Our Pasifika whanau

Last year I got a notification about the Prelinger video archives from the Internet Archive (affiliated with the US Library of Congress as a "501(c)(3) non-profit") that the Prelinger creative commons video was available for search. This - the Prelinger - archive began in 1983 as the private video collection of New Yorker Rick Prelinger (here). By 2002, it was a 60,000-strong collection of "ephemera": education reels, industry, ads, and amateur film, and was acquired by the US Library of Congress. 

Although I generally don't need to use video in my work, I decided to go and take a look. So of course I searched for New Zealand. I found some video of Jack Lovelock winning the 1500 metres at the 1936 Olympics, and a completely cringingly narrated video about Pacific 'belles'. Check it out (Castle Films, 1944).

Take a tour of our Pasifika wahine: through the eyes of the superior and colonising American man. I could only watch this a few seconds at a time. I was appalled for the glamorous wahine of Tahiti, horrified for the Māori filmed in Rotorua ("South"!), whakamā for the Fijians in particular... it was only Samoa which was treated with some dignity (Castle Films, 1944).

I found it was like taking a really nasty medicine... but at least it reminds us just how far we have come in eighty years. And perhaps it also reminds us just how poorly geography was taught - and perhaps still is? - in the USA!

Sam

References:

Castle Films (Director). (1944). Belles of the South Seas [Prelinger archive video]. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/0734_Belles_of_the_South_Seas_03_01_21_00