Tame Iti says it wasn't easy to play himself in new film Muru about the 2007 anti-terror raids

Friday, 26 August 2022

Tame Iti plays himself in the new movie Muru.

The most recognisable face of Māori activism has always seen resistance as an art form. Now in his 70s, Tame Iti is trying a new medium. He talks to Florence Kerr ahead of his big screen debut.

A response from Tame Iti is never going to be mediocre, it’s not in his whakapapa to do that. For more than 50 years, New Zealanders have watched him be the most non-mediocre indigenous activist in the country.

Read this story in te reo Māori and English here / Pānuitia tēnei i te reo Māori me te reo Pākehā ki konei.

He is Tūhoe – a central North Island iwi that boasts some of the country’s best poets, singers, writers, academics, scientists, environmentalists and New Zealand’s most recognisable face of Māori resistance, Iti.

So when it came time to respond to the unlawful actions of police against the people of Tūhoe during the 2007 anti-terror raids, the response was never going to be a tersely worded letter from Iti, who was the raids’ main target, it was always going to be big, meaningful and dramatic.

* Muru: Anō te rerehua, te atamai, me te nanakia o te 'uruparenga' nei ki te pāhua, me te ao

* Muru: Te Urewera raids-inspired Kiwi action-thriller set for Toronto Film Festival

Muru will debut on Sky Movies Premiere at 8.30pm on Sunday, March 5.

This week Muru, a film directed by Tearepa Kahi in response to the unlawful 2007 Government-sanctioned anti-terror raids, premieres in cinemas, but please don’t mistake it for a recreation of those events.

Cliff Curtis plays a community cop in the Urewera community of Tāneatua, unaware of the machinations of the assault rifle-toting Special Tactics Group about to helicopter in to the misty valley.

The big-screen action film draws inspiration from numerous events, both historical and recent, from the 1916 arrest of Rua Kēnana, the arrest of Tame Iti in 2007, the shooting of Steven Wallace in 2000, and Toa, a screenplay by Jason Nathan.

In a swanky office on Karangahape Rd, Iti sits perched on a retro two-seater. He is one of the main characters of the film, he also plays himself.

So what is it like playing an alleged terrorist - you?

“Quite challenging,” he reckons.

“It wasn’t easy. It became like a breathing exercise for me.”

Cliff Curtis plays police Sergeant ‘Taffy’ Tāwharau in the film Muru.

There’s an open vulnerability as Iti describes the scene of his arrest. He is transported back to the early hours of that day in 2007 when police, using a loudhailer, woke Iti, his partner and the whole neighbourhood when they demanded he come outside of his Whakatāne unit.

He never describes how he felt during it, his memory of the arrest is looking at the horror etched on his partner’s face as police held him face down on the road.

“When I got dragged out of the house, she also got dragged out, and she saw my face,” he says. “I had to kind of look up to see if she was all right because they had the gun on my back and my face on the road and I pushed my face up, so I could see her.

“So that was a moment for her in the movie that just shocked her.”

For many who have only consumed Tame Iti through a Eurocentric lens, this vulnerable side might feel foreign. Iti is not just the flag-shooting Māori activist who once pitched his old man's tent outside Parliament in the 70s fighting for Māori rights, he is also an artist, poet, writer, gardener, beekeeper, father and a doting koro.

‘There are no rules to art’

In 2020, Iti spoke at length about the issue of mainstream media and its effects on Māori as part of Stuff’s apology to Māori for its racist coverage spanning 160 years. Iti was a recipient of that racist coverage.

He called the media “a tool of the state” that was used to incite violence against indigenous people.

So how is his relationship with the media now?

Tame Iti plays himself in the film Muru – a response to the 2007 anti-terror raids.

“I think the media are a lot softer,” he says.

“They no longer assume things. Particularly within the art world - they're taking me more seriously now. Within the art circles I would always hear from people who say, 'Oh Tame is just using art because he's got a profile.’ No, I've always loved art and art is a safe place for me to be able to paint those pictures. There are no rules to art, you just create, whether it be performing arts or making a movie.”

Iti is a native creative who has used the many stages throughout his life to create art, whether it be through activism or the tip of a paint brush.

He says activism is art but how it is perceived comes down to the viewer.

“The word activism is a media term with negative connotations to it,” he says.

Tame Iti with his grandson at a Waitangi Day commemoration event in 2008.

“But I think you have got to twist it around, and look at activism from a different perspective. How I see it differs from how the media sees it and it can be quite trendy. Maybe not to some people, they might go watch out for that.”

The art of language

Those negative connotations have diminished as the wider public line up to hear Iti speak. He has given talks to journalists, police students and gave a wildly popular TEDx Talk in Auckland. He holds art exhibitions now and always returns home to his whenua in Rūātoki - it’s his safe space.

Iti was a member of the Māori rights group Ngā Tamatoa and came to the nation's attention in his late teens as a long-haired tama from the Urewera whose face was seen at every major historical event for Māori over the past 50 years. Iti is in his 70s now and just like the nation has watched him grow from a young lad to a koro, the country has grown too - thanks in part to him and Māori activists from his era.

One of the major issues Ngā Tamatoa fought for was recognition of te reo Māori. Next month will be the 50th anniversary since the petition that finally recognised the country’s original language.

The language of his ancestors, which Iti helped save, takes prominence in his first feature film.

