The word ‘Haka’ caught my eye. It’s not one that I’m used to reading on American blogs. It was a headline on Reclusive Leftist Hilary vs the Haka. I clicked on the link, although I assumed she didn’t meant what I would mean if I used the word. Haka, to me and where I live, is the word for traditional Maori dances.

But it turns out that Violet Socks did mean that, sort of, and it was based on a blogger called River Daughter who has been using the word that way for a couple of months. River Dancer explained the metaphor she was making like this:

It’s all advertising and Maori war dancing. It sure looks ugly but it’s not as bad as we think.

River Daughter has continued to use haka as a metaphor for sound and fury from the campaigns that lack substance. In fact she expands what she means by the metaphor here:

What we have here is a Haka. A Haka is a Maori wardance, usually performed by men (figures) to scare and intimidate the enemy. The dancers do a lot of chest pounding and screaming and making truly scary faces complete with bulging eyes and sticking out their tongues. But just like the online world, they aren’t going to hurt you. It’s just to make you feel like they are the most dangerous people on the planet. So what if they scream at you, jostle you or make nasty faces?

To read such an ignorant characterisation of the haka makes me really angry. I have seen haka performed to congratulate and acknowledge achievement. I have been on protests where haka are performed. The racist subtext here isn’t very subtle ‘angry brown men are scary’, but deeper than that is the colonialist attitude towards Maori culture. River Daughter has no idea of Tikanga, she probably doesn’t even know what the word means.

From her posts, I’m guessing the only context River Daughter’s seen the haka is a sporting one. New Zealand’s Rugby team perform a haka before each test. While I think her description of the role of haka in a rugby test, is racist and ignorant, what she wrote was even worse, because there are many more haka than Ka Mate¹ and many more occasions where they are performed than rugby tests. I have seen haka performed as congratulations, as protests, as challenges, as rituals. River Daughter knows very little about the haka, but she is writing as if what she knows is all there is to know.

My point is that the Haka is not River Daughter’s, Violet Socks’s, yours or mine to turn into a metaphor of any sort. It’s worse because this particularly metaphor was ignorant, inaccurate and disrespectful. But I would never use the haka as a metaphor, even an accurate one. That’s one way appropriation works, the idea that you’re entitled to use other people’s culture, even though you know nothing about it.

A note for the comments: There are many threads to discuss the US Presidential elections, this is not one of them.

Edited to add: Sorry I had an incomplete draft and I posted that one rather than this. This is the complete version of my post

1. the name of the haka most often performed before rugby tests (back)

1. I want to express my (very late) solidarity with Blackamazon, Adele and all the other women of colour who were ignored and dismissed by Seal Press. I want to express my support for the girlcott of Seal press. While there’s not a lot I can do personally, since I would neither buy books from Seal Press (can’t afford them) or write for Seal press anyway. But the whole point of solidarity is answering the question ‘which side are you on?’ I think women of colour activists are more important than a feminist publishing house. I know that my liberation is impossible while women of colour are enslaved, and that means that I have to make it clear that I stand with them against racism from feminist institutions.

2. I want to express my (equally late) solidarity with brownfemipower who will be missed. It is disgusting the way her names and intentions have been dragged and lied about across the blogsphere by people attempting to defend Amanda. Brownfemipower is amazing.

[There used to be bits of my opinion on appropriation in here, but I moved them to this thread. If you want good discussion on appropriation go there, or Holly , Daisy and Sylvia/M.

3. Finally, and less belatedly on my part, Amanda’s book itself. These images are racist.¹ They come from Amanda Marcotte’s book “It’s a jungle out there” that was published by Seal Press. I don’t just want to say ‘these pictures are racist and racism is bad’, but to talk about the harm that these sorts of images cause, because the racist ideas that they maintain are very specific. They are presenting indigenous people as a dangerous other. They are presented as things that must be conquered so that white people can live freely on their land. The idea represented in these images are one of the many ways colonialism is maintained and justified.

I live in a country where land has been stolen from indigenous people in the last five years. Amanda Marcotte lives, and Seal Press operates, in a country where the history of stealing land from indigenous people stretches back five centuries. We all live in a world where the distribution of wealth was established, and justified, by colonialism. The white woman, and man, in those pictures were stealing land and resources - everything Africa had that they could use (a century earlier, of course, they would have also been stealing people).

I’ve been writing this post for a week. Writing other posts about these issues for several weeks and not finishing them. I’m posting it now, rather than trying to make it better, because silent solidarity isn’t much good to anyone.

There have been a number of racist dynamics developing in various comment threads. Amanda, and her defenders, only talking to white people and ignoring people of colour. Re-centring the issue on Amanda by focusing on a very small section of comments and demanding that they be addressed first. These behaviours will not be welcome in this comment thread.

I am not interested in the pontifications of outsiders on this. So specifically Robert, RonF and Sailorman are not welcome, nor are anyone of their ilk.

1. note for Hugo Schwyzer the problem is not that they could be interpreted as racist. It is that they are racist (back)

Great article in Mother Jones by Elizabeth Larson, whose daughter was adopted from Guatemala.

For those of you who don’t know, there’s been a lot of pushback against the “saving children from the benighted countries they were born in” narrative, led by those who were adopted.

The article covers much too much ground for me to sum up, so I’ll just quote the article’s comments on open adoption.

“One of the ways that wrongdoers hide their child-laundering schemes is by the closed-adoption system,” says David Smolin, a law professor who’s written extensively on corruption in transnational adoption. He and his wife adopted two sisters from India only to find out that they had been stolen from their birth family. Last March, a Utah adoption agency was indicted in an alleged fraud scheme involving 81 Samoan children whose parents were told that they were sending their children away to take advantage of opportunities in the United States—that there would be letters, photos, and visits, and that the children would return when they turned 18.

