Table of Contents
As in many Polynesian communities Cook Islander social networks are truly transnational. In 2006 only 12,000 Cook Islanders lived within the nation-state, approximately 58,000 Cook Islanders live in New Zealand and an estimated 8,000 in Australia (Cook Islands Statistics 2006; Statistics New Zealand 2006). Familial and community relationships are maintained through frequent phone calls, emails and travel back to the home islands for important occasions such as weddings and funerals, religious celebrations and sports competitions. The mobility of Cook Islanders who reside within the nation-state is also evident in the frequent travel undertaken for business purposes. Government employees and members of non-government organisations regularly travel to regional meetings and conferences. Tourism operators take dance groups on promotion tours to Europe and North America, and business entrepreneurs travel internationally to attract investment in agricultural and tourism projects.
In this paper, the term ‘transnationalism’ is used to refer to the increasing mobility of people, goods, information and technologies that characterises globalisation (Appadurai 1996; Kennedy and Roudometof 2002; Werbner 1999). I focus particularly on the ways in which social networks are sustained beyond the nation-state and maintained across multiple geographical sites, in order to argue that Cook Islanders, like many other diasporic communities, have responded to these global forces in a distinctly local manner (for other Pacific examples, see King and Connell 1999; Lee 2003; Macpherson 2004; Spickard 2002; Spoonley 2001, 2003). This paper examines a local style of travel called tere pati (literally travelling party), which involves large groups of individuals from extended family, church, village and island organisations undertaking travel to other Cook Islands communities.[1] Prior to European contact, tere pati were undertaken to neighbouring islands to forge and maintain social, economic and political ties. The increasing emigration of Cook Islanders has meant that the routes tere pati take have expanded to include diasporic communities abroad.
Guarnizo and Smith remind us that transnational relationships and actions must be grounded in specific times and places: ‘Transnational practices, while connecting collectivities located in more than one national territory, are embodied in specific social relations established between specific people, situated in unequivocal localities, at historically determined times’ (Guarnizo and Smith 1998, 11).
This paper examines the specificities of Cook Islands transnationalism in a number of ways. In the first section, I provide background to the contemporary Cook Islands diaspora and the influence of missionisation, colonisation and global forces on the movements of Cook Islands people. This is followed by an overview of the structure and purpose of tere pati, focussing on the economic, political, affective and aesthetic components of this travel. To conclude, I analyse a particular tere pati that involved groups travelling from New Zealand and Melbourne to the island of Aitutaki. This case study illustrates the ways in which this tere pati, as transnational practice, reproduces Cook Islanders’ relationships.
Throughout the paper, I examine the successful maintenance of ties across the Cook Islands diaspora, however I do not want to suggest that this represents the totality of Cook Islanders experience of transnationalism. Understanding the efforts that Cook Islanders put into preserving connections to their home islands and other communities abroad is important to an understanding of transnationalism. Yet accompanying these practices of conservation are experiences of displacement and alienation that shape the lives of migrant groups in foreign countries. Additionally, Cook Islanders who remain at home keenly experience the results of emigration as loss—mainly of young, vital members of the islands—and as lack of opportunities and of income-generating possibilities for those that remain.
Over half of the Cook Islands residential population, around 9,000, live on the island of Rarotonga, the administrative capital of the group. The remainder of the population, approximately 3,000 people, are scattered across the 11 inhabited ‘outer islands’. From the late 19th century, there has been a steady movement from these outer islands to Rarotonga and onwards. The movement was primarily economically motivated, spurred by the introduction of foreign trade and commerce during British and New Zealand colonial rule (1888–1965). After World War II, Cook Islanders, along with other Pacific Island migrants, provided labour for New Zealand’s urban manufacturing sector (Appleyard and Stahl 1995; Connell 2002; Spoonley, Bedford and Macpherson 2003) and the flow of migrants to New Zealand and beyond has increased steadily since the Cook Islands achieved independence in ‘free-association’ with New Zealand in 1965. This relationship means—among other things—that Cook Islanders have dual citizenship, enabling automatic entry into New Zealand.
Cook Islanders now migrate for a variety of reasons; higher incomes, education and training opportunities are the principal motivations (see Wright-Koteka 2006 for an in-depth overview). Since the late 1990s, when the Cook Islands government introduced a neoliberal economic reform program, many have had little choice but to migrate. The economic restructuring involved halving public service employment and the removal of government subsidies for basic goods and services. While some retrenched public servants relocated into tourism, the Cook Islands main industry, approximately six to eight thousand Cook Islanders have left in search of employment (Secretariat of the Pacific Community 2005).
Like many small Pacific nations, the Cook Islands have been described as a MIRAB economy (Migration, Remittances, Aid, Bureaucracy) (Bertram 1999; Denoon, Mein-Smith and Wyndham 2000, 402; Poirine 1998). Certainly, migration figures attest to this characterisation, as do remittance figures. An NZODA (New Zealand Overseas Development Agency) report stated that money sent home from New Zealand totalled NZ $2.5 million in 1986 (1997, 19).[2] This figure only includes money sent home (via money transfer services); it does not include money taken home as gifts. Nor does it include money spent by overseas Cook Islanders on airfares for kin, reverse charge phone calls from kin, or the cost of transporting items requested from home. Inclusion of these expenses would make remittance figures significantly higher (Loomis 1990a, 1990b).
While the assessment of MIRAB economies as inefficient welfare systems dominates aid policy research, there is a developing body of research that seeks to challenge this assumption through an examination of the worldviews of Pacific Islanders and their understandings of economic and social security (Hau’ofa 1994; Poirine 1998). Poirine (1998), for instance, suggests that the MIRAB system is actually a rational, stable and sustainable system (far more sustainable than the agricultural export and tourist industries), involving a complex system of loans across transnational family groups. As the introduction of economic reforms in the Cook Islands resulted in a decline in aid and the privatisation of government bureaucracies, remittances and migration have played increasingly central roles assisting those who reside within the nation-state.[3]
As I demonstrate below, a central aspect of tere pati is the exchange of money and goods between travelling and hosting parties, and as such can be viewed as an integral aspect of Cook Islands remittances. But while economic transactions play an important role, transactions that take place during tere pati cannot be reduced simply to economics. Helen Lee (2004, 138; this volume) makes the important point that the concept of transnationalism has been utilised in the Pacific primarily to understand economic relationships of diasporic communities and further, that this focus ignores other aspects of social relations. Following her insight, I argue that transnational relationships operate in multiple registers; they have economic, aesthetic, political and affective dimensions, and in order to grasp their significance one needs to explore these enmeshed components.
[1] The usual spelling of the phrase is tere party. I once saw a shipping crate on Aitutaki with the words ‘Aitutaki tere pati’ written in red paint; pati is a Maorification of the word party. I also adopt this spelling. The Samoan equivalent is called malaga and the Tongan version malanga.
[2] More recent figures are not, to my knowledge, available at the time of writing.
[3] The movement of money is not always from the nation-state to communities abroad. The island of Manihiki had a prosperous pearl industry during the 1990s and money was regularly remitted from this island to relatives living overseas (see Marsters, Lewis and Friesen 2006; Newnham 1989). For an important overview of remittances in the Pacific see Connell and Brown (2005).