Tame Iti - the face of Maori nationalism

Tame Iti's methods shock Maori and Pakeha alike. Picture / Alan Gibson

Tame Iti sat in the classroom of his little rural school in the Ureweras as a 10-year-old and struggled to understand what the headmaster had just said. No one was allowed to speak Maori anywhere in the school.

It was the early 1960s. Iti was no rebel back then but deep inside rebellion stirred and rippled through the class. He and the other students looked at one another in disbelief.

Maori was their first language, spoken at home in Ruatoki, their Tuhoe birthplace nestled in the foothills of the wild and rugged Ureweras, where people got around on horseback.

The headmaster's edict was a defining moment for Iti. He says his activism was born that day. To make matters worse, the headmaster was Maori, from Waikato, a victim of colonisation, says Iti.

"If you can imagine yourself in a room and you are the blackbird and then the other blackbird decided that nobody is allowed to sing like a blackbird, it's all the seagull language.

"So you can imagine, there's going to be resistance. I think that's the first action that took place. We kind of talked to one another and I think we all said things like f *** you, in our own language, in our own way."

And they carried on speaking Maori. The shy Iti was among the first pupils to be told to remain after school. His punishments were to write 100 lines of "I will not speak Maori" or to collect a wheelbarrow of horse and cow dung from the animals in the schoolyard. Iti received these punishments quite often.

Flash forward to this month. In a courtroom in Whakatane, the 53-year-old veteran protester is speaking te reo Tuhoe. He is conducting his own defence against firearms charges, and the hearing is in Maori.

A translator is present and Iti's comments pass through the translator and are relayed to whoever is on the stand and to the magistrates.

Anything asked of him in English travels back through the translator and is repeated in Maori. Occasionally, Iti becomes impatient with the translation and asks a question in English.

To have the hearing in Maori is the kind of ploy that annoys many Pakeha. They see him tying up court time, deliberately spinning out a process which would be faster if everyone spoke in English.

Iti admits he can speak and understand English just fine these days, although it was not always that way.

It is not a ploy, though, he says. He expresses himself better in Maori, and why shouldn't he speak the language of his birth, the one he was punished for speaking as a child? "It's a right to speak in your language."

Tuhoe, one of the last people to be reached by the Europeans, have one of the highest percentages of fluent Maori speakers. Iti speaks the language as often as he can.

The court case, which is ongoing, relates to shots being fired during a passionate Tuhoe re-enactment of what is known as the scorched earth policy - where the Crown destroyed crops and homes, starved, killed and arrested people and confiscated lands in the 1860s - and Iti's subsequent arrest for unlawful possession of a shotgun.

Iti says through the interpreter he is there "to debate with you the mana of Tuhoe that has been compromised, trampled by Pakeha". He speaks of it being nearly 100 years since the police went to the sacred mountain of Maungapohatu in the Ureweras to arrest Rua Kenana (a Tuhoe prophet fighting the Pakeha system) who was put on trial for allegedly breaking the laws of New Zealand, "so this is not a new experience for me today".

Now and then people in the public gallery quietly say kia ora as Iti talks of Tuhoe's stolen land and the degradations imposed on the people.

Later, in a cafe in Whakatane, Iti says to understand him you have to understand Tuhoe. Actually, you have to be Tuhoe.

His is the most recognisable face of Maori nationalism. He is the short, stocky warrior with the full moko who turns up at protests and land occupations baring his buttocks or spitting. He is the one who emptied his nostrils at Maori MPs during the hikoi against the foreshore and seabed legislation.

Some of the words about him heard on talkback radio and used in letters to the editor include, "pig", "savage", "embarrassment" and "posturing pest". His supporters use other words, among them "savvy", "smart", "loving", "kind", and "softie".

There is no sign of any buttock- baring today, just a congenial and hungry member of Tuhoe. Is he really a pig, or a savage?

"He's a sweetie," says the young Pakeha waitress behind the counter. "A pussy cat," she adds, sounding a bit squishy. A cousin supporting him at court says he is a "a sweetie, a big, huge teddy bear".

But not everyone thinks he is sweet. Members of his own tribe are sometimes embarrassed by his methods. A Tuhoe mother from Ruatoki cringes at the mention of his name.

She does not like the spitting and snotting. She worries all Tuhoe will get a bad name when he does this. But she agrees with his message, just not the method.

Tuhoe elders, too, have at times apologised for Iti's public behaviour. But Tuhoe kaumatua Peter Keepa says since Iti began speaking out no one has stopped him "because what he really says is the truth".

Others say Iti is a good role model for the young. He is anti-drugs, does not drink alcohol, does not smoke. And he walks his talk regarding Tuhoe custom and rights.

Iti was born on a train, or so he was told, just out of Rotorua.

"Yeah, yeah, on a wagon train, never quite made it to hospital." The story goes he was placed in a nail box and given to whangai grandparents, Hukarere and Te Peku Purewa, who raised him.

In the whangai tradition children are raised not by their biological parents but by others in the whanau. Iti calls them his grandparents but the man was a "great grand uncle" who came from the same whakapapa and who also raised Iti's biological father.

"I think that altogether the couple raised something like 20 or 30 kids."

