The Serious Business of Fun

Iwi settlements were serious business, bring the long struggle of those who had gone before to a type of conclusion. Here Sacha McMeeking reflects on the role of fun in taking those settlements to their potential and making the current generations good ancestors.

I inherited the Ngāi Tahu Settlement.  Not literally, obviously. But I was sitting my first-year university exams while my Taua sat in the gallery of Parliament watching the Ngāi Tahu Claims Settlement Act 1998 become law. Before I had graduated, I was working for the iwi and became a ‘repeat offender’, spending a good decade or so in and out of various roles inside the tribal machine.

For much of that time, the work had two broad flavours: fighting the Crown and building institutions.  Both felt enormously consequential. We were part of a generation working out what to do with the opportunities our kaumātua had fought to create. How should our institutions work? How could they reflect our values rather than simply reproduce Crown forms with Māori names? How could we rebuild the collective capability to exercise mana motuhake?

I was lucky during those years to connect with prac-academics (academics who also do practical work in, with and for communities), associated with the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development and, later, the Native Nations Institute at the University of Arizona. Their work on the cultural fit of Indigenous institutions had a profound influence on me. At its simplest, the argument was that institutions matter to self-determination, but their legitimacy and effectiveness depend on embodying and enacting the cultures and political traditions of the peoples they serve.

I became deeply interested in the work of Indigenising our own institutions and was lucky enough to be part of various attempts to do it. All were beautiful, but not all those efforts translated into real change.  Some of the efforts foundered on bureaucratic boulders, others on human dynamics.  Despite years of heart driven work by many to ensure our tribal organisations uphold tikanga, part of the colonial hangover is institutional conservatism that can make innovating on our terms feel risky and we all know (and many have personal experience of) intergenerational trauma contributing to less than wholesome kindness in some tribal politics.  

Which meant I had put a question mark over the ‘cultural fit theory’ (in invisible ink, because the proponents are scholarly rockstars).  Some recent experiences have led me to think it’s time to crack out the sharpie for not only the question mark, but also some referenced annotations.  The backdrop is a few cousins did the whakapapa arm twist and I ended up facilitating a few strategy wānanga for iwi and hapū.  Across several of those, I started hearing a note in the korero that I think is profound and challenging.

People talked about all the things that come up at these kind of wānanga, but there were ideas and a tangible passion for some that was distinctly different to the flavour a decade ago: A swimming pool at the marae, so the kids would come home and not want to leave. A tribal Airbnb network, partly so the tipu haere brigade could circulate money inside the tribal economy, but perhaps more importantly so hotel dinners could be replaced by staying up too late with long-lost cousins.

Then one hākui cried because her mokopuna didn't get to do stupid, embarrassing stuff at the marae with their cousins like she had.  Those tears gave me a lightbulb moment.

Maybe, after several decades of post-Settlement institution building, one of the next big frontiers of iwi development is fun.  That sounds frivolous. There is nothing frivolous about the political environment we are operating in, the ongoing work of reo and cultural revitalisation, persistent inequities, intergenerational trauma, or the unfinished constitutional business between Māori and the Crown.

But what if fun could or perhaps should have an instrumental role in moving those gritty and pressing issues.  So, I went looking to see what academics have to say about fun.  It turns out: quite a lot.

The research sits in different disciplinary buckets and, unsurprisingly, mostly uses more respectable words than fun. But across work on social capital, collective memory, positive emotions, festivals, community arts, social infrastructure and what sociologists call collective effervescence, there is a substantial body of theoretical and empirical work that helps explain why having a good time together might actually matter more than feels comfortable giving it credence for.

Across those literatures, enjoyable shared experiences are associated with stronger relationships, trust and attachment, but the more interesting idea for me is what accumulates through having those experiences repeatedly. Groups develop a stock of shared memories, jokes, places and references that belong to them. Those experiences become part of what makes being together enjoyable, while also giving people reasons to do it again. Over time, something that looks rather like fun starts doing some fairly serious relational work.

