Dame Anne Salmond: The spirit of independence

Sunday, 12 May 2024

Dame Anne Salmond speaks with clarity and calm, even when she might be angry. Like many of us in New Zealand, she has a right to feel that way. People are dispirited, hopeless, desperate. We use words like polarisation and distrust, but the emotions are much more basic in the land of the long black cloud.

Salmond talks about the “completely irresponsible politics” and the potential for social destruction she sees when Te Tiriti is discussed in New Zealand in 2024, especially ACT’s attempt to redefine what it means. More on that later. More, too, on why New Zealand has not felt this bleak since the end of the Robert Muldoon era, way back in the early 1980s.

While none of this connects directly with the subjects covered in Salmond’s latest book, Knowledge is a Blessing on Your Mind, if you think more deeply it does. The book is a compilation of articles written in fields of anthropology and history between 1980 and 2020, when Salmond became established as a leading interlocutor between Māori and Pākehā worlds.

She doesn’t mind the word “interlocutor”, as someone who translates, explains and shifts between one space and another. But she resists the phrase “public intellectual” which strikes her as portentous.

We talked on the morning after the death of writer Sir Vincent O’Sullivan. She didn’t know him, but her sister, who is a poet, did. She talked about the help O’Sullivan offered to other writers. Something in that comment about older writers giving back matched Salmond’s own view of the responsibilities scholars carry.

Let’s talk about the book. It was a lockdown project, Salmond explains. She was at home with her boxes and her archives, and was actually feeling slightly bored about the idea of going through all that old material. Then her late husband Jeremy suggested she write introductions to each piece and he sourced historical photos to match, sometimes from the family collection.

“It was actually a lovely thing to do,” she remembers.

The book can act as a beginner’s guide to Salmond, a sampler for the curious. If the 500 pages of her 2003 Captain Cook opus, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog, seemed intimidating, then try your luck with the 50-page version here. The book’s short, personal reflections are also the closest she will ever come to a proper autobiography.

“Autobiographies?” she says, sceptically. “I’m an anthropologist so my life has been about trying to understand how other people see things. I’ve never really been attracted to the idea of doing an autobiography.

“While I’m still alive and kicking, there are so many things to engage with in the present. I’m still fascinated by so many of the things I see happening, not just in New Zealand but around the world and in the Pacific.”

As for being an interlocutor, that is never a role she sought. It happened by accident. When she was 16, she won an AFS scholarship to the US and “had an amazing time, having been in a girls’ boarding school for five years, then landing up in a co-ed school in Cleveland Heights, Ohio and mixing with people from all around the world”.

When she was asked to speak to community groups, they asked her about Māori life. She could sing a couple of action songs and swing a poi, which wasn’t bad for a young Pākehā woman in the early 1960s. But she wanted to know more, and when she got back to Gisborne, and had some time before leaving for university in Auckland, she took te reo lessons from George Marsden, a veteran of the Māori Battalion who taught at Gisborne Boys’ High School.

“As soon as I did that, I was off on a journey. I was basically entranced. There weren’t many other Pākehā on the same journey at that time. People in te ao Māori were quite surprised when I popped up.”

She says she was lucky that she met the right people at the right time. At university she met Eruera and Amiria Stirling, two elders who became her mentors for the next 20 years. She went on to write books about each of them and she and Jeremy named their daughter Amiria – she too is an anthropologist.

She joined the Māori Club at Auckland University. She didn’t overlap with Winston Peters, but she did work closely with his brother Jim when she was Pro Vice-Chancellor Equal Opportunity and he was Pro Vice-Chancellor Māori. It’s a small world.

She got to know Syd and Hana Jackson, Hone and Maxine Ngata, Donna Awatere and Pita Sharples, but “we met up before it was political”. She believes it would have been harder for a Pākehā woman to make those connections later.

She has fond memories of touring the country in her “little blue VW” with Eruera and Amiria Stirling, visiting marae and attending hui – her first book, Hui, was the result. But did anyone look at this student and future scholar and wonder about her motivations?

“In te ao Māori, people tend to talk to others and there’s a really good kūmara vine. If they think you’re out for some sort of advantage, they’ll check with someone who knows you.”

There was scepticism on the other side, though. People in her mother’s social circle would ask “What on Earth is your daughter up to, Joyce?”