Members of Ngā Tamatoa on the steps of Parliament, 1972. They are, from back left, Toro Waaka, John Ohia, Paul Kotara, Tame Iti, and, from front left, Orewa Barrett-Ohia, Rawiri Paratene and Tiata Witehira.

Iti says being able to address historical and recent trauma in the movie and do it using te reo Māori was meaningful for everyone involved. Iti was not the only actor in the film who was a real life participant in the raid, many of the people involved in the scenes were also detained or arrested by police during the raids.

“I think that it’s really important that we share our stories, because it's whakapapa,” he says.

“The use of the language is very prevalent in the movie, it's Tūhoe and [the movie is] created by us and I think it adds another layer of the way we present our story whether it’s through art, whether it be through sculpture, whether it be standing in the middle of the streets, or through social media.”

Iti describes the movie as adding layers to the narrative.The Government narrative had been told at the time, and now Tūhoe are adding their layer to it.

“I think we got to paint a different picture of it. We added different colours to it to present to the audience,” he says.

“All that has been presented to you in the movie is actually real, you know, those things are real. Although, this is not a recreation of the raids itself. But a lot of those things that you see in this film actually happened here in this country. I know, I've been a target of that.”

He says the retelling of this story in their own words has marked a significant point in his career.

Tūhoe didn’t have to wait 100 years to get their side of the story out, Iti says, unlike his ancestors who experienced cruelty and death at the hands of constabulary forces.

Settling the dust

The history of the Crown’s interactions with Tūhoe post-1840 is horrific. The tribe experienced some of the worst atrocities at the hands of the Government, which included the Crown’s brutal scorched earth policy of 1869, which saw the homes and crops of the Tūhoe people burned as the Crown sought the fugitive Te Kooti. Many who survived would later starve to death.

Tame says art has always been a safe space for him.

In 1916, police again raided Tūhoe lands to detain Tūhoe leader Rua Kēnana at Maungapōhatu. Kēnana’s son Toko and Toko’s uncle were shot dead and many Tūhoe, including women and children, were injured. The Crown confiscated land including the tribe’s spiritual homeland Te Urewera, which was eventually returned to Tūhoe guardianship in a co-governance agreement in 2014.

The depiction of the Crown in the movie could be seen as generous, given the long history of atrocities. Iti, who was convicted on firearms charges after the raids and sentenced to two-and-a-half years’ prison, says jail didn’t affect his state of mind.

“Jail is a mindset. I've never been in that state of mind even when I was in jail,” he says.

“You have to know your mind, when to pull back and then sometimes when you have to come back a bit in. I used my time there [in prison] for art and helping prisoners. During our protest years we were challenging the state but we were also seeing our own people go against us. That’s colonisation – you don’t have to go to jail to be in jail because it’s about your mindset.”

Although the movie’s name, Muru, means forgiveness it doesn’t mean all of Tūhoe forgive the actions on that day. But it doesn’t mean they want to stay rooted to anger and not progress forward. The movie is not just about telling the narrative, it’s also a healing tool.

“I think it's time to settle the dust down, because we can't develop and move when the dust is still out there and the space becomes very cloudy so you have to wait for it to calm down,” he says.

“There are several layers of that and it becomes a breathing exercise. You have to be able to breathe and when it's too cloudy you can't breathe in it, because you get suffocated, and you put yourself in a little wee bubble.

“So we have got to clear it away so that we can start seeing each other. So we're not just dealing with the brain, you're dealing with every particle of yourself. From what makes us? What brought us here? What is the purpose? So those are all part of these layers. It's important for us to go back through the ancient times because that's where the future is. And then we bring that, and we might have to rewrite it, reshape it and put another form into it.

“So there's always room for changes in developing in that way. So it’s very important for us even more so today in telling our story and using that as a vehicle to heal ourselves and move forward from that together - everyone together.”

Giving voice

Iti says the movie is one of hope for Māori: “That we have a voice out there.”

And the movie is for everyone, not just tangata whenua.

He hopes Pākehā will watch it too.

“I think it's good for them. It's also for them as well,” he says.

“I think it's important for them, too. You know, they can have their tangi with it, they can have their anger or feel whakamā about it, you know, all of that. They need a place to be able to talk about it. People often do talk to me about these things, you know, about racism within their own whānau.”

Iti spent time, prior to the movie getting under way, talking to whānau who were affected by the raids and their feelings on making a movie.

“It had to be a collective decision that we were going to do this. I had those conversations with everyone a year or two before the movie was made and if they felt OK about it. And they were really quite open about it and were part of the cast. We had to be all in it together because it was made in the village.They were involved from the start.”

So where to now for the man with one of the most recognisable faces in Aotearoa?

“I’m still working fulltime as an artist, I’m doing painting and sculptures and that’s ongoing for two to three years,” Iti says.

“I’m conscious of the short span of time, I’m in my 70s and I want it to stretch out for the next decade. I'm happy about that and that’s a bonus. I’ve got another nine more years to get to that stage.”

As the non-mediocre man prepares to depart the flash digs on Karangahape Rd, he leaves with a parting shot.

“Freedom,” he says.

“Now I know what freedom is, freedom for me now at my age is being able to do what I want to do. My whole life really was about putting my head on the block for everyone else. I think about what I am leaving behind and, for me, freedom is also about leaving a legacy for myself, my whānau, my hāpu and my iwi.”

Muru opens in cinemas nationwide on September 1.