Wherever she looks, Dame Anne Salmond sees connections: between people, between academic disciplines, between Māori and Pākehā cultures, between the islands of the Pacific, between the past and the present. Sometimes she sets out to make the connections, sometimes she finds them, sometimes they find her. Most recently, she has been examining the existentially crucial connections between humans and the environment.
An important personal connection was sundered in January, when her husband, conservation architect Jeremy Salmond, died. “It’s been a horrible year,” she says. “Jem and I were very close – 54 years together and we were very happy.” She is speaking in the impressive Devonport, Auckland, villa on which her late husband practised his heritage restoration skills. “We’ve only ever lived in this house. And we bought it when [daughter] Amiria was just a baby. He learned his craft on this house.”
As well as the personal partnership, the two shared a professional one in which each complemented the other. When Anne was doing fieldwork on marae around the country, Jeremy accompanied her and “was always much more useful than me”, she says. “People assumed because I could speak a bit of Māori that I knew a lot more than I did. But they would explain it all to Jeremy and tell him everything.”
He is also a presence in her new book, Knowledge Is a Blessing on Your Mind, which collects academic and other writing from 40 years, some previously unpublished. Salmond describes it as “a scholar’s journey. It’s quite personal in one way, but the way I’ve been a scholar doesn’t really exclude everything else.”
She credits Jeremy with the idea for the book’s structure. When she was approached about the project by Auckland University Press, she thought it was “boring”.
“I wrote all that stuff a long time ago. But Jem said, ‘It’s really good, because these are papers that lots of people won’t have seen. And why don’t you write something about what was going on when you wrote each one?’ And when I started to do that, the whole thing came to life.”
Salmond was born in 1945 and grew up in Gisborne, which “was quite a divided community when I was young. [Māori and Pākehā] met at school, and on the sports field and the farms, but it was pretty separate a lot of the time.” She describes her mother, Joyce, as “a bridge” who “always engaged with Māori people” and had Māori friends.
When teenage Anne went to the United States as a field scholar, she had been taught some action songs to include when doing the obligatory talks to Kiwanis and Rotary clubs but “I just realised I was talking through a hole in my head”.
Curiosity aroused (which is perhaps her natural state), she began to learn te reo Māori and joined a kapa haka group. She describes herself as having felt at home in Māori culture right from the start, “like a part of me that was missing somehow”.
At university, she took up anthropology – the only department where you could learn te reo Māori.
Sir Pita Sharples, the academic and former minister of Māori affairs, was a fellow student. He remembers Salmond as “really bright, and modest with it. We became pretty good friends. She came into the department with an IQ twice as high as ours and very out there and top of the class.”
University life was social and communal in a way that would be unfamiliar to today’s students. “We had excursions to go diving for kai moana, lots of parties, lots of singing,” says Salmond. “You’d go watch the guys play rugby. It was kind of pre-political.”
Says Sharples: “She had quite a Pākehā background, but soon she was speaking Māori fluently. She threw herself into her work with Māori and Polynesian culture. She was genuine.”
Tracey McIntosh, professor of indigenous studies at the University of Auckland, has worked closely with Salmond. “People who were students with her have said to me she stood out even as an undergraduate. It was very clear that there was a pathway in front of her.”
Academically, Salmond says, “we were taught to think about the whole world, the whole of the Pacific, and Aotearoa as being part of that. New Zealand wasn’t separate from the Pacific in Māori studies.”
Making connections
Of all the connections Salmond made at this time, the most significant was with the Māori elders Amiria (Ngāti Porou) and Eruera Stirling (Te Whānau-ā-Apanui).
She met Amiria first, at a party in her first year at university. “She learnt a lot from just being with them,” says Sharples. “They found her quite charming and she was like a daughter to them.”
The pair saw something in the young Pākehā that made them think it worth investing time and energy and sharing their rich store of knowledge with her. “This was an act of real generosity, and without a doubt shaped the rest of her career. She lived up to it,” says McIntosh.
Salmond says it was a time of “going around marae and listening to people, sitting through hui and exploring te reo with people who are fluent native speakers, and in Eruera’s case, wānanga experts and expert philosophers”. She was exposed to “some of the deep ideas that are really different from deep ideas in the Western tradition. And so you start to see that the world in that kind of way of thinking, through whakapapa, is this vast, all-inclusive, cosmic network of kinship. We are just one life form among many.”
The acclaimed books she wrote with them – Amiria: The Life Story of a Māori Woman (1976) and Eruera: The Teachings of a Māori Elder (1980) – were landmarks in bicultural connection and understanding.
The link between Salmond and his family runs deep for Eruera Tarena, the Stirlings’ great-grandson and executive director of education and leadership consultancy Tokona Te Raki. “What taonga the books are,” he says. “It’s like having a window into the lives, the thoughts and the souls of our old people. When I was young, I read the books multiple times, because they are just interesting reads, so I feel that connection with someone who’s like a window to your tupuna.”
