Takātapui

Scholars and activists Ngahuia Te Awekotuku and Elizabeth Kerekere speak with Melody Thomas about what sex, sexuality and gender looked like in Te Ao Maori prior to colonisation, plus Rosanna Raymond shares a Pacific perspective, and we meet non-binary Auckland teenager Kahi.

Despite spending more than a year learning about sex, sexuality and relationships in Aotearoa - until recently, I knew very little about pre-colonial Māori perspectives on these things. I'd have more easily defined the indigenous North American term "two-spirit" than our own takatāpui.

For this episode of BANG! I spoke with scholars and activists Emeritus Professor Ngahuia Te Awekotuku and Dr Elizabeth Kerekere about why old stories illustrating diverse sexualities and gender expressions in Te Ao Māori aren't better known by all.

For most of the 20th century, the question of pre-colonial Māori attitudes towards homosexuality and other non-binary genders and sexualities had only one answer.

A typical comment came from the 1970s vocal psychiatrist L. Gluckman, as quoted in Sexuallity & the Stories of Indigenous People:

"Homosexuality in both male and female was unknown in early New Zealand. Sexual perversion in the modern Māori is culturally determined by current social, economic and environmental pressures."

This was mainstream view - Māori were free of "perversions" until they were introduced by Europeans.

But in the 1970s there was a challenge to that mainstream view.

In that decade, Ngahuia Awekotuku was one of two people to stumble upon the word "takatāpui" - an ancient term defined as "an intimate companion of the same sex" which had fallen into a long period of disuse.

Takatāpui was reclaimed by Māori in lesbian, gay and trans communities in the 80s. In recent years its' definition has expanded to encompass all tāngata whenua with diverse gender identities, sexualities, and sex characteristics - similar to the way the word 'queer' is used now.

But for Te Awekotuku the word has greater significance: the fact that it predates European arrival in Aotearoa is a clue.

"In the world that existed before Tasman, Cook and the arrival of outsiders, I believe there was a really robust and vigorous and intense exploration of sexualities, and an acceptance of them," she says.

Te Awekotuku believes the arrival of European settlers and later missionaries, meant behaviours which had been entirely acceptable were suddenly cast in a deviant light.

"Whatever Christianity may have brought to the Māori world which was good and wholesome and proper and acceptable, it also brought a great deal of pain and a lot of judgement," she says…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details