The politics of Indigenous tattooing

Show notesThe story in this episode is composite, drawn from real events. The identifying details have been changed to protect privacy, but the situations and the political contexts are real. The real-world events the story draws on, full citations, and further reading are below.REAL-WORLD EVENTS REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODETā moko and its colonial suppression- Tā moko, the customary Māori practice of marking the face and body, was almost extinguished in Aotearoa New Zealand across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Missionary stigmatisation through the nineteenth century stripped public legitimacy from the practice; the Native Schools Act of 1867 removed Māori children from the language and knowledge networks in which tā moko transmitted; and the Tohunga Suppression Act 1907, in force until its repeal in 1962, criminalised the work of traditional specialists, including tohunga tā moko.- By the middle of the twentieth century the male facial moko had effectively ceased to be applied, and the women’s chin moko, the moko kauae, had declined sharply.- The tā moko revival from the 1980s onwards has been led by Māori practitioners and scholars, including Te Arawa scholar Ngāhuia Te Awekōtuku, whose Māori and Psychology Research Unit at the University of Waikato, funded by a Marsden Fund grant, produced the contemporary reference work Mau Moko (2007) with Linda Waimarie Nikora, Mohi Rua, Rolinda Karapu, and photographer Becky Nunes.Tikanga and the moko kauae revival- Tikanga, the body of Māori protocols rooted in customary law and relational obligation, governs the application and receiving of tā moko. The work proceeds through layered permissions: from the recipient’s iwi, from kaumātua, and within the practitioner’s own teaching lineage.- The moko kauae revival, accelerating from the late 1990s and into the 2000s and 2010s, has seen growing numbers of wāhine Māori receive the chin moko as an assertion of cultural and political authority. The revival has been documented as one of the most visible expressions of Māori women’s political agency in this period.Samoan tatau and the Pacific traditions- Samoan tatau, the full-body male tatau and the women’s malu, is one of the few Pacific tattooing traditions that survived the colonial period substantially unbroken, transmitted across generations by the masters of tatau, the tufuga tā tatau.- The English word tattoo entered the language from the Samoan tatau, picked up by Captain James Cook’s expedition to the Pacific in the 1770s. The word travelled into global English while the practice itself was suppressed across most of the colonised Pacific.- Samoan novelist and scholar Maualaivao Albert Wendt’s essay “Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body” (Span 42-43, 1996), republished as the afterword to Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific (1999), is one of the foundational scholarly readings of Pacific tatau as political and literary practice.Wurundjeri Country, Aboriginal sovereignty, and inter-Indigenous protocols- Naarm Melbourne sits on the Country of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. Practices conducted in Melbourne by visiting Indigenous practitioners, including Māori tā moko artists, take place on Wurundjeri Country and customarily proceed with the engagement of Wurundjeri cultural authorities and Welcome to Country protocols.- Australian First Nations scholarship, particularly the body of work associated with Goenpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson and the Indigenous sovereignty literature, has developed the political-philosophical argument that all relationship to land in Australia begins from the unceded sovereignty of First Nations peoples.Māori in Australia: the trans-Tasman diaspora- The 2021 Australian Census recorded 170,035 people of Māori ancestry in Australia, the largest Māori population outside Aotearoa New Zealand. Queensland holds approximately thirty-eight per cent of this population, New South Wales approximately twenty-three per cent.- The Māori diaspora in Australia is largely a post-1990 phenomenon, driven by the closure of New Zealand industries that had absorbed Māori labour in the postwar decades, the wage and housing gap between the two countries, and the Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement that has historically allowed relatively open movement between Australia and New Zealand.- The result is a generation of Māori, including the second-generation diaspora born and raised in Australia, who carry ancestral practice in contexts away from their whenua and within reach of trans-Tasman family networks.REFERENCES[1] Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and IndigenousPeoples (London: Zed Books; Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1999).[2] Ngāhuia Te Awekōtuku, Linda Waimarie Nikora, Mohi Rua, and RolindaKarapu, Mau Moko: The World of Maori Tattoo (Auckland: Penguin, 2007).[3] Mason Durie, Whaiora: Māori Health Development, 2nd ed. (Auckland: OxfordUniversity Press, 1998).[4] Hirini Moko Mead, Tikanga Māori: Living by Māori Values (Wellington: HuiaPublishers, 2003).[5] Naomi Simmonds, “Mana Wahine: Decolonising Politics,” Women’s StudiesJournal 25, no. 2 (2011): 11-25.[6] Sean Mallon and Sébastien Galliot, Tatau: A History of Samoan Tattooing(Wellington: Te Papa Press, 2018).[7] Albert Wendt, “Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body,” Span 42-43(April-October 1996): 15-29; reprinted as “Afterword: Tatauing thePost-Colonial Body” in Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, andIdentity in the New Pacific, edited by Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 399-412.[8] Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, andIndigenous Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).[9] Australian Bureau of Statistics, Cultural Diversity in Australia: Census2021 (Canberra: ABS, 2022).[10] Paul Hamer, Māori in Australia: Ngā Māori i te Ao Moemoeā (Wellingtonand Brisbane: Te Puni Kōkiri and Griffith University, 2007).FURTHER READINGRanginui Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Mātou: Struggle Without End, revised edition(Auckland: Penguin, 2004). Foundational political history of Māori-Crownrelations.Michael King, Moko: Maori Tattooing in the 20th Century (Auckland: DavidBateman, 1972). The first major late-twentieth-century documentary study ofthe practice.Marcia Langton, Welcome to Country: A Travel Guide to Indigenous Australia(Richmond, Vic: Hardie Grant Travel, 2018). On Aboriginal cultural protocols,including the engagement of visiting Indigenous peoples with First Nationscustodians.Larissa Behrendt, Indigenous Australia for Dummies, 2nd edition (Milton,Qld: Wiley, 2021). On Aboriginal political and cultural history.Damon Salesa, Island Time: New Zealand’s Pacific Futures (Wellington: BridgetWilliams Books, 2017). On the trans-Pacific and trans-Tasman political anddemographic patterns shaping Māori and Pacific lives across Aotearoa NewZealand and Australia.Anne Salmond, Two Worlds: First Meetings Between Maori and Europeans,1642-1772 (Auckland: Viking, 1991). On the early Pacific encounters thatbrought the word tatau into English as tattoo.Brendan Hokowhitu, ed., Indigenous Identity and Resistance: Researching theDiversity of Knowledge (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2010). On Indigenouspolitical and cultural authority in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand.All works, organisations, scholars, legislation, and historical events listedabove are real and citable. For any source intended for formal academic orprofessional writing, direct verification against the original publication orinstitutional record is recommended. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit civicsandcommerce.substack.com