He thinks Salmond’s status as someone outside the family and Māoridom was part of the successful relationship. “Sometimes there is a power in being an outsider. It’s not about jostling and iwi politics or positioning or claiming a legacy and mana. It was about having someone they deeply loved and trusted, but also someone who could capture it in a neutral way. A lot of our tohunga had these relationships with a lot of early European ethnographers.”
A means to an end
Not all Māori share this benign view. Salmond’s work has been challenged by Māori critics such as environmental, indigenous and human rights advocate Tina Ngata, who responded to Salmond’s 2022 Newsroom article about race-based framing of the partnership provisions of the Treaty of Waitangi with a blog post titled “It’s Time (AGAIN) to Teach about Racism”. She objected to a Pākehā “telling Māori how to be Māori” and said Salmond “historically and culturally decontextualises Te Tiriti o Waitangi to her own ends”. Ngata wrote that “at the end of the day, Salmond does not have the requisite whakapapa to shape this debate”.
Anthropology was always a means to an end, says Salmond, who valued the opportunities it provided to make connections across other disciplines and between academia and the rest of society.
“I’ve always been interested in philosophy and environmental matters and the law.” Certainly, the study of linguistics wasn’t enough. “You weren’t really getting into deep patterns of how people understand the world. The idea of Māori studies in an ivory tower is just ridiculous. In [Māori] philosophy you are made up of your relationships; you’re a here tangata, a knot of people.”
As an example of connections across cultures, she cites her experience when studying at Cambridge University, not long after her close work with the Stirlings. Everywhere she looked, she saw patterns from the marae: tapu areas where only initiates could walk, men’s houses and women’s houses, “and there’s all the portraits of the masters around the walls and all the carvings. I thought: this is not so different.”
The work goes on. In early October, Salmond headed to Scotland and the island of Ulva to join anthropologist daughter Amiria in exploring more family connections. She has long known that her great-grandfather James McDonald was of Scottish descent and, alongside Sir Āpirana Ngata and Sir Peter Buck, was a core member of the Dominion Museum expeditions team who filmed Māori life between 1919 and 1923.
More recently, she discovered a new connection: McDonald was a direct descendant of a Celtic bardic line that “has been called the oldest literary lineage in Europe. They were the ones who kept the whakapapa – the stories of the clan.” The line continued down to McDonald’s great-grandfather, Ian MacMhuirich. “He was the last of them, and Amiria has found manuscripts by him in Scotland.”
This visit was to be a special one in many ways. It was Amiria’s 50th birthday. They celebrated the first week, and the second was for fieldwork “running around measuring crops”. This was Salmond’s idea of an excellent time.
“In many ways,” she says, “that history is just so similar to what happened to Māori – it happened to the Highlanders first.”
Given the bardic heritage, it is perhaps not surprising that Salmond is a more-than-usually gifted writer. Seldom is deeply researched anthropology such a pleasure to read. In books such as The Trial of the Cannibal Dog, she has an almost uncanny ability to put the reader inside the heads of the people she is writing about and set them down in the places where the scenes occur.
She says it’s about finding the connections that are already there. “Like, for example, going out on a boat, which I’ve done a lot of, say in Tolaga Bay, and looking back at the land. With all those coastal profiles, there are all the images that the artists left behind. And then, when you read the log books, you know where they are on the landscape. And you can work out quite a lot about what’s actually going on.”
The same goes for the people in the stories. “The ancestors are real people. But it’s not just Cook who’s real, it’s the people on the beaches as well. And they are people you can learn about, if you go about it in a way that is mana-enhancing and respectful.”
She describes a kind of magic: “When I was with Amiria and Eruera, for example, and mixing with that generation of great scholars and great orators, it really was like walking into another world. I say it’s a bit like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. All of a sudden, you’re looking around with this absolute sense of wonder. And I’ve never lost that.”
So, Captain James Cook is like us and not like us, and the same goes for the Māori he encountered. “They each had their own mana. And if you don’t honour that as a scholar you’re not doing your job. If you say, ‘I’m a Pākehā. I can’t understand anything Māori so I’m not going to write about it’, it means that what you’re writing about is inherently unbalanced.” She’s aware of limits. “I’ve always known that people on the marae know more than I ever will. So, it’s not a matter of talking with authority; it’s more a matter of being on a journey to try to understand.”
No stuffy academic
Sometime collaborator Billie Lythberg is a lecturer in organisation studies at Auckland University’s business school. She and Salmond worked together on the Artefact TV series, but their connection goes back to Lythberg’s childhood friendship with Amiria Salmond.
“[Dame Anne] gave me the first sense of what it might be like as a Pākehā to work in te ao Māori,” says Lythberg, who highlights Salmond’s passion for communicating her knowledge to others. “Her writing is designed to reach as many people as possible. She doesn’t write like a sort of stuffy academic.”
It has always been like this. “I meet so many people who, if I talk about doing something with her, will immediately say, ‘Oh, my gosh, she was my favourite lecturer.’ They can recall her lectures so vividly, I think because of that capacity she has for bringing things to life.”
