The gifts Pasifika people can give to NZ, if we let them
Aotearoa’s Parliament is currently debating a law change which would restore the New Zealand citizenship rights of Samoans born in Western Samoa between May 13, 1924 and January 1, 1949, but who had those rights stripped away in 1982; and others claiming citizenship through those people by descent or marriage.
This debate is a poignant reminder of a history that many New Zealanders would rather forget. Former Samoan PM Tuilaepa Sa’ilele Malielegaoi starkly reminded us of this history when he observed that for Samoans, “Hell is easier to reach than New Zealand”.
The grim reality of climate change suggests that many Pasifika people could soon be arriving in Aotearoa, possibly as refugees. Without bold leadership, we risk a 21st-century reinvention of the 1970s Dawn Raids, a dark period too easily forgotten by many New Zealanders but keenly remembered by the Pasifika people who were in Aotearoa at the time.
If Pasifika people arrive in increasing numbers due to rising sea levels submerging their homes, rudimentary knowledge of human nature suggests that hostility will be met in kind. Restoring citizenship gestures towards a much brighter future.
New Zealanders could look to Pasifika peoples for help with some of our most pressing challenges. By celebrating their arrival, we could ask how their thinking and attitudes toward community can help us with the loneliness crisis.
Pasifika people are innately communal, in that they thrive and survive on human interaction.
Psychologist John Cacioppo tells us that “as an obligatorily gregarious species, we humans have a need not just to belong in an abstract sense but to actually get together”.
Cacioppo memorably compared the harmful effects of isolation on social humans to smoking. We have legal restrictions on smoking and its harms. Perhaps we need a ban on loneliness. We will need Pasifika people to tell us how to do this.
We’ve seen the effectiveness of social media at isolating us from each other. The biggest harm on our kids from the highly addictive TikTok may not be time away from homework. The longer we stare at our screens, the less we are with each other.
We could sit passively by, awaiting the next even more lucrative forms of online addiction as social media companies apply AI to every vulnerability in human nature. Or we could ask for help from people who have a deep tradition of being with each other.
Are you feeling the depressive effects of too much TikTok? Why not try a talanoa, an open and transparent form of dialogue and problem-solving that requires you to be with other people?
How does this process of resocialising each other begin? It might be in the way the conversation between these authors started.
One of us is an academic philosopher keen to engage in conversations signalling the arrival of a brave new interdisciplinary university. Chatting with a professor of law from Samoa revealed the expressive power and joy of the talanoa. Could the kanohi ki te kanohi nature of the talanoa suggest a solution to the problem of students using AI to write their assessments?
Universities that turned to online teaching and assessment during the pandemic are now finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish submissions on an education platform that come from what the student has learned and those that come from treating a lecturer’s question as user input into ChatGPT.
Perhaps the talanoa offers both the therapy of human socialising and some solutions to challenges for today’s struggling New Zealand universities. Who knows what else we might learn once we really get talking?
To embrace and celebrate the contributions of Pasifika communities is to move towards a more inclusive and resilient society.
Let’s take bold steps to restore citizenship and welcome Pasifika people, recognising the rich cultural heritage and wisdom they bring to Aotearoa.