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Given that the entire value of Treaty settlements over the last twenty-five years would cover superannuation payments for only two months, it feels like the redress sought by Prince … can never and will never account for everything we have lost.
Diane Prince’s Flagging the Future: Te Kiritangata – The Last Palisade (1995), from the exhibition Korurangi: New Māori Art at Auckland City Art Gallery, will forever have a profound significance for me. Prince (Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Whātua, Ngāti Kahu) is a multidisciplinary artist, weaver, writer, activist and educator. She was also a researcher for the Bastion Point land occupation in 1977–78 and, together with her then partner, the late Dun Mihaka, played a huge part in a number of struggles for land and sovereignty.
I first learnt of Flagging the Future: Te Kiritangata – The Last Palisade during a kōrero between Robert Leonard, Megan Tamati-Quennell (Te Āti Awa, Ngāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Waitaha) and the curator of Korurangi, George Hubbard (Ngāti Kurī, Te Aupōuri, Te Rarawa), at the Tai Ahiahi///Tai Awatea: Curating Contemporary Māori Art symposium a few years ago, in 2017. Flagging the Future was a mixed-media installation work featuring weaving, found objects, dried kōrari, or harakeke flowers, and had a New Zealand flag lying on the floor, stencilled with the words ‘Please walk on me’. The work was paired with Emily Karaka’s painting Te Uri o Te Ao (1995), which was hung on a wall behind Prince’s installation, with the words ‘This is Māori Land’ inscribed along the top. Although both works echoed each other and the mamae within Māori communities over the loss and confiscation of Māori land by the Crown over the last century, Flagging the Future was a specific critique of the fourth National Government under Jim Bolger, whose ‘fiscal envelope’ policies proposed to cap all Māori land settlements at $1 billion.
The invitation to stand on the flag was one that many visitors accepted, while others were outraged and offended. Talkback radio at the time heightened the outrage and one visitor laid a formal complaint with the police. The gallery was advised that the work was in breach of the Flags, Emblems and Names Protection Act (1983) and were told the flag would need to be removed, or the gallery and artist could face prosecution. After consultation with Prince, it was decided that the entire work be removed; this was seen as censorship by the art community. Prince saw herself first and foremost as an activist and has stated, “I am not an artist. The flag is just a protest work suitable for display.” The controversy surrounding the work overshadowed the complexity of Prince’s work and the work of numerous other Māori artists in the show, reducing the impact of one of the first major shows of contemporary Māori art in this country.
I think about this work often and wonder what would happen if it was shown now. I never got to see it, as I was around five years old and living in Australia when the exhibition was on. While so much has changed within our society since 1995, if many of the racist talking-points emerging from the last election are anything to go by, it would seem that we still have a long way to go. Given that the entire value of Treaty settlements over the last twenty-five years would cover superannuation payments for only two months, it feels like the redress sought by Prince and many of her peers and comrades can never and will never account for everything we have lost. I often wonder whether contemporary art is even a place where we can have these kinds of discussions around the ongoing effects of our colonial history and what kind of relationship could continue to grow between tangata tiriti and tangata whenua, or whether it will just stagnate and continue to reflect the very worst aspects of who we are as a nation. The best way to think it through is with words, so I turn to the late Moana Jackson: “There’s a lot of talk about settling the Treaty, but treaties aren’t meant to be settled, they’re meant to be honoured.”
Hana Pera Aoake (Ngaati Hinerangi, Ngaati Mahuta, Tainui/Waikato, Ngaati Waewae) is an artist and writer based in Kawerau.
Header image: Diane Prince, Flagging the Future: Te Kiritangata – The Last Palisade, 1995. Installation view, Korurangi: New Māori Art, Auckland City Art Gallery, 1995. Courtesy of Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki and the E H McCormick Research Library
