Reading the Signs on a Journey Into Māori Law By Māmari Stephens*
This article was first published on E-Tangata, on 13 February 2021. It is reprinted with permission. Māmari Stephens, a legal academic and Anglican priest (and good friend of E-Tangata’s), is one of 24 Māori academics who tell their personal stories in a new book, Ngā Kete Mātauranga: Māori scholars at the research interface, edited by Jacinta Ruru and Linda Waimarie Nikora, and published by Otago University Press. Here is Māmari’s essay from the book. I’d like to say my journey into law and mātauranga Māori started with a great urge to fight for Māori peoples, to do right, to remedy injustices. But that is not how it started at all. It started, in a way, with a whack on the leg. My leg, that is. Shift. Flicker. Focus. In my mind’s eye I was about ten or twelve, although, to be fair, every major memory of my childhood seems to stem from when I was about ten or twelve. In some ways I was a bit of a scared kid: scared of death, scared of the prospect of nuclear war and, in my heart of hearts, I was also scared of other Māori people. Other than my occasional timid forays into “Māori Club” and a trip to Ahipara under the wing of my oldest brother, I had no idea how to speak or understand te reo Māori. I had no clear idea that there was such a thing as tikanga Māori. Until, that is, the day I sat on a little table in our lounge at home in Christchurch. I was wearing shorts. My brother walked in, saw me and, in a few quick strides, crossed the room and slapped my bare leg. Hard. I still remember the sound, and the shock, followed by confusion and shame.
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“Never sit on tables,” he snapped. I have never sat on a table since. At that point though, I had no idea why I couldn’t. I had learned that I had crossed a line somehow, but I couldn’t see the nature of the line, nor what lay on either side of it. I had learned I was subject to a law, but not why. My brother never slapped me again, but the lesson remained. Shift. Flicker. Focus again. It’s 2013. We were about to go on to Korou Kore marae in Ahipara for a wānanga: me and some other people I didn’t know. I grabbed a cheap wrap-around skirt from the car boot. I knew enough about tikanga to offer a basic karanga, no one else seemed keen. Just as well, because my Aunty Mere was on the other side. She called, I called. We crossed the marae ātea. I was relatively confident as we moved into the wharenui, I put myself in the back row on the visitors’ side. I saw, but didn’t truly see, that some of the others had gone up to stand in front of the pictures of tūpuna on the far wall of the wharenui for a moment or two before heading to the chairs. I paid no heed. I had done my job.
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