National Portrait: Dame Anne Salmond - walking between two worlds

Thursday, 6 September 2018

When Anne Salmond was 20, she was sent to the Solomon Islands capital Honiara to write down the language of the Ontong Java atoll.

The atoll is several hundred kilometres north of Honiara, but the locals came in for education or medical treatment and had a settlement there, so for three months the young anthropologist watched and listened.

'They were cooking in the ground and doing 'love magic' – getting someone to be madly in love with you with the force of incantation or by something to put in their food. That was like, wow! Twenty years old and in the middle of all that. And the women were bare-breasted …'

Salmond spoke Māori, so had some Polynesian-language building blocks, and by the end, she was dreaming in this new language. But it was obvious to her how much more she didn't know. Her real lesson from the field was to be 'very sceptical' of any researcher who spends a short time alongside an alien culture then comes home saying they 'know' a people.

**READ MORE:

* Salmond fronts Artefact series

* The 'time travelling' author and the geopolitics of 1770 Aotearoa

* Opinion: Cook 'First Encounter' celebrations a 'difficult step'**

That's an old-school approach to anthropology, says Salmond. 'It's like trying to learn physics in two years.' Sure, academics should get out in the field, but they should be wary of claiming authority.

To claim authority you really have to put in the hours – and even then some humility won't go astray.

For most of her life, Salmond has been an observer of Māori culture. She's a Pākehā who speaks the language, who knows her way around the marae, who has been constantly talking with and about Māori.

'But to claim to speak for Māori – that would be a really dumb thing to do. I mean they're perfectly capable of speaking for themselves.'

Also, 'after spending a lifetime, I'm still getting things wrong, or not understanding stuff'.

That Honiara trip was more than half a century ago. The anthropologist is now also a historian, an author, a dame (since 1995), a New Zealander of Year (in 2013), a TV documentary host, an environmentalist, a fellow of the Royal Society, a former chair of the Historic Places Trust, and winner of an array of awards and prizes and medals. She's a Distinguished Professor at the University of Auckland.

She grew up in Gisborne, went to boarding school in Masterton, and realised how little she knew about the people of her own country only after she went to the United States at 17 on a scholarship. Once home, she started remedying that. She took anthropology in Auckland because that was the department that taught Māori language.

'I was in Māori Club and kapa haka and all that. A lot of the people who led the Māori renaissance and were the revolutionaries were people I went to university with.'

Her work has continually circled around what happens when cultures bump up against each other: three early books about contemporary Māori life; two histories of early contact between Māori and European; then three histories of broader European exploration of the Pacific, focusing on Captain Cook, Tahiti and Captain Bligh respectively.

Last year's Tears of Rangi: Experiments between Worlds, looked at early contact in New Zealand once again, but with an especially philosophical bent, looking at how cultures might differ not simply in their world views, but in the actual worlds they inhabit, something she calls 'cosmo-diversity'.

It might sound a bit flaky, but Salmond says this doesn't mean she's not a realist. It's just that 'none of us have a monopoly on wisdom'.

Eighteenth-century Europe was all about hierarchies of class and race and gender, and relied on maps, grids and fences. Meanwhile, Aotearoa's reality was built on ideas of whakapapa and relational networks and an interweaving of natural and human worlds. It's time, says Salmond, to take more notice of those non-Western realities and see how even today they can broaden our minds and even our sciences.

'The navigation systems in Polynesia enabled people to explore a third of the Earth's surface, starting out when the Egyptians were building the pyramids. I mean, the most severe empirical test of a navigation system is whether you get to the island or drown at sea. It couldn't be more empirical really.

'To say that the project that came out of western Europe in the Enlightenment exhausted the capacity of human beings is so self-congratulatory on behalf of people who belong to that tradition.'

​Salmond is 72, and isn't slowing down.

'One of the things about being involved in te ao Māori a lot is that kaumātua [elders] don't really retire. In the past, I've been chair of things and been senior executive, but I wouldn't do that now. You can sit and think and talk to people, and keep on learning.'