And like the best teachers, she has time and energy beyond what could be reasonably expected. “I’ve seen her utterly exhausted at the end of very long days, especially when filming for Artefact, yet able to ‘power up’ for whomever she is working with, so they know they are receiving her full attention.”
She describes a distinctive physical side to Salmond’s writing practice. “In the analogue days, she would work on a voyage by finding every record of that voyage, published or in manuscript form. Say it was the third of October in 17-something – every single thing that was mentioned that day she would photocopy and paste onto a huge sheet of paper, which means you get a wonderful narrative kind of overview, from as many people as possible.
“It means you can make these incredible connections, when you find something in a museum collection pinpointing where that amazing taonga might have come from and connecting it to the people who have made it.”
Tokona Te Raki’s Eruera Tarena continues to find inspiration in Salmond’s work. “I appreciate her thought leadership. And her mahi. At the moment, people aren’t pitching solutions, they’re pitching slogans. In a public domain where she can use her platform to raise her voice, she is more powerful, because she is Pākehā, with many segments of our society, but also she’s got serious cred in te ao Māori, which is great. We need bridges who can span cultures.”
One hundred of the 500 pages in Knowledge Is a Blessing are devoted to a close examination of the document intended to connect Pākehā and Māori – te tiriti – reflecting its importance in her work and thought. She is clear about the imperfect state of race relations here, especially given the misunderstandings around that document when it was signed and the breaking of the agreement, which started almost immediately.
“We’re still smashing the promises we made,” says Salmond. “You can’t fix that by giving people cash. You’ve got to give them respect.”
That said, she is keen not to minimise the value of treaty settlements. “It’s something that most other countries have never contemplated, so it’s something the country has done of which I think we can be proud.”
Of the current climate, she says, “This tit-for-tat type of politics around race is really dangerous. The sort of leaders we need are rangatira who treat others as rangatira and who engage in exchanges that are mutually respectful and creative. We don’t need people who are going to try to take us down a path that means we’re trashing each other and trashing our land, because they actually tend to go together.”
She says leaders need to take people with them, not present a fait accompli. “That’s true in a democracy, and it’s equally true on the marae. The idea that the people are the chiefs of the chief, and that everybody has mana is something we share. Those are ideas that translate across pretty well. That’s why whakapapa is beautiful, because it’s all about interconnection, and relationships, and you focus on the things that really matter, which is the quality of relationships among people, and between people and the land. And these are the things that will make or break us.”
Land and people
The primary focus of Salmond’s thinking and thought in recent years, which connects all the threads of her earlier work, has been the environment. The urgency of the issue has only been confirmed by recent events close to home in Tairawhiti, notably cyclones Hale and Gabrielle.
“One of the projects that Jem and I worked on together was Waikereru, our restoration project in Gizzi [Gisborne]. The harm to people and the land and the river was just extraordinary, and you realise that all those things are linked up. You can’t fix something like that just by focusing on carbon. You can’t fix it just by planting pine trees, because the pine trees actually created the slash. You realise that when you think about how best to run a country, you know, it’s about relationships, and not just with each other, but with the land.”
For a long time before that devastating evidence was laid out, Salmond had been taking a keen interest in the connections between people and the environment.
“It grew out of travelling around with Amiria and Eruera and reading the landscape. He was a walking encyclopaedia about different whakapapa. And when we did Artefact, it was a bit like doing it again. Whakapapa is about seeing ourselves as just one life form among many, and realising the degree of hubris that is built into our attitude that these things are there for us to use.”
The restoration project at Waikereru has been a spectacular success. As the land has been returned towards its original state, flora and fauna that have long been in decline have started to flourish again.
It’s been a typically hands-on commitment. “Jem and I started off just doing it on weekends because we were so busy. And we did a lot of planting and stuff ourselves. And there have been collaborations with wonderful people who we’ve become close to through that project.”
One is Steve Sawyer, director of Eco-works, who encountered the Salmonds when they “were looking for somebody to spray weeds out at their eco-sanctuary, which wasn’t really an eco-sanctuary then”.
This grew into a collaboration, he says. “We started discussing options for the land and how to restore it and how to protect waterways and the biodiversity that remained.” The partnership has been going for about 20 years.
Add Sawyer to the long list of people who have found inspiration working with Salmond. “She’s so knowledgeable, but she’s always happy to sit and listen to what others have to say. [She’ll say,] ‘What can we do next to make something better?’ She’s got this amazing ability to get the best out of people. She has an ability to communicate and get people to do amazing things themselves.”
For Salmond, with her unique vantage point, nothing could be more important right now than what is happening to the environment.
“I was a vice-president of the Royal Society of New Zealand for a bit, and in that role, you get to see the work of scientists right across the spectrum. And when you look at the Antarctic scientists, you look at marine scientists … everybody’s terrified. The scientific community is saying that if we carry on the way we’re going, we’re history. To leave that to our kids and our grandchildren is unbelievable folly. This is bigger than the treaty because this is about survival.” l
Knowledge Is a Blessing on Your Mind: Selected Writings 1980-2020, by Anne Salmond (Auckland University Press, $65).
