Of tourism and tradition

Tourism and conservation are two of the big issues of the day for every country and all peoples, especially those of us fortunate enough to live in the Pacific.

We need the tourists. For many smaller nations they are the principal contributors to the economy. Even for bigger countries, they are of enormous and growing economic importance.

A combination of factors is ex

panding worldwide tourism. Rising

standards of living in many countries and cheaper airfares mean more people can afford to travel. Over crowding and pollution in their own countries make our part of the world, which remains comparatively free of some of the worst environmental degradation of modern-day life, an increasingly attractive destination.

But the more tourists there are to admire the natural wonders of the Pacific and its clean and green environment, the greater the risk that their very numbers will ruin what they have come to see.

Maintaining a balance to preserve the region’s natural state for today’s tourists and future generations is the challenge for all of us.

It is a challenge that poses its own dilemma, especially for the indigenous peoples of the Pacific how to cash in on a tourist boom and enhance their economic positions while preserving a traditional way of life and conserving the natural resources that are integral to it.

No race understands this dilemma better than New Zealand’s Maori. The number of overseas tourists visiting New Zealand has now topped one million a year. The Tourism Board has set a target of three million visitors annually by the year 2000 that means an extra 158,000 visitors every day in the peak season.

Board research in overseas markets shows that apart from New Zealand’s mountains, parks, rivers, lakes and beaches, the unique culture of the Maori is a major drawcard for foreign tourists. Yet apart from Rotorua, Maori have traditionally had very little involvement in tourism, mainly because they lacked business expertise.

This is changing. As Maori strive to develop a commercial aspect to lift their role in the economy, they are moving into hotels and other tourist areas. The Aotearoa Maori Tourism Federation has acquiried 140 members and is trying to co-ordinate a national network of Maori tourist operators.

“Overseas tourists want to experience New Zealand’s unique indigenous culture rather than just whizz by in a bus,” says the federation’s general manager Arihia Carrington.

Pakeha New Zealanders have never been slow to exploit this indigenous culture in promotion and advertising often in ways that drew Maori disapproval. There was a time when foreigners could have been excused for thinking, by the posters and videos they saw, that New Zealand existed solely

Wellington

of flax-skirted Maori jumping in and out of steaming pools.

We have matured somewhat since then, and our promotion efforts are more sophisticated. But Maori still have difficulty agree ing on just how they fit into the tourism environment beyond pro viding the basic concert party entertainment which remains their primary involvement.

There is a cultural divide

which hampers the development

of a Maori role. Tourism, tramp ing and the like are pakeha, not Maori, pursuits. “Maori, for ex ample,” one explained, “do not go to the beach to lie on the sand and sunbathe. We go there to get seafood.”

As more and more visitors want to experience adventure tourism, in the form of wilderness tramping, white-water rafting, hunting and fishing, conservation issues are of growing importance.

It is increasingly vital to protect the land and this requires conservation controls that often conflict with Maori practice and belief. (Maori tend to look askance at pakeha claims to be the conservationists when they are the tangata whenua, or people of the land, and it was not them who began clearing the bush in the last century to introduce pasture

farming.)

The bush, the mountains, rivers, lakes and the coast, which pakeha profess to be so concerned about preserving, are at the heart of Maoritanga, and conservation highlights a fundamental conflict between the two cultures.

This is summed up by one Maori as: “The pakeha attitude is that the land belongs to you. But to Maori, you belong to the land. Your identity as a Maori over many generations is written on the landscape and will be there for a long time after you are gone.”

As a result, Maori find it difficult to accept conservation measures that, for instance, require them to get passes to walk on their tribal lands which have become national parks. An added irony is that in some cases the parks were donated to the nation by Maori.

Piri Sciascia, an assistant director-general with the Department of Conservation, tells another story which illustrates the kind of cultural differences that hinder full Maori involvement in tourist development.

The department gives a commercial concession allowing skiing at Whakapapa in the Urewa National Park in the central North Island. But in Maori eyes, the mountain belongs to the Ngati tu Wharetoa people and Maori tradition says you do not visit another tribe’s land without an invitation.

Sciascia says he was middle-aged before he could bring himself to take his family skiing on the mountain. “I was waiting to be invited and in the end I had to become a pakeha to go there without an invitation.”

David

Barber