We are depicted as poor parents, and poor partners who struggle to function healthily in modern society as untrustworthy and prone to addiction. We are still largely portrayed in mono-dimensional stereotypes as violent, brutish, and irresponsible – even in movies made by Māori. Sadly, ‘Once Were Gardeners’ is as relevant as ever.

He outlines how the state agencies, and in particular the justice and corrections systems, absorb and utilise these notions about our people – resulting in higher incarcerations – and how we too internalise these suggestions, resulting in more hurt across our communities, in our relationships, and within our households. First by explorers, and then by anthropologists and researchers, and then by media. In this lecture, Moana, in his calm, factual, and grippingly clear manner, lays out the means by which we as Māori have come to be cast as violent brutes. I found myself going back to it this week, for healing. Next year will be 10 years since Moana Jackson’s pivotal ‘ Once Were Gardeners’ lecture. Where did that image come from? Where did the novelist Alan Duff get the idea of naming his novel Once Were Warriors, when a clear and actually objective analysis of our society would have shown that the book could more properly have been called Once Were Gardeners, Once Were Poets, Once Were Singers, and if you’re from Kahungunu, Once and Always Were Lovers.” It was described most graphically by one of the first English writers about our country who had never actually visited here but in 1830 wrote that “the land is inhabited by a savage, bloody warrior race with vengeance and war as the precious lifeblood of an ancestor, bequeathed from savage father to savage son.” The warrior race suggests that there are certain races of people who were born to fight, to be violent and to kill. “The notion of a warrior gene as a scientific fact is actually based on the history of a scientific and cultural lie and that is the notion of a warrior race. With actor Jason Momoa putting his problematic interpretation of haka on the world stage during the press tour for Aquaman, Tina Ngata revisits some of the myths and misunderstandings about Māori as a ‘warrior race’.

Once were warriors alan duff