Learning from the Marae

Kia ora—have life! This Maori greeting is a theme of Marae: Te Tatau Pounamu. ‘It’s the encouragement to have life, an extraordinary life in a country, Aotearoa, a place of unending light, and New Zealand, a place to be good people in,’ Bishop Walters says.

Bishop Walters and his son and daughter-in-law, photographers and film makers Robin and Sam Walters created the book by visiting and photographing more than 150 marae around the country, from well-known sites such as Waitangi, to Bluff and Bruce Bay on the South Island West Coast.  

Alongside the many photographs of those marae, the book focuses on the story of 21 Maori meeting houses, covering the length of the country, telling the history of the tribes and stories of the people they met on their visits.

Uncovering treasure

The book idea came about as a way to combine the trio’s love of photography, travel and Maori culture when Robin Walters came back to New Zealand, after 12 years of living overseas. Returning with Sam, who is Welsh, and their two children, Robin says he was eager to learn more about his Maori heritage after so long away and to introduce it more to his wife and children. Looking through some old papers he discovered an essay by his father on carvings made by one of his teachers, master carver Pine Taiapa, in marae around the East Cape.

With those ideas in mind, the trio began to plan, inspired by the words of Bishop Walter’s father Thomas Houston Walters, who said:

When you are in the bush, talk to the bush and remember to allow the bush time to talk back to you. When you are by the sea, talk to the sea and listen to what the sea has to say. When you are with the people, talk to the people and allow time for them to talk back to you. Talk to the meeting houses, because they are the treasures of the ancestors, and they will talk back to you.

Although the book took three years of travelling, with some marae refusing to be part of the project or needing multiple visits, Bishop Walters says the trip was endlessly fascinating and inspiring. This was helped by huge differences between meeting houses, with their many and varied carvings, or no carvings, to the age of the buildings, and through to the differences in language spoken at different marae and the varied protocols.

‘Every day, it was like when the old gold diggers found gold and then another bit of gold, it uplifted the spirits. There’s a great variety in the meeting houses and there was sheer pleasure in visiting those places, because it typifies the life of our ancestors.’

A tour of tales

Although the book started as a photography project, as they visited each meeting house they also met the people there. Their stories, along with the stories of the land and the construction of each marae, make up much of the journey through the book.

With people and their stories coming to the fore the book becomes something of a tour of New Zealand culture, with fascinating tales about the history of small towns and Kiwi culture and people living together in Aotearoa.

Rugby and art, big parts of Bishop Walters’ life, are caught up in many of the stories.  A trained artist and art teacher, he studied and worked with a series of prominent Maori artists, including Ralph Hotere, and helped develop a Maori arts curriculum for primary and secondary schools.

He was also a fullback for the Maori All Black’s winning the Tom French Cup, awarded to the best Maori rugby player of the year, in 1957, and managed development teams.

Different cultures together

However, for Bishop Walters the book is not all about art and sport, or even all about Maori culture, myth and history. Despite being a book about Maori meeting places and the people that meet there, Bishop Walters says the relationship between Maori and Pakeha was a driving focus for him, looking at how New Zealand’s first two cultures could come together.  

‘I have this view, that I present right at the start, of a place that is capable of building blended relationships, able to live together in peace. It’s about the tangata whenua, the first peoples who named this place Aotearoa—the land of unending light—and the Pakeha who named it New Zealand—a place to be good people in. It’s almost a way of introducing that there is a capacity to be more equal with each other and to accept people as they are.’  

Those closer ties and the positive impact they could have, could be seen in his ancestry, he says, and in his children, who have all married people from other countries and cultures. Visiting his own marae at Ahipara was a particularly moving and memorable time, digging into its story and his ancestry and looking again at the relationship between his famously aggressive Te Rarawa tribe and his European missionary ancestors.  

‘That will always be special. My Maori side were the tangata whenua (or first peoples). Their perspective of life was to assert absolute domination over anyone not related by blood. You disposed of anyone who got in your way—that was your religious way of expressing yourself, really. And with the arrival of the new people, the Walters people, that place made a remarkable change in their lives. Overnight, we became Christian people, following a path of faith, hope and love.’

Another example of cultures coming together was in making the book, travelling with his Welsh daughter-in-law Sam Walters, who had only briefly visited New Zealand before. Introducing her to Maori culture and seeing her response was an exciting, rewarding experience, which he hopes will be passed on to readers of the book and be useful for those without a Maori background, he says.

‘Everything she uttered was as a person just coming here, a new citizen. I hope that that might help those who don’t know about what’s there.’

Lessons from the marae

Living together in the land God created is something of a theme of Bishop Walters’ life as a minister, and of the book.

