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Captain Cook arrived in New Zealand in 1769, he encountered a native
people fierce in temperament and expert in the arts of war. The
various tribes had no common name for themselves, but in contrast
to their increasingly frequent European visitors, they saw themselves
as normal — "maori" — and the word stuck.
The Maori had
never been peaceful folk and some of them caught on quickly to the
possible opportunities latent in European technology. In 1820, a
Maori named Hongi Hika visited England where he was feted at Cambridge,
received by King George IV, and sent home laden with gifts. He returned
to New Zealand via Australia, where he had thoughtfully exchanged
the English presents for muskets, and then Hongi Hika unleashed
a bloody new kind of warfare among the Maori. Other tribes joined
the arms race, and the later Maori Wars (1845-47, 1860-61, 1863-64,
and 1864-72) pitted land-hungry European colonists against increasingly
sophisticated native opponents. In the last of these wars, a prophet,
Te Ua Haumene, stirred the Maori to a desperate attempt to drive
the Europeans out. He killed his own son to expiate his own lapses
from the Maori way and inspired a fearless group of warriors known
as the Hauhau. Their efforts were soon supplemented by another religiously
inspired guerrilla leader, Te Kooti.
The world goes
round and round; empires cave; and new fanatics arise. The call
to reclaim an imagined past when the culture was supreme and the
religion pure has a long history of its own. In some remote mountain
fastness, some lagoon far up the river, some base camp deep in the
jungle, someone is always plotting to turn back the insults of history.
The Maori,
however, at last learned that armed resistance didn't pay. Te Kooti
laid down his guns and reformulated traditional Maori religion into
a gentler creed called Ringatu, focused on faith healing. Not that
the Maori gave up their resentments toward the thieving Europeans
who took their land by theft, trickery, or main force. Those resentments
have simmered and they now have found a terrifying new expression:
intellectual-property rights.
In May, Solomon
Maui, a lawyer representing a group of Maori, wrote to the Danish
toy company LEGO, protesting LEGO's attempt to patent a new computer
game, "Bionicle," which draws the names of characters
and places from several Polynesian languages. Initially, LEGO rejected
the charge of "cultural and linguistic piracy," and the
company's spokesman, Eva Lykkegaard, argued that "Bionicle"
expressed LEGO's "deep respect for the history of the Polynesian
people."
But LEGO is
now reported to have given up the fight. According to the BBC, the
company has agreed to "stop using Maori words for its hi-tech
toys" and to work with the Maori "to draft guidelines
on how to use traditional knowledge."
The casus
belli, the "Bionicle" game, is based on an imaginary
island, Mata Nui, created by the spirit Mata Nui but now fallen
under the control of his evil brother, Makuta. LEGO released a CD-ROM
version of the game in which the player attempts to guide the six
heroes, the Toa, to overcome the minions of Makuta to liberate Mata
Nui. LEGO also sells kits for building Bioincle toy figures. Tarakava,
a lizard-like swamp creature, is selling on Amazon.com for $49.99.
The Nui-Rama, "giant insect-like creatures," fetch $14.99
a pair. All six of the heroic Toa can be had for $19.99.
Mata Nui does
sound a bit like Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and toa is the
word both for an especially brave Maori warrior and a species of
hardwood tree that grows on many Polynesian islands. The enmity
between brother gods as well as other parts of the "Bionicle"
plot line are pretty much what the lawyer Solomon Maui says they
are: "bits and pieces" of Polynesian culture stuck together
to make a "menagerie of toys."
And it is a
bit difficult to locate in this fantasy that "deep respect
for the history of the Polynesian people" that the company
shill, Eva Lykkegaard, claimed. Rather, the spirit of the LEGO game
is what I would call cultural insouciance. It doesn't aim to derogate
Polynesian gods or to belittle South Sea customs. It simply takes
those as one of the myriad of mythological worlds that humans have
created for themselves, all of which are open for innocent and playful
exploration.
In the dark
world of postmodernist thought, this kind of playfulness is spoken
of as "appropriation" of other cultures and it is held
not to be innocent at all, but rather to be a way of demeaning non-Western
peoples the better to control them. It takes a certain leap of faith
to imagine the LEGO corporation as a sinister arm of Western global
hegemony, but, be assured, we have academics working on the perfected
form of that leap right now. I hear the wheels turning, turning,
turning: Western capitalism transforms Polynesian culture into a
childish commodity to divert attention from (a) atomic testing,
(b) global warming, (c) oppression of native peoples, (d) all of
the above. I'm not making this up. Dr. Rob Wilson, a poet and professor
of English at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, for example, has
inveighed against the "vast global apparatus" of tourism
and worried that, "Recuperation of the Pacific local identity
is perilous [in] these days of late capitalist weather in the globalizing
economy of cash flow and cultural mix."
But LEGO's
venture really is playful, and so is the shrewd Maori effort to
turn Bionicle into a propaganda victory for the "rights of
indigenous peoples." The Danish toymakers and the Maori activists
are about equal in their clever reshuffling of the past to create
fictions for the present. LEGO probably thought to draw on the numerous
positive associations the West has with aboriginal Polynesian cultures.
It clearly did not intend to evoke any of the grimmer views of Polynesian
life that are also part of the historical record, such as Marquesan
cannibalism or, for that matter, Maori headhunting. For their part,
the Maori activists must have adopted a certain creative obtuseness
to think that Bionicle really "infringed" Maori rights
to their "language and culture."
What the Maori
really aimed for, they achieved: publicity for their 1993 Mataatua
Declaration claiming broad legal protection for "the intellectual
and cultural property rights of indigenous peoples." The Mataatua
Declaration is rattling around the U.N. and other international
bodies and bodes much mischief to come. I suspect the spirit of
Hongi Hika, who exchanged those English gifts for muskets and powder,
is smiling on his descendents. In the toy wars, they've won a big
one.
And, in a roundabout
way, the Maori have made their peace with globalization. They are
"normal" now in the new sense of acting like any other
interest group that pays itself in the lighter-than-air coinage
of symbolic victimhood. To be the self-declared victim of a mild-mannered
toy company may seem a small thing when your ancestors trounced
British armies and fought colonial militias to a standstill, but
times change. I look forward to the day when the descendants of
Pashtun warlords too are griping about intellectual-property rights.
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