This year she hosted Māori TV's six-part globe-trotting documentary Artefact, and was consulted on Sam Neill's Captain Cook series Uncharted. Next year sees the 250th anniversary of Cook's landfall in New Zealand, and she's just back from London after lecturing on that at the British Library. Later this month she's a keynote speaker at the Women of Influence forum in Auckland, which is co-sponsored by Stuff.

She's deep into new research about pioneering Māori statesmen Sir Āpirana Ngata and Sir Peter Buck, and is wrapping up another project looking at New Zealand's rivers from diverse perspectives, from geomorphology and ecology to Māori philosophy. Both projects are examples of that 'cosmo-diversity' approach in action.

Salmond hasn't just written about 'two worlds' all her life. She's also lived in them – and it hasn't always been comfortable. There was a time when activist Titewhai Harawira 'had a bit of a campaign to stop Pākehā working on Māori things, and she was going for the anthropology department. It was interesting.'

Earlier still, Salmond remembers being at Omahu Marae when someone took exception to her as the only Pākehā there.

Rejection 'always hurts', but such occasional slights seemed small compared to the bigotry she saw going the other way.

'Being part of Māori Club, and having really close friends, I saw them not getting flats. I saw them being treated like absolute dirt and I saw them crying and hurt. I still know people who get it in the neck every day for being Māori, and if you get it in the neck for being Pākehā sometimes you can understand it.'

In any case, there were always people in Māoridom who had her back. When Harawira stood and demanded Salmond leave a Māori leaders' conference, a kuia got up and told Harawira off.

'She said 'Don't say that to Ani,' sort of thing. So I haven't really had to fight those battles for myself, when I was young.'

You get the feeling Dame Anne Salmond can fight her own battles when necessary. There's something grand about her. When she opens the door of her extraordinarily lovely Auckland villa, she seems rather tall. She has long, dramatic white hair and a patrician nose. She sounds a little like Helen Clark, both in accent and in the strong, clear certainty of her sentences. When asked to respond to some foolishness in the current public discourse, her eyes narrow and her lips twitch.

Don Brash's views about Māori, for instance. He recently told RNZ that 'most Māori have benefited enormously, net, from colonisation'.

How does Salmond – both a leading historian of colonial-era Māori and deeply connected to modern-day Māori – react to that kind of thing?

'Hmmm,' she says. Without colonisation, 'maybe not so many of their young would be in jail, y'know? To make a statement like that would be so …'

She looks exasperated, starts again: 'I mean, how would he know? What does he know about what it's like for people now, actually? And what does he know about what life was like for them then? Nothing. Zero probably. Because he's never really studied it.'

It's the same when Brash and others talk about te reo being useless. 'But they've never learnt it, so how would they know? They say Māori philosophy is just superstition, but they've never studied it, so how would they know?'

It's a bit like those anthropologists who dare claim authority about a people, when all they've done is spend a few months in the field. Sure, it irks her when people like Brash use their megaphone to talk on a subject they know little about, but mostly 'it's boring actually. Sort of annoying, but boring as well'.

She doesn't despair. There's a difference between the noise, and what's going on on the ground.

'There's a lot of people, especially in the older generation, who do think like Don Brash, but the younger generation is really different, in my experience.'

There's the everyday cross-cultural pleasure of hearing a young Asian-born Kiwi doctor talk about being a 'kaitiaki' to her patients. Or there's Salmond's niece from Gisborne, who's studying for her masters in education, but is also training in star navigation – the old science that saw Polynesians settle throughout the Pacific.

'She's Pākehā, but her husband's Māori, and her kids are Māori, so those lines are being traversed all the time, in our family as well as in the community. And those people are going to forge a different kind of country.'

* The Women of Influence winners will be announced on September 18 at SkyCity in Auckland. For tickets and for more information about the Women of Influence Forum visit womenofinfluence.co.nz.