A White-looking Bridegroom Performing Haka in his Wedding

The performance of haka by non-Maori people has always been a controversial phenomenon for decades. Recently, my Indigenous roommate introduced me to watch the video - a video about a white-looking bridegroom performing haka in his wedding with his Maori bride suddenly attracted me.

Here the Pakeha culture represented by the white-looking bridegroom and the Maori culture, represented by the Maori bride, are fused.

In the video, the haka is firstly performed by a majority of Maori guys wearing western suits; then, the white bridegroom joined the performance.

In the social and cultural level, “Pākehā culture may be the national culture in terms of

providing the pervasive, common-sense underpinnings for the ordering of social life, but Māori culture is the national culture when distinctiveness and ethnic exoticism is called for”, from Woodward's lecture.

From my point of view, the bridegroom's performance is a kind of reaction to the Maori community. He is showing his willingness for accepting the Maori culture. He is respecting the Maori way of life. The video ends by showing their hugs and the ritual of Hongi.

The power of this ritual – haka is significant. The bride was crying in the video. She said in another video which showed the Maori perspectives toward haka, that she cried just because she felt the strong power of the ritual. Even to me, a traditional Asian girl, with rare indigenous knowledge before coming to New Zealand, was feeling enthusiastic when I watching the haka. It is just fascinating. It can be seen as a symbol of culture and it is just like the Spanish flamenco dance.

From my personal thought, the reason why she was crying also lies on the transition for her from her original Maori family to a new, white family.

The content of this video, in my opinion, fits into the point suggested in the lecture, “the hybrid postcolonial subject resists assimilation into the dominant culture but no longer completely inhabits a pristinely indigenous pre-colonial world”. The society needs to be developed, so does the issue of race. The culture will be hybridised and this is the first step to do it. Media has the power to disseminate the ideology of respecting and accepting the culture of indigenous even the minority group. As this video was published on youtube, it has the function to influence people with their thoughts toward the issue of Maori and Pakeha relation, and to promote the harmony between them.

Sources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KACrV4MUUz0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h9Sr6fzGQM

Woodward, Suzanne. "Pakehaness/whiteness in Aotearoa NZ." FTVMS 325. The University of Auckland. 29 Apr. 2016. Lecture.

Woodward, Suzanne. "Postcolonialism." FTVMS 325. The University of Auckland. 6 May. 2016. Lecture.