Tāme Iti says he has been an artist all his life, he just didn't realise it. Photo / Alan Gibson
So much has been seen and heard about Tāme Iti in the past 50 years, it is difficult to discern who needs whom more.
Perhaps he is addicted to publicity – but no more than the media and the public are addicted to stories about him, the artist activist.
It is as though he is living his life as one continuous show, a bit like a Tūhoe version of The Truman Show.
The Herald’s electronic photo library has about 600 photos of him at various events, protests, court cases, hui, commemorations – with all manner of people.
In one, at the turn of this century in Suva, Iti is pictured alongside Fiji coup leader George Speight outside the Parliament.
The story was being covered for the Herald at the time by a talented young reporter, Eugene Bingham, who was based in the press gallery.
Now Iti has teamed up with Bingham, and Iti’s son Toi Kai Rākau Iti, to produce a very readable biography, Mana, the written record of what has been a 73-year performance.
The book adds delicious detail to some already well-known events, such as the disappearance of the Colin McCahon painting from the Waikaremoana visitor centre, and one of Iti’s earliest protests – the tent embassy he set up on Parliament grounds in 1972 as part of the Ngā Tamatoa group.
Iti got there first and set up the tent when he was disturbed by a parliamentary security guard. Iti made his excuses and said he had to go and see the MP Matiu Rata. Reception staff said he couldn’t see Rata yet.
“What should I do next? What’s my next move? I thought. Turning back to the staff at the reception, I said: ‘Where’s the Minister of Māori Affairs’ office?’
“‘It’s down that way, but you can’t just go and see him, you need an appointment,’ they said.
“I waited for a bit, and then I just went for a walk, looking around. Next thing I see a sign on a door – ‘Honourable Duncan MacIntyre’. He was the Māori Affairs Minister. So I went in.
“He was sitting there, smoking his pipe, an old koroua Pākehā. He looked like he’d seen a ghost when I walked in. I told him, ‘I’m Tāme Iti, the Māori Ambassador. I’m having trouble with your security outside. Can you deal with it?’
“He just looked at me, stunned, but polite enough. I didn’t stay long – just made my point and left.”
He returned outside, but by then the police and media had turned up. Rata arrived just as Iti was being thrown into the paddy wagon. He got off because the police had removed him without the Speaker’s authority and Ngā Tamatoa spent a further six months camped at Parliament.
“That day, Parliament wasn’t their space any more,” Iti says. “It became ours. That’s what activism is about – walking the fine line between the physical and spiritual, standing tall for what’s right.
“It’s not just a fight; it’s a performance. You’re on stage, carrying your mana, and you’ve got to make it real. They’ve got their rules, and we’ve got ours. And that’s how we stand. That’s how we hold our ground.”
Tāme Iti’s life has been full of drama, from the moment he was born on the floor of a railway carriage when his mother was travelling from Hamilton to Rotorua.
At the age of 2, he was taken to the rural village of Ruatoki on the edge of Te Urewera and left in a nail box on a kitchen table, at the home of Te Pēku and Hukarere Purewa.
They were dairy farmers and had raised Iti’s birth father as a whāngai.
Ruatoki in those days was a bustling village with 12 marae, a school, a cheese factory, rugby grounds, tennis courts and a post office.
Māori was Iti’s primary language to the extent that when he left home at 16 to go to a trades training course in painting and decorating in Christchurch, he took lessons from a Pākeha woman to improve his English.
Hukarere – or the old lady as he refers to her - had been a teacher and was a prolific letter writer. She kept him informed of the goings-on in Ruatoki and the farm in beautifully written letters in te reo Māori. But regretfully, he never kept them. He was deeply fond of her.
Te Pēku – or the old man – was as tough as they come, by the sounds of it. “He could talk to you and punch you at the same time.” Iti acquired a loathing for milking cows in his childhood, but he also acquired a sense of style from Te Pēku.
“The old man, Te Pēku, was fashionable,” says Iti. “A lot of the time he was just in his gumboots on the farm. But when he wasn’t dressed like that, he was immaculate – crisp, clean shirts, pressed straight creases, fitting trousers and jacket.
“It made an impression on me. Since those days, I’ve always liked the feel of what I’m wearing, what it says, and put a lot of thought into it. Whether that’s on the marae atea, out the front of a hīkoi – or, like I was then, on the journey to a new life.”
The local river in Ruatoki was Ōhinemataroa, the site of a short, sharp and effective sole protest by Iti, who couldn’t stand the intrusion of jet boat races that had been going on for years.
He chopped down a poplar tree, hoping it would fall into the river and block the way, but it fell on to the bank.
