Thinkin’ about the haka lately.
If you’re not familiar with haka, and I’m saying this before I check a wikipedia page on it it is a cultural celebration perhaps best compared to a dance, from the Maori culture out of Aotearoa, which I more commonly refer to as New Zealand, because it’s a habit and it dies hard. But yes, you may have seen this before, a scene of a group of usually men, usually rugby players, standing before an opposing team and doing a synchronised performance. I’m reluctant to call it a dance just because I know that dance is an English word, and I don’t necessarily want to distract from what haka are by what you might imagine if I call it just a ceremonial dance.
There’s this story that shows up about the haka, and it tends to be how people in the Northern Hemisphere finds out about it. Someone plays against the Aotearoan team in a sporting event, and the Aotearoan team opens by doing their haka. Then you get some early sports headline like:
Ireland unmoved by New Zealand Players’ War Dance
Followed by a headline an hour later like:
Ireland loses 16-2 against New Zealand.
And this is, to me, very funny, because why would you mention the haka and then why would you mention how Ireland was unaffected by that. And I’ve seen this headline structure multiple times! And part of that is a little bit unfair, because the haka is but one part of that story, where the bulk of the story is that international Aotearoan sports teams are made up of people really good at the sports they play. The footnote though, the thing that always hangs around the edges of it is people trying to express in some way of rearranged words that haka is somehow, bad. That it’s not cool as hell, that it’s inappropriate, that it’s being used at an inappropriate time.
This is, of course, racist as hell.
In case you think I’m coming at this and presenting an expert opinion, I’m not. I really, absolutely am not — as much as I personally like the country next door and tend to see them as a Better Version Of Us (which doesn’t erase y’know, the racism and the colonialism and the weird thing about autism diagnoses), I’m Australia, and I have no part in Maori culture, no claim to belonging nor any attempt to express ownership of anything to do with Maori culture. This is not about what haka are or should be. This is more about where I am something of an expert, which is, hanging around white Australian racists when they think nobody’s going to push back on what they say.
If you want a resource that seems more able to explain Maori culture from its experience and practice in a convenient way, you could check out Paaka Davis, over on tiktok, who seems like a lovely person from what I can see, even if the place he’s choosing to put his content is, well, tiktok. Him reacting to an American comedian mad about haka is what put this in my mind.
Haka is a thing that my people — the racist white ones — really get mad about, and then try to come up with a reason for why. I’ve heard it called barbaric, I’ve heard it called uncivilised, I’ve heard it called stupid, unintelligible, incoherent and often, very often, I’ve heard it called unfair. It’s unfair that they get to do that and we don’t get to, don’t get to, don’t get toooo…
tooooo…
And that’s when things trail off, because there’s no coherent alternative. Unstated in this assumption is that the non-Maori participants aren’t getting to express their culture in any particular way, that they’re not bringing their culture to the arena, where people wear their clothes and speak their language and clap the way that their culture does and chant the chants they know and play the game that their culture owns and like, sure, okay, but the Maori players did the haka.
And like, I was around it enough to know that yeah, okay it’s racist, but you know why it pisses us off so much right?
Right?
It’s because … we really wish we had that, y’know?
Haka is fuckin’ cool. Haka is a bunch of the scariest, toughest, most iconically masculine dudes you will ever see in our culture, the people who are capable of doing the things that my family and my surroundings’ men were so jealous of, and they weren’t just doing something cool, they were doing something cool that my people would consider uncool in its face. It’s dance! It’s sticking your tongue out! It’s expressing emotions!
Like, this is going to step into a fraught area, because I’m about to use the term ‘white guy,’ and I’m using it to describe not an actual ethnicity. White guys are a political class, but here I’m using it to describe a type of person that shares that class with me, and crucially, not a Maori. And when you ask ‘hey, how can you be a white guy and a Maori,’ check the above video. The nature of Maori identity is not some cladistic model of DNA dispensation, and, honestly, the way they write about it, it kind of underscores how silly the alternative colonialist perspective is. My mother was born in Britain, her mother was born in Wales, and I’m supposed to make some kind of complicated threading of the fractional math to indicate that this makes me one sixteenth? Or eighth? Welsh?
That’s dumb. It’s a lot easier and a lot more coherent to say that I am connected to Wales through my mother, who is connected to Wales through her mother, who is connected to Wales through her mother. It’s not about a percentage of authenticity, it’s about your connection to the land. The category that includes you and how you can track that and what it means to you. My culture says that no, it’s a percentage thing, and that brings with it ideas of purity and dilution and attenuation towards and away a sort of proper mean which, shock horror, this gets used for a lot of racist stuff.
Anyway.
White Guys.
There are in fact, a lot of white guys who are Maori, and could refer to themselves as Maori, based on Paaka’s video, and they may start that connection in ways that others don’t notice until the tattoos show up. I’m not here to crap on that White Guy. Get in touch with your roots. Especially your actual roots. But, there are other White Guys who do not have that connection to Maori culture, and I’m not going to sit here and ask you to break out the chart to prove you have the right. That’s not my place. But I am going to mention the hypothetical White Guy who does not have that connection and knows he doesn’t and the people around him are aware of it.
So anyway, this is a thing you’ll see if you hang around any modestly common White Guys with tattoos, where eventually, giving it enough time, you’re going to see someone with tattoos filed as ‘tribal.’ And those tattoos are trying to connect to something about an image of a culture that person has, because…
They’re really cool.
Cultural Appropriation is a thing because we do it, and we do it because we see other culture’s stuff and we can recognise it kicks ass. We see it and we want it and we want it in so many cases because we don’t have our own. White isn’t an identity, it doesn’t bring you anything aside from the tools of its own enforcement, which means racism and violence, and its incorporated toolkits. The things that White tells you your culture is is a bland default that doesn’t appreciate your actual connections, your actual cultural origin, the things that make you you and me me.
And so when we see people authentically using their own culture and their own framing to refer to their own ideas and their own state of being we tromp in and try to bring in that big bland default which brings with it the racism. When Paaka Davis talks about the way that a Maori parent means you are Maori, and so it goes, you’ll see in the comments dipshits saying ‘uh, no, you are this fraction’ and like, right there you see how they can’t consider the way the Maori person is talking about Maori identity.
And turns out, White Guyness doesn’t just make you boring, it makes you impose your being boredom on everyone else.