Pūtātara: Indigenous stories and resistance in the South Pacific

With Jamie Tahana.

For Indigenous communities across the Pacific, stories have always held the capacity to guide and teach, to entertain and warn. From ancient times traversing the world’s greatest ocean, these cultures have passed their histories, genealogies, science, and skills through stories that tell of time, place, and peoples’ links to the sea and land. Over time, particularly amid the pressures of colonisation, the way these stories have been told, and the reasons for doing so, has shifted. In this session, Jamie Tahana will explore the way stories have been used as a means of resistance, particularly over the past 50 years, an era that saw new generations of writers, musicians, poets, and artists using their stories to provoke a revolution that came to be known as the Māori renaissance, through to Pacific artists who were at the vanguard of independence movements and resistance to nuclear testing and climate change, and how these are now increasingly being utilised on an international level, to institutions as high as the International Court of Justice.

Jamie Tahana (Te Arawa - Ngāti Pikiao/Ngāti Makino/Tapuika) is a Māori journalist, writer and broadcaster. His work has spanned stories ranging from abuse in state care, climate change in the Pacific, nuclear legacies, health and justice disparities, and the Treaty of Waitangi settlement process between Māori and the Crown. He worked for public broadcaster RNZ, including as a Pacific correspondent and Māori News Editor, including through the Covid pandemic. Now living in London, his work has appeared in outlets including The Guardian, BBC, Grist, E-Tangata, The Spinoff and Metro Magazine, and he recently produced a podcast series, Pūtātara, on Indigenous art and protest. He has worked with UNESCO on Indigenous media, spoken on Indigenous storytelling at the Global Media Forum in Germany, and helped work on Indigenous media projects and conferences with First Nations groups in Canada and Norway. He holds a master’s degree from Victoria University Wellington, where he studied truth and reconciliation.