Hoturoa Barclay-Kerr

Master waka navigator

From his earliest memories, his uncles and aunties called him ‘‘Captain’’. Hoturoa Barclay-Kerr’s name was chosen by a Waikato kauma¯ tua – the legacy of Hoturoa, who captained the Tainui canoe from Hawaiki to Whangapara¯ oa, and on to Kawhia. But it must have seemed like a name that had lost its purpose.

While his parents sat in meetings at

Tu¯ rangawaewae Marae, a young Barclay-Kerr would wander down to the big shed beside the Waikato River and play on the old waka taua, or war canoes. He would dream about their great journeys bearing his tu¯ puna, or ancestors, across the ocean.

But instead of gathering new adventures, the canoes were gathering dust and decrepitude, as those with the knowledge to build and paddle them gathered wrinkles and tangi invites.

When one waka, Te Winika, was restored to appear in the 1971 Auckland Anniversary Regatta, Barclay-Kerr’s dad bundled his 10-year-old son into the car to witness it.

‘‘He said ‘We’ve got to go and watch this, because this could be the last time you ever see this happen in New Zealand’.’’

For the first time, Barclay-Kerr watched a waka slide through the water. It stirred something in him. So when that regatta appearance spurred a waka renaissance, Barclay-Kerr jumped aboard at every chance, even if it meant just sitting there emptying a bucket.

It wasn’t until he saw a film about the launch of the first voyaging canoe built in Hawaii for hundreds of years – a double-hulled sailing canoe – that he realised his vision of his ancestors arriving on the great war canoes could never have happened.

‘‘For me it was like a real bolt from the blue. I lived in this romanticised notion of how our tu¯ puna came here. The only images I had ever had of waka were these big things people paddled up and down the river.

‘‘When I saw the sailing canoe being launched it suddenly hit me – yeah, actually, you could never paddle a waka taua from Hawaiki to here, you just can’t do it. So I thought ‘Yeah, one day, I’m going to try and get on this canoe’.’’

Silvered hair pulled back in a ponytail, gentle eyes caged in creases, BarclayKerr sips kawakawa tea – tonic for his rugged cold.

The 59-year-old is in Wellington to talk Tuia 250, the commemoration of Captain Cook’s arrival in New Zealand in 1769. He’s been made the project’s co-chairman, because he did much more than just get on that Hawaiian canoe. He turned the knowledge of his ancestors into reality, and now captains his own voyaging canoe, the 22m Haunui, with a crew of 14.

When they first asked him to sail his waka as part of the Cook commemorations, BarclayKerr said no. ‘‘We weren’t that interested in being a cheerleading flotilla for the Endeavour

. . . The pain of some of those encounters is still being endured by some iwi.’’

They asked what would change his mind. Changing the narrative, he said. While everyone knows Cook’s version of events – the view from the water – he wanted to give Ma¯ ori the chance to tell their stories from the beach, such as the very first contact between Cook and Ma¯ ori, in Gisborne, which ended in death.

‘‘The descendants of the first victim of that encounter have never really had a platform to talk about it. So nobody knows much about it, other than records in Cook’s journal that say the boys killed somebody on the beach. For them, their tu¯ puna, who had lots of other skills

and his own mana for what he did amongst the iwi, has been consigned to history as this savage who was shot on the beach.’’

For Barclay-Kerr, it’s a new take on an old theme. He’s spent a lifetime honouring his tu¯ puna.

While European explorers were hailed heroes for finding foreign shores, Ma¯ ori were depicted as emaciated and helpless arrivals, apparently carried by rogue winds or currents while out fishing. So Barclay-Kerr set out to prove that it was knowledge, not luck, that carried his ancestors to Aotearoa.

Having spent his first six years in Tu¯ hoe country, Barclay-Kerr grew up steeped in Ma¯ ori language and culture. His father, Wharetoroa Kerr, was headmaster at Ru¯ a¯ toki District High School.

They spoke only Ma¯ ori at home, so when Barclay-Kerr moved to Auckland with his mother Ngarungatapu, also a teacher, he spoke little English.

Weekends were spent in Waikato, where his parents were involved with

Tu¯ rangawaewae Marae. As the waka revival flourished, little Captain grew into his name.

By 13 or 14 he was learning to paddle the waka; by 17 he was running his own canoe.

And finally, he travelled to Hawaii to learn the art of voyaging canoes. He learned navigation from master Mao Piailug and his disciples – to understand when and where stars rise and set, to determine direction; to learn to estimate speed to determine distance; to understand the way swell and currents tug at a straight course; to hold – and trust in – knowledge passed down over centuries.

‘‘A voyaging canoe shows the ability to maintain and hold knowledge that is centuries old.’’

It’s a skill that won him a Te Waka Toi arts award in 2016. But is it art or science?

‘‘For me, art and science is just culture. All of that is what falls into my basket of knowledge. I can look at a DNA sequence and see art in that. I look at a waka and see art in that, but also science in terms of its design, the way the hull’s shaped for speed, the maths that goes into width-to-length ratio to give good capability for riding over swells. So yes, they’re artistic, but there’s science in there.’’

Barclay-Kerr’s first big Pacific voyage was from the Cook Islands to New Zealand about 35 years ago. There have been many since, complete with hairy moments. Storms whose only antidote was to drop the sails and bob around and wait. His five children are also fluent in te reo and waka.

Now he uses the waka to train the next generation of navigators, and help young people understand the parallels between Western science and traditional knowledge.

‘‘I say to kids: ‘Are you guys doing maths at school? How are you doing in it?’

‘Oh, maths sucks.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s really hard.’

‘You should learn your maths.’ ‘Why? Our ancestors never did maths.’

I go to them ‘Yes. they did.’

‘No, they didn’t.’

‘Watch this.’ I give them the handheld GPS, say: ‘Tell us how fast we’re doing. I’m going to come over here and do some maths and tell you how fast we’re doing.’ We’ll do that and

they go ‘Whoa’ and they get into it. And that was better than one whole week of trying to teach kids maths.’’

Barclay-Kerr did a masters at Waikato University researching waka as an expression of mana. He wanted to look beyond paddling or sailing waka as a pastime. While a Western perspective sees the lack of documentation of early Polynesian navigation as a weakness, Barclay-Kerr sees it as a strength.

‘‘A voyaging canoe shows the ability to maintain and hold knowledge that is centuries old, maybe even thousands of years. An unbroken line. If you’re the holder of that type of knowledge, you actually bring a lot of mana to your people.’’

Barclay-Kerr is taking that mana, and the mana of his waka, around the country as part of Tuia 250. He hopes it will be a voyage of discovery of a different kind, gathering stories of encounters, between Kupe and Maui and the land and its fauna, and of encounters between iwi and Cook, which can then be used in classrooms nationwide.

Success would be a legacy that will constantly remind New Zealanders where we came from and bridge the gulfs of understanding, he says.

‘‘It all comes of misunderstanding – not knowing what one group knows and feels about something. You can’t fix something if you don’t know it’s broken. But you also have to be ready to open your eyes to help diagnose whatever it is that is broken. You can’t just sit around going ‘It will be OK’. That’s why I’m into this, because hopefully it will create that conversation.’’