As a minister, the spiritual aspect of the trip and of marae was very important for him. Visiting a marae, for him, is like the biblical idea of going up a mountain to be refreshed. You go away to meet with God and then come down again into the world refreshed, he says.

For Bishop Walters, working on Marae was a chance to carry on an idea he had begun to explore in 1984. That year, he says, he contributed to a book discussing the Maori model of looking after families using the model of a Gisborne marae and utilising his training as an artist to take a creative bent on the project.

For this latest book, he wanted to again find a creative way to look at the Maori perspective and way of doing things, considering the positive lessons that can be found in marae and the traditions associated with these meeting houses.

Many of the aspects of marae and marae life that came out in the book were things that were important for both New Zealand culture, and the church, he says.

Those included aspects such as marae being places of peace, where peace is made and taken out to other places; places of hospitality and generosity where everyone is fed and cared for; and places of aroha or love; as well as places where people meet.

There are close links between marae and church, he says. Church buildings were instrumental in the history of marae and the wharenui or meeting houses, which are now viewed as the heart of the marae.

Marae began as open spaces, used for open-air meetings, with the large, central wharenui not built until after the arrival of the Europeans and the first European missionaries. They were built using the new tools brought by the settlers, Bishop Walters says, as a Maori sacred spaced, where Maori culture could be retained in the face of a new and rapidly expanding culture. But they were modelled on the church buildings the missionaries were building, he says.

These Maori meeting houses, then, were inspired by the church, but the church should also embrace the meeting house and the people in it, he says.  

Throughout his time as a minister, Bishop Walters has tried to hold church meetings in marae, and says the church should reach out to marae. ‘I have never built a church as a bishop; I have gone where the people meet and worship, where their meeting houses are.’

Marae as metaphor

Along with being an art teacher, he also taught at the Anglican training college, St John’s College, in Auckland, and his teaching side comes out as he describes how the physical marae building can be seen as a metaphor for what the church should be like. ‘It is an easy way of remembering rather than using the technical, academic language that I was brought up on,’ he says.

The floor is like the foundation of Christian maturity in Ephesians 4:13–16, and the open arms of the meeting house porch are like Christ’s open arms saying ‘welcome, come in’, he says. Inside, the four tukutuku (or woven panels) on the walls can represent that you enter to worship God, to fellowship with God and for teaching from God, and that you exit to go out into the world and serve God. The pillars of the marae stand for things you want to do, such as prayer or reading the Bible. The roof is a reminder that the focus goes up to God, with the central roof beam, the backbone which holds the marae together, representing God.

The church could also learn from the protocols of marae greeting, Bishop Walters says. The traditional greetings require people to state who they are, where they’re from and what their intentions are. It helps the person, and those they are visiting, know their roots historically or spiritually, makes their aims clear, and tries to prevent people being deceptive.  

For some Pakeha Christians, worshipping at a marae can be an uncomfortable experience due to things such as the wooden carvings representing traditional Maori gods. Bishop Walters says his own people did not carve the gods in their marae, both because of the teaching of the missionaries not to make idols and because they felt the carvings glorified works of man. But as an artist and a trained carver, he says the artist can give whatever meaning they chose to a carving and that not all carvings are of gods or dedicated to them. Carving also transforms the wood and can be seen as a creative thing inspired by a God with a love of creativity. A creative God who created the whole world and gave us great creativity.

Bishop Walters has faced criticism for his stance of taking church onto the marae and introducing Maori ideas from people who suggest he is undermining what it means to be Anglican. ‘But I have gone beyond that and rather than call myself “Anglican”, he says, ‘I have always called myself “mihingare”.’ This was his tribe’s word for ‘missionary’ and is part of an indigenous model of mission and ministry that he has helped put together. It describes any missionary, regardless of denomination, with the indigenous model taking examples of different ways of thinking from different tribes and peoples and looking at them as gifts to be used in spreading the mission, he says.

The model helps people in New Zealand see mission in a way that reaches New Zealanders, not as something to be done overseas, he says. ‘My way of working as a bishop was to acknowledge the gifts from God to different areas that allowed people to act as part of their contribution to the church’s mission and ministry in New Zealand. It’s been a wonderful revelation for me and I’m greatly blessed for helping put it together.’

Ultimately, though—like the book—it comes back to bringing cultures together and finding a way to best live in the country God created, he says. ‘I hope by going through this book, people will be blessed, not only by the words, but by the nature of the country, as well as the buildings and their relationship with the mountains, rivers and sky. I hope they are blessed by the world that God created us to be good people in. If people were to look at it that way, I hope it would teach them, help them to learn, [and] through that, to see this place that they live in as an example of God’s generous gift to humanity.’

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by Robin Raymond (c) 'War Cry' magazine, 7 February 2015, pp5-7.
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