Openness, Smolin notes, would also make it harder for parents to think of adoptions as “rescuing” children. “There are cultural reasons why people give up children for adoption,” he says. “But when you have a situation where money alone, in relatively small quantities, would allow the birth family to keep the child—under current law you are allowed to take the child and spend $30,000 when $200 would be enough to avoid the relinquishment.”

As it stands, families who have forged relationships with birth parents often find it impossible to turn their backs on their economic needs. Some send a monthly stipend; others pay for the education of their child’s siblings, help finance businesses, or buy computers or cell phones to make it easier to stay in touch. And while all this is legal once the adoption is finalized, it’s a lot messier than writing a check for Save the Children. “We need to be careful what kind of impression that makes with other people in the village or area,” says Linh Song, the president of Ethica, a nonprofit organization that advocates for transparent adoptions worldwide. “Will they receive aid if their child is sent abroad?”

If you’re interested in reading further about Transnational Adoptions, there are a bunch of excellent blogs that write about this issue. Harlow’s Monkey is a great place to start, both because the blog is excellent and for the blogroll.

I don’t imagine most readers of Alas follow Australian politics particularly closely - neither do I. The main political issues I’ve followed have been union issues, racism against immigrants and indigenous issues, particularly the invasion of the Northern Territories. The common theme in all this is that Australian Prime Minister is an evil racist troglodyte.¹

Australia had elections yesterday and after eleven years in power the Howard government was finally defeated. I’m not really celebrating that - not being a huge fan of the Australian Labour party. But I do take some small joy, because it looks like John Howard lost his seat, and won’t even get back into parliament. Assholes losing their jobs is the highlight of any election.

1. The other theme is that the opposition Labour party also sucks beyond the telling of it (back)

On October 15 the police raided over 60 houses throughout New Zealand. They arrested 16 people on jointly possessing a number of firearms, and one person on drugs charges. From the very first day the police were talking about charges under the Terrorism Suppression Act.

The raids were brutal, a 12 year old girl had a gun pointed at her head, and when her grandmother tried to comfort her the police yelled at the grandmother to shut up and moved closer to both of them (you can view the 12 year old’s comments here). In Ruatoki, a they put a roadblock on the line where the land had been confiscated so many years ago, and anyone who went in and out had to have their photo taken by their car. When one house was raided, the children were locked in a shed for hours by the police while the search was being carried.

Four people were arrested in Wellington; three of those were friends of mine - people I loved. They didn’t get bail; they went into the prison industrial complex.¹ Suddenly prisons stopped being an abstract concept to me, and became a reality that I attempted to navigate while trying to visit the prisoners and get them books and money.

But we didn’t, couldn’t, just do prisoner support, we also needed to stand in solidarity of people who had been attacked, particularly Tūhoe, the iwi ² that had been targeted in these raids. The four weeks that followed was prisons and driving and meetings and court and protests and meetings and supporting each other and meetings and prisons and court and driving and hugs and tears and and anger and love.

At 4pm, Thursday 8 November almost four weeks after people had been arrested, the Solicitor General announced that no-one would be charged under the terrorism suppression act (these were the first charges ever attempted by the police under the Terrorism Suppression Act). The following day all my friends got bail, and all 16 defendents are now free

I don’t think I could describe the sustained joy that started at 4.01 and continued for a week. They were released eleven days ago and I’m smiling right now, because they’re out and I can see them whenever I want.

It’s joy and a respite, but we’ve got so much work to do. All 16 are still facing charges under the Arms Act. The Terrorism Suppression Act - which allowed extensive bugging, has just been strengthened. While our friends are out of prisons, those vile instituations still stand, with far too many trapped inside. ³ I still live in a colonised country, where demands for Tino Rangatiratanga and Mana Motuhake⁴ are ignored.

I couldn’t write much. I was in too much of a whirlwind to know what to say. I’m looking forward to writing more regularly, but what’s happened over the last 6 weeks has affected me, and will affect what I write.

I’ve been promising to write more about feminism in prisons for a while now. While my analysis hasn’t changed much, your understanding changes as issues stop being abstract and distanced and become part of your reality, and the reality of those you love. So I imagine those posts will take a slightly different form than they might have two months ago, but will probably be stronger because of it. Most importantly, in the next few days (or weeks) I hope to write an introductory post that’ll cover some of the very basic history of colonialism in NZ, and Maori resistance, that I can use a reference point if I want to write more on Alas. I’ve generally avoided cross-posting what little I do write on Alas, but I think writing about colonialism where I live has resonances beyond, so that I should do the background work to make what I write intelligible.

I can answer questions if people have any, it can be hard to write about what’s going on here for another audience, but I think it’s worth doing.

Updated I realised I didn’t do any sort of explanation of the charges under the Arms Act. 16 of those arrested were charged under the Arms Act. These charges related to events that the police claim happened in the Urewera Mountains. Almost all the charges are joint charges - so 16 people are charged with co-possessing a rifle, or whatever.⁵ Most defendents are facing several charges under the arms act - the weapons they were alleged to possess were not found on their property during the raids. Just two people have additional charges - in relation to four guns the police claim to have found during the raids.

1. Being remanded in custody is much rarer NZ than America, and there is no such thing as money bail, so you never have to put up a bond (back)
2. tribe (back)
3. Please hold the inevitable ‘what about the rapists and murderers’ comments until I write a proper post about this and have time to reply (back)
4. I’m not going to try and translate - but I think land and freedom best conveys the meaning (back)
5. I’m the worst person in the world to try and explain this, because my knowledge of guns is so supremely limited that (back)