7/7 Catholic villages became repositories for parts of Tongan culture the Wesleyans wanted to eliminate. A few Lapahans preserved the me’etu’apaki, an exquisite dance that recorded the landing of early settlers in Tonga. ‘Atenisi scholars learnt & spread the dance in the ‘90s.

6/7 Tu’i Tonga loyalists converted to Catholicism in opposition to Tupou’s aggressive Wesleyanism. Now, in the words of ‘Opeti Taliai, ‘they hope to do with voting what they could not do in battle’. & yet there are reasons to celebrate Tongan Catholicism.

5/7 The Catholic church’s stronghold is Lapaha, the capital of Tonga’s old maritime empire. The Tu’i Tonga dynasty that reigned in Lapaha was defeated two hundred years ago by the Wesleyan army of Tupou I, the founder of modern Tonga.

4/7 The Catholic church’s support was vital to the successes of the Democratic Party & the slow & incomplete dismantling of Tonga’s autocracy. But an ancient rivalry continued inside the church’s conflict with Tupou IV & his successors.

3/5 The conference put wind in the sails of ‘Akilisi Pohiva, who had been calling for reform through the ‘80s. ‘Akilisi is Tongan for Achilles, & the founder & leader of the Democratic Party proved a great warrior in the years after the conference, braving jail & intimidation.

2/5 In 1992 the Catholic Church & Futa Helu’s ‘Atenisi University co-hosted a large conference on democracy. Tonga’s absolute monarch Tupou IV complained, but did not intervene.

1/5 My wife took these photos when she visited Vava’u’s main Catholic Church last Sunday. Catholic friends & acquaintances are pleased when I tell them their church has spearheaded Tonga’s pro-democracy movement. But in Tonga nothing is as simple as it seems.

Golly sorry about all the typos in thread! I forgot to mention that Byron also adapted a Tongan story told by Mariner, in which a warrior hides his lover in the cave to protect her from a battle. Byron regendered the protector with Neuha.

21/21 Baffled Pakeha explained this recalcitrance by finding flaws in Māori culture, & eventually by deciding Māori were physically inferior. By the 1860s Premier Harry Atkinson was using Darwin to deem Maori a weaker race that needed to be helped toward extinction.

20/21 Just as Roger Douglas expected Māori to flock to Act, so Hobson thought Māori would want to embrace capitalism & Christianity. But Māori evolved their own forms of both systems & resisted losing land & autonomy.

19/20 There’s a partial parallel for this trajectory in our 19thC. In the 1840s the dominant ideology amongst Pakeha administrators & better-off colonists was one of ‘amalgamationism’. They believed Māori would willingly join Pakeha society, becoming brown Britons.

18/20 Act’s slide into racism is the result of the failure of the individualist view of the world it held in the ‘90s to make sense of reality. Rejecting history & sociology - colonisation, land loss, class - as ways to explain Māori ‘failure’, it has turned to culture & race.

17/20 Stefan Molyneux’s visit to NZ in 2020 gave massive publicity to his claim that groups like Māori are intellectually & morally inferior to ‘whites’. Musk’s twitter endlessly advertises views like those of Molyneux.

16/20 No MP or Act official has advanced the argument that Māori are racially inferior. It would still be career-ending. But when I was researching this subject several years ago I saw many Act supporters making pseudo-scientific arguments against Māori in cyberspace.

15/17 ‘Scientific’ racism had another advantage over the culturalist approach. If Māori were physically inferior to Pakeha, & were doomed to be poor or in prison, then, as Banks’ caller pointed out, there was no point in using state resources on them.

14/17 It was hard, after all, to accept Ansell’s claims that speaking Maori or performing a haka were led inevitably to ram raiding or drawing the dole. Māori leaders insisted - rightly, of course - that many Maori gang members & criminals lacked awareness of their culture.

13/17 John Banks famously lost his job as a talkback host after agreeing with a caller who had claimed that Māori were poor & violent because of their inferior genes. For some people this pseudo-scientific racism was more satisfactory than the culturalist critique of Māori.

12/17 This culturalist opposition to te ao Māori had an even more sinister ideological twin. Inspired by overseas extremists like Stefan Molyneux, some people on the NZ right began to advance a ‘genetic’ explanation for the failure of Māori to live up to ACT’s expectations.

11/14 If Māori culture holds Māori back from becoming thriving individuals, then shouldn’t this culture be opposed in toto? That was Ansell’s argument, & it was one increasingly accepted by Act supporters. It’s no coincidence that Ansell also campaigned against Islam.

10/12 In the years after 2004 Ansell took Act’s critique of Māori to its logical conclusion. He formed activist groups & campaigned against the Māori language & famous parts of Māori culture like haka. He railed against ‘Maorification’.