Once a Panther podcast: 'Our youngest caught me at the sink, tears in my eyes'

Tuesday, 29 June 2021

Once a Panther is a Stuff podcast about the Polynesian Panther Party, a group of young New Zealand-born Pacific Islanders who stood up to institutionalised racism and helped change the course of history in Aotearoa.

OPINION: The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House – Audre Lorde

I listened to the first five episodes of the new Polynesian Panther podcast Once a Panther over the weekend on Bluetooth headphones, punctuated (very often) by the cinema of family life. Kids, groceries, coffee somewhere, weekend sports, cleaning up and everything in between is what the weekend looks like in our fale.

Courtney Sina Meredith is a distinguished author and the director of Tautai, Aotearoa’s leading Pacific arts organisation.

I returned to Tāmaki Makaurau from a visit to Ōtautahi on Saturday; I decided to put the first episode on through the car Bluetooth while driving my partner to New Lynn for art supplies. The opening sequence was energetic and light, well-produced with an entrepreneurial air though I felt myself bracing for terror.

Unlike standard podcasts with a single narrator, listening to Once a Panther is more like an intimate family fono with music, ambient sounds, and time travel through memory, projections into the future and only brief encounters with the present. I’ve always preferred this kind of storytelling, our kind of storytelling, collapsing time and space.

The Polynesian Panther Party protest in 1972.

* From gang to government: Fete Taito has forged his own pathway

* Once a Panther: The revolutionary Polynesians who stopped the dawn raids

* Once a Panther: Stuff's new podcast about Polynesian Panthers - racism, dawn raids, and rising up

While the conch shell is passed between living legends Tigilau Ness, Dr Melani Anae, Will’ Ilolahia and Wayne and Alec Toleafoa, you move across the narrative as a witness, ally, confidant, and teina. It feels humbling to share in the inner world of this movement and those brave enough to pay the high price of fighting for justice at a time when it wasn’t fashionable. Some of the Polynesian Panthers did time, some hid from the world for years, they bear the scars of a path forged for those who came after them, and by some miracle, their spirits are not broken.

Like everyone in the Pacific community, whether directly affected or not, we have lived these tales as a collective – these stories of dawn raids, devastating prejudice, social injustice and trauma. The long tail of trauma looks different for every family, but it is there an uninvited spectre.

Ponsonby is where my family established themselves when they came here from Samoa looking for a better life; the family house on Cowan Street still stands today. My great-grandfather, Felise Vave Leavai Meleisea, in a document produced by New Zealand’s Ministry of Pacific People’s, is cited as one of the first Samoan New Zealand citizens: “1925 – Felix Leavai, a Samoan, is one of the first Pacific people to be naturalised”. Our family has been in this country for a very long time. My Uncle Nari Meleisea, the younger brother of my late grandmother Rita Sina Meredith (nee Meleisea), is introduced in the second episode of Once a Panther.

The theme of what it means to be a Kiwi is marbled throughout Once a Panther. It gives pause to wider questions of humanity – captured beautifully in the heartbreaking connection between the Springbok Tour protestors in 1981 and gratitude from Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela himself.

My mother, Kim Meredith, was only a young teenager at the time, but she can be seen in protest footage fighting against apartheid. New Zealand now stands proudly on the right side of history because of people like the Polynesian Panthers and my mother.

All that said, I found listening to these oral histories incredibly triggering.

The anger in my heart surprised me, still fresh and raw. We carry this intergenerational pain in our bodies. It is manifested through mental health issues, disease, poor social outcomes, and so much more. There is an amazing sorrow that shimmers just below the surface, and it stares back at us in the mirror. It asks to be healed, it asks to be seen, it asks to be heard.

This podcast series provides safe passage for Polynesian New Zealanders like myself and our children to access a time critical to the formation of this country and our place within it.

I listened to the fifth episode on Sunday night while I made the kids their favourite chicken and rice dish. Our youngest caught me at the sink, tears in my eyes, listening to Tigi singing his heart out. It was the sound of a warrior at peace.

I scooped our bubba up into my arms and buried my face in his caramel curls, somehow full of hope. Was this the kind of happy scene they conjured in their minds to push against startling odds? I would like to think so.

After 50 years of fundamental activism and transformation pioneered by the Polynesian Panthers, it turns out, this is exactly where their story must find a home: with all of us, in our everyday lives.

Courtney Sina Meredith is a distinguished author whose work delves into issues such as racism, sexism and poverty and draws on her Samoan roots. She is the Director of Tautai, Aotearoa’s leading Pacific arts organisation.