Matua: His Mandate with Destiny
Haami Moeke Snr QSM was a respected Maori kaumatua (Elder). He passed away recently. He was both my friend and my carving mentor. To me, he was matua or simply Haami. The thing I loved most about him was his total lack of humbuggerishness. When you asked him directly what he thought, he told you. If you beat about the bush, he was happy to assist you in your lostness by waiting patiently as you got yourself unlost!
Tikanga
Matua always believed the carver set the tikanga. Tikanga are the customs and traditions that have been handed down through the passages of time. They come from tika, things that are true and not teka, things that are false. Hence the word is tikanga not tekanga.
Today, tikanga is often influenced by other cultures, views and perspectives. An example of how he thought about tikanga is epitomised in the time we worked on a carving recently for a large company. Under Haami’s tikanga of ‘Noa’ or no tapu (a sacred restriction), we didn’t say karakia (prayers), we did eat outside but that was probably due more to the fact it had rained a lot this year and eating in the sun was more delight than duty. He combined both traditional and contemporary motifs and of course there was the small matter of my being female. Actually, it never registered as an issue for matua ever. Nor for me because of his lead.
Haami wasn’t a superstitious man. He was a good deal more practical than cosmological in his thought around the subject though he did read indepth accounts of old Maori cosmogony that depicted Sky and Earth as the primal parents. What we understand these days as the creation story.
Theogony and Anthropogeny
Such readings also led him along pathes of theogony and anthropogeny (the origins and development of man). These things always interested us. We didn’t always believe that such ideas were a reliable illustration of the mentality or intelligence of what a person believed with the passing of time.
In fact, the two if us were a good example of people who had mentally outgrown the ever present cultural cosmogony, yet, Haami continued (and was teaching me about) his respect for it in his pursuit of understanding the role it played, also in his use of traditional motifs and by working within the old beliefs held by others for the purpose of completing what he had been tasked to do.
Why? Well, that’s simple. For the benefit of the Iwi or Tribe and because wisdom had taught his feet to go where no path could be seen. It was life’s gift to him that ‘understanding’. We’d both wrestled intellectually with knowable levels of gathering into ourselves working applications of multiculturalism and how that meant to us in the context of our being Maori.
Multicultural
In my opinion, matua really was a multicultural man. In all his experiences of life, something in the fundamental essence of who he was, knew, accepted and accommodated his fusion of that particular belief. We accepted there was no pleasing everyone so we were often found talking through how that meant to us, for him as a carver and me as a woman, carving. I have an intellectual limp these days. Like Jacob of old who wrestled with a big old angel.
Was the angel just playing when he touched Jacob’s hip causing him to limp thereafter? I don’t believe so. The Hebrew of that action is translated as a ‘dislocation’. A physical reminder of a cosmological encounter. For me, as with all intellectual wrestlings and struggles, it’s about growth.
For Haami, perhaps they were both his legacy and his mandate with destiny.