He grew up in a small house built in the 1930s on a farm in Ruatoki. "A kitchen, a bedroom but no lounge room, no bathroom, outside toilet, no power, water tank. You have a bath in the river and the stream.

"I wouldn't say hardcore but, you know, survival. I learned a lot. You learn to keep the place clean, simple, nice, comfortable. We were warm, we were well dressed, we were well kept, we went to school."

There was a lot of love and a lot of hard labour. His backyard was the mountains, the bush and the river.

"I had the body of a guy who worked out in a gym. Horseriding was the main transportation, the old man never owned a car, never had a TV."

He learned to work with the animals, chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys and pigs, and he milked an awful lot of cows. "We had everything but we were brought up to conserve food because we never had fridges."

He was never a naughty child and, hard to believe now, he suffered from shyness. "I was a very quiet boy, very quiet. In a lot of ways, I'm still quiet."

He is not shy any more and thinks shyness comes from fear, a fear of making mistakes, of saying the wrong things at the wrong time in the wrong place.

As a teenager in Ruatoki, a teacher told the students about apprenticeships. Iti could have chosen to go into forestry, mechanics or panel beating. But he chose an apprenticeship in interior decorating and left for Christchurch at 15.

"I didn't know where I was going, I just picked anything to get away from milking cows."

He was still shy in Christchurch. He could read and write English but found it hard to articulate. In his third week he saw a notice at the hostel and went to English classes a couple of nights a week with an old Pakeha lady. He is fond of her, she helped him.

Iti grew in confidence and Iti-the-revolutionary emerged. The frustrations of his past and his people's history took voice.

It was the late 1960s. The Maori nationalist movement was growing in parallel with the struggle for equality for blacks in America, opposition to apartheid in South Africa and class struggles around the world.

Iti met others in the struggle for Maori sovereignty and he joined the left. He protested against the Vietnam War, he protested against racism.

He joined numerous protests against sporting links with South Africa. He joined the New Zealand Communist Party and went to China in 1973 during the cultural revolution.

He was involved early on with Maori protest group Nga Tamatoa.

He claims to have been in contact with revolutionary movements around the world, from the African National Congress while Nelson Mandela was locked up, to freedom fighters in East Timor. The Vietcong National Liberation Front was his first contact to the revolutionary movement, he says.

Outside Tuhoe, his heroes are still Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Lenin and Ho Chi Min. "They inspired me. [They were] people very determined in their thoughts and philosophies, they were guided by their ideology and principle. I have a lot of respect for people with strong principles, right or wrong, it doesn't matter. I might not agree with it but I have respect."

He has continually bucked the system in New Zealand and could talk for hours about the impact of colonisation. "You've got nearly 100,000 Maori here who don't know where they come from, they know they're Maori, that's about it.

"The whole thing about colonisation is to train these natives to be obedient, trained puppy dogs, so when you bark you've only got to bark at a certain time, a certain day.

"There's two kinds of being brought up in our world: being brought up at home and being brainwashed at school and so it can cause a bit of brain damage. That's how my life was."

When asked whether the hurt will always be there, he says you can just as easily ask the Scottish or the Irish the same question. It was the same people who committed atrocities there who came here.

"Tuhoe was part and parcel of that whole global domination. We're still dealing with it today."

The only power people really have is the right to speak and assert their mana. His message is "don't be shy to stand up and say who you are".

The baring of buttocks which so inflames people is part of his culture, he says. It is only shocking to those not raised with it. Actions like this are a language in themselves. He does not have to justify why he does it and will not justify it.

If it is seen as an insult, so be it. The Crown has insulted Maori repeatedly through murder, theft of land, denigration of language and culture.

"The law itself has committed a crime against the Waikato people, the Taranaki people and the Tuhoe people. To me, that's more insulting. A little bit of spit has no power."

But he does not hate Pakeha. "Understand that it's the system that I don't like. The system is full of holes."

There are many other aspects to Iti. He is an employee of Tuhoe, a long-time social worker in drug and alcohol addiction. He paints, he used to have a gallery. He used to have a restaurant in Auckland serving traditional food. He used to have radio shows and was a DJ.

He is a father and grandfather, with two adult children and an 11-year-old boy. He softens when he talks about his family.

When asked about that alternative "teddy bear" image, he doesn't flinch. "I think that whole tough image is created by the media."

He admits he uses the media sometimes, but sometimes it uses him, pitching him a certain way. His children suffer through the image sometimes, he confesses, but it is part of what makes them strong.

"I know when my little boy was confronted by some kids at school, those kids said to him, 'your dad is a pig' and he said to these kids 'don't you speak to me like that'."

When one of his adult sons, Wairere, was young he came home one day saying he had a new name. The teacher could not pronounce Wairere so called him Chappie.

Iti remembers telling the boy to pronounce his name correctly for the teacher then tell him Iti would call on him in a month. A month later he asked his son how it was going and the boy said: "Oh, now my name is Wairere, not Chappie."

Iti chuckles. He loves fatherhood and says this is a side of him people do not see. "I mean, I still kiss my big boys, you know, 30-year-olds, I still give them a big kiss on the lips."