Toy Wars
Just another victim.

hen 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.