Without her mother’s support, she might not have engaged so freely in those early years “when it wasn’t the done thing. A lot of people didn’t like seeing a young Pākehā girl mixing with te ao Māori. They thought it was not proper, or something. It never occurred to me, really. I just loved it from the beginning.”

But the encounters her Māori friends had with the Pākehā world were not always happy.

Asked to identify the moment she became outspoken, she says it was then.

“Seeing the way Eruera and Amiria were treated just absolutely incensed me. It was so hurtful and so stupid. These were amazing people treated as though they were a lesser form of life by people who had no right to make those judgements.”

***

Decades pass. Salmond is now 78 and white-haired, a grandmother and an academic with a long list of awards. On May 17, Salmond will be hosted as the honoured writer in a free event at the Auckland Writers Festival. She was “very moved” by the invitation.

As a writer, she shifted from anthropology to history, or from working with people to working with pieces of paper, when she published the groundbreaking Two Worlds in 1991, followed by five more books on encounters between peoples in New Zealand and the Pacific. The books emphasise the mutual strangeness, the alien mindsets on each side.

She was ahead of her time on issues like mātauranga Māori and the racism embedded in Western universities and knowledge systems.

She branched out into television, fronting and contributing to a series called Artefact on Whakaata Māori (formerly Māori Television). It told New Zealand history through objects. An episode on the Great South Road went from Auckland to Marlborough and Nelson to New Plymouth to illustrate the New Zealand Wars in an original way.

Other stories took them overseas, as “we realised how cosmopolitan te ao Māori has always been”.

She loved doing that and would have continued had Covid-19 not got in the way. As is typical, she names those who worked alongside her, such as producer Jane Reeves, who is the daughter of Sir Paul Reeves, and director Katie Wolfe.

The series dared to suggest that by telling stories across cultures in a spirit of openness we might better understand each other. That shouldn’t be a novel concept, yet it seems fraught in 2024.

“I don’t know how we managed to turn these relationships into something so dark and dire,” she says. “Where’s the fear coming from, because I don’t feel it. I’ve never been afraid of those engagements because for me they’ve always been so rewarding.”

Does it seem like there have been waves of fear over our history, like a tide that goes in and out?

“I don’t think it’s quite as innocent as that. This fear feels to me like it’s been deliberately cultivated. Why do that? In a period when so many people have started to explore te reo and are reaching out across these boundaries. Trying to destroy all that. Why?

“Is it for some short-term political gain? In that case, stop it. Go away. We don’t need that in this country.”

Her research on polarisation showed how easy it is to exploit ethnic and religious fractures. But also, political mistakes were made and some have taken advantage.

“I didn’t think that Labour handled the discussion around Three Waters and co-governance well at all. They talked to the Māori community but they didn’t talk to the rest of the community about those issues very much. They just ploughed ahead. If you spend all your time with one party of the relationship and not the other, it never works out well.”

Her work on the Māori text of Te Tiriti informs her low opinion of ACT’s attempts to reinterpret it.

“The things they say Te Tiriti says are completely fictitious. If you can’t read the text and understand it, you probably shouldn’t be trying to tell the country how to think about it.”

She put in a submission against the Fast-track Approvals Bill, which she sees as going further than even Muldoon went when he “became very arbitrary and dictatorial. The current Government needs to reflect on that history”.

The national bad mood was measured in a recent Ipsos poll that showed that many New Zealanders felt the economy was rigged and our country was broken. She wasn’t surprised by that.

It goes back to a kind of New Zealand origin story. Both Māori and Pākehā came here out of a sense of adventure or for a better life. “Some of those Polynesian societies were pretty hierarchical, compared with Māori.”

There was a spirit of independence and a dislike of top-down governance. It’s ironic that politicians who campaigned against Wellington centralisation are doing the same thing with the Fast-track Approvals Bill.

Salmond sees that New Zealanders are sick of people sitting in Wellington, thinking they know better and not reading the mood of the country. It doesn’t fit with the national psyche, as she’s come to know it over the decades. Hence the anger that was caught in that poll.

“I think it’s the spirit of independence of our ancestors rising up when politicians try to stand on a great pinnacle somewhere and tell us all what to do,” she says. “It just doesn’t feel very Kiwi.”

See: Dame Anne Salmond will appear at the Auckland Writers Festival, Aotea Centre, May 17, writersfestival.co.nz