“That’s when it hit me: ‘I’ll stand in the river myself. Right there, where the water’s shallow, pāpaku.’ In other parts of the river, the boats could choose which path to take, but where I was thinking, there was no choice. It was the narrowest part of the river, just deep enough to come up to my puku. There was no way around it – if they wanted to race, they’d have to deal with me standing in their path.
“I waded out into the middle of the river, my focus on the spot I’d chosen, the narrow channel where the boats had to go. I stood there, letting the water flow around me, and waited. There was a bridge nearby where people were gathering to watch the races.”
He heard the boat before he could see it, and then it came around the bend, and the driver spotted him.
“As he got closer, he had only two options: hit me or hit the trees on the bank.
“Then, at the last moment, the driver swerved, careening the boat straight into the willow trees along the bank.
“I climbed out of the river, soaking wet, breathing hard, but feeling like I’d made my point.”
The jet-boat crew were furious. They got into a big row with Iti.
“But I wasn’t taking his bullshit. ‘Koinā tō koutou mate, tō koutou whakahīhī,’ I said. Their downfall was arrogance – the arrogance to think they could come and race wherever they wanted, right in our backyard, on our awa.”
The book is not entirely old war stories by an OG. Tāme Iti also reveals some shameful parts of his life, particularly the violence towards his wife Ann Fletcher, an Australian woman he was married to for six years. They had two sons, Wairere, born in 1973, and Toi Kai Rākau, born in 1976.
“My kids’ mum and I were not of the same world, and the clashes, when they happened, were not good,” he says.
“There was violence. Again. This violence I deeply regret. I was violent against the mother of my children. I think it’s important to try to reconcile these parts of one’s life. Not to make out that you’ve never done things that don’t uphold your mana or the image that the world might hold of you.
“I’ve apologised to my boys’ mother for my violence. It was not okay and not fair on her. Not fair on her mana. I’m not sure if she’s ever forgiven me, and I understand that.
“Since then, I have never repeated that behaviour with a wahine – not saying that violence didn’t feature in my life again, just not in that way.
“I sought out help and did a lot of work. Part of that mahi is knowing that you can never take it back. You must accept it as a part of your story. Heoi, koirā te kōrero.”
After working in the mill at Kawerau for about six years, he returned to Ruatoki, where he effectively became a social worker, working with young people, people with addictions, and violent families. And he gave up drinking in 1986.
There are two big events with which Iti is most famously associated: the 2007 police raids and charges under the Terrorism Suppression Act for running camps in the Urewera, and the disappearance of the Colin McCahon triptych from the Āniwaniwa visitor centre, run by the Department of Conservation at Lake Waikaremoana.
The former is not dealt with in any great length in the book, and much of it is already on the public record. Charges under the Terrorism Act were dropped, and of the 17 people initially arrested, four went to trial on weapons charges. Iti served nine months in Waikeria Prison at the age of 60. The police under Commissioner Mike Bush eventually apologised for the raids and paid compensation to the families affected.
But Iti’s version of the events around the McCahon painting is a revelation, and while someone was convicted for it, the book makes it clear it was Iti’s idea.
“It’s time for me to share some of my kōrero,” he says. “Because what unfolded was huge, and stressful, and meaningful, and took some twists I had never expected. And what was most important was the kaupapa.”
The three pieces, each one 1.8m wide by 2.1m tall, had been commissioned for the centre by the Urewera National Parks Board in 1974. He was visiting the centre in 1997 when he got a funny feeling in his stomach.
“A thought came into my head: ‘I want this painting to disappear. I want it to vanish.’ My whakaaro was that I could use the painting to make a statement: the Crown stole our land, whenua whānako, so maybe if they lose this painting, they will feel a tiny fraction of what it’s like to lose something precious. I wanted them to think: ‘This is how it feels to have a taonga tuku iho taken from me.’ Make them understand. From there, a plan started formulating.
“As I drove back to Ruatoki, planning away, there were aspects I wasn’t sure about, and aspects I definitely was sure about: no one was to get hurt, and no harming the artwork. ‘Get in, get the painting, get out. That’s it. Just make it disappear. No violence.’
“It was never about anything other than the whenua. It wasn’t a criminal act – it was a political one.”
He discussed it with a few guys separately, and one of them, a close associate, begged Iti to let him do it.
The painting, which was valued at $2 million, was taken on June 5, 1997, about 4am, “which was good because no one was around to get hurt”.
Detective Inspector Graham Bell, who died recently, was running the painting inquiry and put plenty of heat on Iti. Merata Mita, the filmmaker, eventually passed on a message to Iti that the artist Ralph Hotere wanted to see him. Hotere’s message was that the arts patron Jenny Gibbs wanted to talk to him about the painting.
