FESTIVAL ‘ 90 : For This Group of Maoris, It’s All in the Family : Waiwhetu clan stresses filial fidelity and cultural pride in its traditional song and dances

Family groups in the entertainment world are common but few have been as large as the 20 brothers, sisters and cousins who make up the Waiwhetu Maori Cultural Group.

Southland audiences over Labor Day weekend’s opening programs at Angel’s Gate and at the Maritime Museum in San Pedro got their first glimpse of the Puketapu and Luke families in traditional Maori dress as they performed songs and dances--including poi dances and the intimidating haka , or war dances.

While some performers may travel with managers and publicists in tow, the Maoris’ most important team members are the elders--the kaumatua and their female equivalent, kuia --whose roles are to hold the group together as a unit and see that performances remain true to the Waiwhetu spirit.

On the current tour, the group’s farthest and most ambitious performances to date, Ritchie Luke, 63, wife Hina and “Aunty Betty” Winitana are the elders who sit in the audience and later advise members on whether their performance has stayed faithful to the Waiwhetu spirit.

“We perform these songs for ourselves, as an expression of who we are,” Luke says, explaining why the group has chosen to bypass domestic tours and Maori competitions in New Zealand and has taken its music and dance straight to the “outside” world instead.

“We will sing on our own marae (family complex) , but performing in New Zealand has no meaning for us,” Luke said.

How can they reconcile this attitude with appearing before international audiences who may have little understanding of Maori culture?

Luke sees U.S. tours as a chance to show Americans a piece of New Zealand and give younger family members a chance to develop Maori pride. Except for four teen-agers making their first trip outside the marae, most members of the group are veterans of two previous tours .

Their appearances during the Los Angeles Festival were arranged last year at a cost expected to be $80,000 New Zealand dollars (about $48,000 U.S.). The group has raised 90% of its money itself and was not pleased when Saturday’s program erroneously stated that a Rockefeller Foundation grant had partly paid for costs.

Waiwhetu, or “Shining Water,” is a suburb of Wellington, New Zealand’s capital, and is a tribal community for the Te Atiawa people, who came from the Taranaki region farther north to settle in the early 1900s.

Cultural, spiritual and social life for many Maori centers around the marae, which is a complex composed of a meeting house, grass area and eating house. At the turn of the century, a Te Atiawa leader, Ihaia Puketapu, decided he would build a meeting house for both Maori and non-Maori (Pakeha) at Waiwhetu. A believer in solving disputes peacefully, Ihaia decreed the house was to be a place of peace, friendship and goodwill to all people.

Since the 1950s, the marae has been the focal point of Te Atiawa activities in Wellington and the Luke association with Waiwhetu is as strong and old as that of the Puketapu family. Intermarriages have gone on for years, the elder Luke said, and there is no real distinction between the two names.

His son, Wirangi Luke, the tour organizer, said his parents’ generation formed the cultural group before the marae was built but it “faded out” in the 1960s through a lack of tutors.

During the 1970s, there was a renewed interest in Maori cultural activities, coinciding with a general revival of Maori culture throughout New Zealand. A number of Waiwhetu youth wanted to learn about traditional dance and song.

Richard Luke recalls the revival coincided with the establishment of kohanga reo, Maori preschools that hold all their lessons in the Maori language. Kohanga was a ‘70s initiative by Maori parents who wanted to see their children learn the Maori language in their early years. It followed a long period when the use of the Maori language was in danger of dying out.

Kohanga reo, he says, fired an enthusiasm among parents to learn Maori. For people in Waiwhetu, it happily coincided with Ritchie’s daughter, Hinemoa, and her husband, Moana Priest, both educated at Maori colleges that placed a strong emphasis in reviving interest in the arts for young people keen to catch up on the lost years.

“There was a sense of trying to achieve something they had not been a part of earlier,” Wirangi says.

Today, the Waiwhetu Maori Culture Group remains true to tradition in both its dance and harmonies in waiata (songs) common to all Maori tribes.

Wirangi worked for Maori International, a company promoting Maori business and tourism. Its managing director was Luke’s uncle, a Waiwhetu elder and former government secretary of Maori Affairs, Kara Puketapu.

In 1985, Maori International began Te Maori tours, where overseas tourists, many of them Americans, visited different marae. The company used Waiwhetu marae as a testing ground because of the family ties. The group entertained their visitors during dinner.

Contact with foreigners made the group want to learn how their guests lived. Few members had been overseas and many were shy and reluctant to mingle confidently with visitors. Performance organizers agreed that overseas travel would overcome the problem.

The tour was successful and motivated the group to tour again: In 1986, the unit went to San Francisco, Orange County and Hawaii. The trips, costing $50,000 to $60,000, were paid for through fund-raisers rather than sponsorships and meant the group could perform as it wanted.

“We want to show that we as a Maori culture group can perform with dignity and capture the American audience,” Wirangi Luke says. He says the group performs best when the audience responds.

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