The research on collective memory particularly resonates because the idea that communities make and sustain themselves through shared remembering is deeply familiar in te ao Māori. Our histories are kept alive through kōrero, whakapapa, waiata and repeated retelling, so that things that happened a century ago can feel remarkably close to us. We don't need academic research to tell us that matters. What the research does add is evidence that collective memory has practical effects: shared experiences and the memories they create can strengthen attachment, reinforce relationships and increase the desire to gather again. Randall Collins describes a related effect as emotional energy:  the connection, confidence and enthusiasm generated through successful collective experiences can linger afterwards and draw people back towards the group. That leaves me with a slightly different question. We have inherited an extraordinary store of collective memory from those who came before us, we are very good at keeping much of it alive, but are we creating enough of it now? Are today's mokopuna accumulating the stories with their cousins that they will still be retelling in fifty years' time?  Seen that way, the stupid stuff with your cousins starts looking considerably less stupid.

The empirical evidence isn't strong enough to announce that installing a hydroslide beside every wharekai will usher in a new era of mana motuhake. Much of the community-level research shows associations rather than proving causation. But there is enough convergence to take the proposition seriously and genuinely kick the tyres on whether fun might be part of the relational infrastructure required for regenerating mana motuhake.

That doesn't mean the institution-building era was misguided. Quite the opposite. Our institutions hold assets, exercise authority, protect collective interests and create possibilities that previous generations fought extraordinarily hard to secure. Perhaps their success is precisely what makes it possible to ask a different question now.

If the first post-Settlement challenge was to rebuild the machinery of collective self-determination, perhaps an increasingly important challenge is to ensure there is a dense, joyful, self-reproducing collective life for that machinery to serve.  That would lead to some interesting choices.  What might iwi development look like if one of our measures of success was whether our mokopuna wanted to come home? What would we invest in if cousin memories, voluntary return, laughter, shared adventures and lifelong relationships counted as outcomes? Would the swimming pool suddenly look less frivolous? Would we design fewer hui and more occasions that people talk about for years afterwards?

Underneath these questions there are more difficult questions because fun is not equally available to everybody, which can be amplified by tribal dynamics that reproduce exclusion and/or the presence of trauma whether inter-generational or from this lifetime that can make collective spaces complicated.

There aren't any off-the-shelf answers and all that existing research can do is point to these questions as having merit to pursue with a spirit of curiosity. That is why this has become one of my current rangahau quests: what role could fun play in the next phase of iwi development? What gets in its way? How could we cultivate it deliberately without institutionalising all the fun out of it? And what might post-Settlement iwi invest in differently if we took its role in retribalisation seriously?

My mates will probably find it hilarious that I want to research fun. I am more commonly associated with searing intensity.  But, like most rangahau, this one is personal.  My babies get dragged to the marae because their māmā is facilitating something for Aunty Such-and-such. At present, their willingness to endure a full-day wānanga sometimes requires a pre-planned regimen of bribery.  Perhaps if there were more cousins getting dragged along too, they could spend more time building mattress forts and less time interrupting proceedings to ask for the next instalment of bribery.

We have plenty of re- work ahead of us: revitalising, reclaiming, restoring, regenerating. Much of that work is serious because what happened to us was serious. But, we get to choose how we do this re-work: seriousness doesn't have to be the dominant experience of putting things back together.  It could be, but so could fun.  I suspect I know which option my tamariki would consider to be a good mokopuna decision. 

Sacha McMeeking is a Kairangahau Matua at Te Manawahoukura in Te Wānanga o Aotearoa

Further Reading:

Te Kerēme Youtube Videos (6) Te Kerēme and Ngāi Tahu Settlement - YouTube

Janine Hayward and Nicola R. Wheen (eds), Treaty of Waitangi Settlements, Bridget Williams Books, 2012.