherness and communities cooperatively sharing narratives about their experiences to be able to give the researchers some good feedback. When they came to Christchurch, they said it was a struggle to be able to mobilise communities together.” Given his own background growing up gay in the city, that didn’t surprise Tuitaupe.

That’s where Moana Vā comes in. The group officially launched online in late February and are currently focusing on building relationships at events such as this month’s Christchurch Pride. As academic, fa’afafine and Moana Vā patron Fuimaono Karl Pulotu-Endemann put it at the virtual launch of the collective, there are two non-negotiables in life: “One is your cultural identity, and the other is your sexual identity. As a Sāmoan and a fa’afafine, Moana Vā has the space to grow and nurture our Pacific people of all sexual identities.”

Already Moana Vā is beginning to make an impact in their city. At a vaccination event where Tuitaupe was a volunteer, he was approached by a young Tongan who spotted the Moana Vā logo sticker on Tuitaupe’s laptop. “She told me that she heard about the positive work Moana Vā has been doing, so once she had her vaccine shot done, I went and visited her at the observation area and gave her one of our badges. Her face lit up, and I thought ‘that’s a start to let someone in our community know that there’s a space for them’, and I hope that gives her the confidence to reach out if she so wishes,” he says.

Beautiful ‘ei katu headpiece symbolising the Pacific rainbow collective, Moana Vā. (Photo: Supplied)

Moana Vā coordinator Lana Sheilds says the people they serve are in different parts of their journey, which makes it all the more important to treat them all with respect and ensure the space they offer is safe. “You’ve got to treat that fine line cautiously because some may not feel ready to come out, some may have questions or there will be those on the other side and are needing to be around people with shared experiences.”

Koko nights are a means for Moana Vā to foster relationships and connect with their community. During the drop-in session on Monday nights, the collective welcomes regulars and newcomers to join for a hot cuppa and a talanoa or chat. “It’s very casual and it’s an opportunity to get together with like-minded people,” Tuitaupe says. However, for safety reasons, the team doesn’t advertise the location publicly – they encourage those interested to get in touch with them on social media.

Attending koko nights is a chance to also get to know the team at Moana Vā. “It’s important for young Pasifika LGBTQIA+ to see others who look like them because we identified early on that a lot of our youth carry a lot of trauma and hurtful experiences without any support,” Tuitaupe says. “I wish a young Suli had a space like this back in the day.” Having youth voices on the team is crucial: Moana Vā’s youngest member is aged 18. 

Another important part of their work will be educating the wider Ōtautahi community about Pacific history “because sexuality and gender identity was fluid back then before missionaries came ashore,” Tuitaupe says. “We believe that getting others to understand more about the Pacific and the rainbow community will help dismantle the stigma that hovers around our space.”

Christchurch Pride has begun and will run until 29 June 2022. For full event details, tickets and Covid updates, check out their Facebook page.

This is Public Interest Journalism funded through NZ On Air.

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We all know how this ends. (Image: Tina Tiller)
We all know how this ends. (Image: Tina Tiller)

SocietyJune 16, 2022

Please put the scary Christchurch dolls back

We all know how this ends. (Image: Tina Tiller)
We all know how this ends. (Image: Tina Tiller)

Christchurch archaeologists have dug up a bunch of 150-year-old ‘Frozen Charlotte’ dolls. Can they please put them back, writes Alex Casey. 

This morning, Stuff reported archeologists in Christchurch had unearthed thousands of 150-year-old objects, including a gaggle of haunting “Frozen Charlotte” dolls. “This is an extremely rich site,’’ Southern Pacific Archaeological Research (SPAR) director Richard Walter told Stuff. “We weren’t expecting this much material and the diversity of the material is really interesting.” The dig also discovered an intact chamber pot – a fitting accoutrement for when you inevitably crap yourself at the sight of these ghoulish girlies. 

A brief dig around the internet quickly reveals the haunting history of Frozen Charlotte dolls. They became popular in the Victorian era, their creepy name inspired by an equally creepy poem written by Seba Smith in Maine in 1843. After reading a news article about a young woman who froze to death on a sleigh ride to a New Year’s Eve ball, Smith penned the terrifying ditty “A Corpse Going to a Ball”, which you can read in full on this scary steampunk website. That poem then inspired a popular folk ballad named Fair Charlotte, which then inspired millions of dead-looking dolls named FROZEN CHARLOTTE. 

Normal things

According to the Washington Post, the dolls sold for about a penny each and went absolutely gangbusters – basically the LOL Surprise doll of the 1800s, except the surprise was that your mum might have submerged a tiny ceramic corpse in your bath or birthday cake for some reason. Some Frozen Charlottes were even sold with dinky Barbie-like accessories, including tiny caskets and fashionable shrouds to stave off hypothermia. It makes sense, then, that the Christchurch Charlottes most likely belonged to students at Christchurch Ladies’ School, which sat on the site of the dig on the corner of Tuam Street and Oxford Terrace in the late 1850s.

There is no doubt that this is Aotearoa’s most significant old doll story since what The Spinoff staff still refer to literally on the daily as the Waipū Terror Doll – a doll that was stolen from the Waipū museum and returned days later very bald and stuffed in a bread bag. And while I understand the historical significance of this discovery, I am nevertheless begging those who dug up the dollies to reconsider and simply place them gently back into their graves, or at least in a padded maximum security room, preferably far, far away from Waipū. 

Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last two years, it is not to look to science or experts in times of crisis, but to celebrities. And according to celebrities, old dolls are ruining their lives. In 2019, Ozzy Osbourne revealed that he experienced a litany of health problems thanks to a haunted doll named Robert. Post Malone had a private jet emergency, a car crash and a break-in after messing with a haunted box in Las Vegas (not quite a doll but very much the type of thing you might find containing a doll). Posh Spice dressed like haunted doll Annabelle last year and then her son got this big cursed tattoo. Coincidence?

And don’t even get me started on what we should have learned from fiction by now about mucking about with crummy old dollies. I’ve seen all the films, I’ve read all the Goosebumps books, I know how this ends. Annabelle comes home and nobody is happy to see her. Chucky gets an actually pretty good TV reboot. Slappy the Living Dummy stuffs himself into a watercooler and completely ruins my childhood. In 2022, the very last thing we need is a Frozen Charlotte Winter, so let’s let sleeping Charlottes lie and keep our fucked-up dolls in the past where they belong.

(The ONLY exception I’m willing to allow is Greta Gerwig’s Barbie film, which eerily revealed the first look at Ryan Gosling’s Ken on the same day the Frozen Charlottes were dug up. Coincidence?)

But wait there's more!