“So, that’s how the fulla who’d done the job and I ended up standing on the front doorstep of a mansion on Paritai Drive, a road of multimillion-dollar homes overlooking the Waitematā.
“Jenny told me she had a big collection of McCahon paintings, and then she said: ‘Somebody told me that if anybody knows where the painting is, it will be Tāme Iti.’ ‘Oh yeah, okay,’ I said, straight-faced.
“I wasn’t going to let on I knew anything. Once more, I was playing a role; I was on a stage. I had a performance planned, and now was the time to act.
“Jenny made a cup of tea, and we went downstairs to another part of the house. She showed me some of her art collection, and then we sat down to talk. We spoke for three and a half hours.”
Iti felt her thinking had shifted from the painting to the cause.
Discussions continued over ways to make the whole exercise about 60,000 acres (24,281ha) of stolen land, not 12 square metres of art.
“Eventually, after 15 months, the time arrived. The painting had moved. It was in Auckland. We had a codename for it, ‘Whāriki’, a mat. I liked the idea of a kuia Pākehā handing it back.
“We arranged for Jenny to hop in her car, a $300,000 Mercedes-Benz, and cover her eyes. We drove her to a secret location, put the ‘Whāriki’ in the back of the car, and then we disappeared. She took it to the Auckland Art Gallery.
“It was a relief, in the end, that we no longer had it. It had been heavy. It was time for the ‘Whāriki’ to come out of the mist, ki Te Ao Mārama. It had done its job.”
It had provoked a conversation and made people think about value, the value of the painting and all the hours of police spent hunting it down, and the value of the stolen land.
“What efforts were being put into righting that?”
In 2015, the Urewera Mural was put on display at Te Kura Whare in Tāneatua, the base for Te Uru Taumata, Ngai Tūhoe.
In 1998, Tūhoe activist Te Kaha was given a 15-month suspended prison sentence and ordered to do 200 hours of community service at the Auckland City Art Gallery.
One of the most uplifting parts of the Tāme Iti book is the description of a collaborative performance in Whakatāne with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra (NZSO), Iti’s whānau group Te Mira, and the tertiary education provider Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi.
Its genesis was Iti’s meeting in the Koru Lounge in Wellington with Peter Biggs, the CEO at the time of the NZSO.
“Nice fulla, Biggsy. I told him I was into classical music, I liked to paint to it. That and house music. Sometimes jazz. We had a good kōrero, so I said to him, ‘We should do something together, make some art.’”
They swapped numbers, and Biggs rang him six months later.
Iti insisted it be the NZSO entering the Māori world and not the other way round. It developed over a couple of years into a 70-minute performance telling the story of the Mātaatua waka with an original orchestral score with the help of Laughton Kora, Mahuia, Bridgman-Cooper and Maisey Rika. It included reworkings of old tribal songs and chants of resistance.
“I had grown up with these songs, sung them over and over,” says Iti. “They’re living histories told across generations. Having the Western art form of orchestral music bring its magic to these deeply held works was just amazing.
“The arrangement opened up a whole other universe of emotion and narrative. They became vast, expansive worlds: surging oceans of aroha and tidal currents of loss; stormy swells of sorrow clearing to gentle cadences of hope; thundering, percussive rhythms of persistence; and sweeping, howling gales of lament.”
It was performed on an outdoor stage at the landing place of the Mātaatuta waka on December 9, 2023, on the fourth anniversary of the Whakaari White Island eruption.
Three thousand people turned out and were transfixed by the spectacle, he said.
“I thanked Biggsy. For trusting us to look after them and for the cultural exchange. He thanked me for allowing him and the orchestra to come into our world, to sit amongst us and to share our stories and craft.”
Tāme Iti has always loved drawing, but he didn’t start painting seriously until the 1990s, with encouragement from a former cop, Chaz Doherty.
These days, he says he has been an artist all his life – he just didn’t realise it.
“Art doesn’t have to be grand and bold and big. It doesn’t have to be on a wall or a stage. It can be found in activism.
“I know what I like and what I stand for. I’ve grown older, and I’m a different person now than I was before. He tangata rerekē ahau – I’m not the same person I was 40, 50, 60 years ago. Of course I’m not. I’m the Tāme Iti of today. That’s who I am. I live mana motuhake.
“I have my beliefs, and I stick to them. I believe in my hapū, and I believe in my iwi.
“For me, what I want to do is create a world – not a Tāme Iti world – but a world where we can embrace and enjoy our differences. Art helps me do that. We don’t all have to agree on everything, but we can enjoy moments of debate and arguments, we can kōrero and wānanga. That’s how we navigate and build connections.”
Mana by Tāme Iti, published by Allen & Unwin Aotearoa New Zealand. RRP $49.99. Out now.