Creating nonfiction film in our mother tongue: Samoan, Tongan, Punjabi

We are three postgraduates of Te Ara Poutama Faculty at Auckland University of Technology. We have written a collective piece as a distinct group who emigrated from villages, districts, and countries outside of Aotearoa. We are nonfiction filmmakers creating film in our mother tongue; Fritz in Samoan, Sylvester in Tongan, and Asim in Punjabi. Through our shared experiences we have become trusted friends and collegial support for one another. Consciously, we chose to take up practice-led research in a faculty of Māori students and staff for cultural and strategic reasons. That very same rationale has prompted us to co-author our paper as contributors to a small but growing number of Aotearoa language films made by practitioners who although are not Indigenous to the lands we are living on, are, however, descended from the original inhabitants in our countries of origin. 
To impress upon readers the importance of why we create Samoan, Tongan, and Punjabi nonfiction film for, and with, our language communities, we have used this publication to make a point of authoring our individual stories in Samoan, Tongan, and Punjabi, with an accompanying English translation. The true sense behind the ideas we are conveying with words and images is therefore contained in the Samoan, Tongan, and Punjabi texts. By contrast, the English translation is our humble interpretation that we feel falls short of communicating the complexly woven fabric of meaning found in the original language. For this reason, the English translation is secondary to the mother tongue.

(collective duty of care) they have given to three non-Māori postgraduates in their home faculty has been vital to ensuring we are in safe hands to learn and flourish during doctoral study.
Because of their efforts to co-create a distinct and protected whānau-oriented space, we have also benefitted.This space we speak of is simultaneously located within, and independent of, a mainstream university whose function is to integrate Māori students and staff into the institutional architecture by using English-language-sensemaking and bureaucratic procedure to make decisions over and about the university's Indigenous cohort; decisions, which in effect, favour the dominant Pākeha culture.We are grateful to our Māori peers for protecting us from cultural politics, for sharing their cultural space -Ngā Wai o Horotiu Marae, and for inspiring us to be unapologetically Samoan, Tongan, and Punjabi under the marumaru (shelter) of Te Ara Poutama.
If there is a semblance of cultural safety in numbers, despite the small numbers of Pacific and South Asian migrants carrying their mother tongue across borders as the principal research method for data collection and sensemaking, then making ourselves safe (instead of being vulnerable) in a western university system requires a practicable strategy.
What worked for us was finding a supportive environment in the Māori faculty where Māori people accepted us for who we are, along with our people whom we bring with us in our community-oriented research.Hence, we did not see that our creative research, an assemblage and reflection of our people and language on-screen, would be highly valued and respected by faculties where the belief systems of the Indigenous tribes of Aotearoa were not central to how others -migrants, who are Native to their countries -are treated and taken care of.
By no means are we saying that postgraduates from Pacific and South Asian states and territories who do not have whakapapa Māori (Māori ancestry) should undertake practice-led research in a Māori faculty.We firmly believe that Māori faculties and schools in New Zealand's eight universities are designed for the researcher development and support needs of Māori postgraduates first and foremost and must remain true to this kaupapa (principle) according to Treaty of Waitangi obligations that the Tertiary Education Commission stipulates they must deliver in the Kete Whiri strategy (Tertiary Education Commission, 2023).What we are affirming is that our location in a Māori faculty has acted as a fortunate buffer to the institutional hierarchy applying deprivation theory over and about us; two migrants from sovereign Pacific states, Sāmoa and Tonga, and one South Asian migrant from west Punjab in Pakistan with a Muslim majority population (bearing in mind that east Punjab in India has a Sikh majority population).As a result, we have personally and professionally grown and gained confidence from our genuine, warm interactions with Māori peers and staff.
A critique that Fritz and Sylvester want to put forward (and Asim stands with them) relates to a specific kind of cultural politics infiltrating the New Zealand university environment.That is, the decontextualised identity marker Indigenous in academic literature published by Samoan and Tongan researchers (Weaver, 2001).The intended meaning of the identity referent Indigenous when deployed by Samoan and Tongan researchers can be read as political and problematic in an Aotearoa context.Fritz and Sylvester see it is their academic responsibility to question research using an Indigenous orientation when firstly, researchers are not residing in, or researching about, Sāmoa and Tonga.And secondly, when some researchers were not born or raised in their ancestral nu'u (Samoan for village) and kolo (Tongan for village), and therefore might not be recognised by the village community as locals, but rather, overseas Samoans, overseas Tongans.
A significant factor omitted from the Indigenous framing is that Samoans and Tongans living in their countries do not identify as Indigenous peoples.Sāmoa and Tonga, according to their citizenries, are independent sovereign states where ethnic Samoans and Tongans make up the majority populations, national languages, and dominant cultures.In addition, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples informs their states and societies' knowledge of who is Indigenous in international relations, i.e.Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, Australian Aboriginals, New Zealand Māori (United Nations, 2007; Brown Pulu,   2024 1 ).
How is this monumental shift conceived and validated in current academic research?Is Indigenous truly how generations of Samoans and Tongans born in Aotearoa blanketly self-identify?(Tevi, 2018).Or does Indigenous manifest itself as an aspirational identity?(Keepa and Manu'atu, 2006).
The obvious issue being ignored is how tāngata whenua -researchers belonging to Māori tribes of Aotearoa -and their people, are dislodged and made invisible by Samoan and Tongan research in Māori lands that calls itself Indigenous.Indigenous where and Indigenous how?Even more perplexing is the conflation of Māori and Pacific researchers in a homogeneous Indigenous category, insinuating that in Aotearoa these groups are identical.
We believe that the very term Indigenous demands considered contextualisation on the part of Samoan and Tongan researchers (Brown Pulu and Filisi, 2024).Naming oneself and one's people Indigenous requires the researcher to explain what diasporic communities located outside of Sāmoa and Tonga mean by this, especially when they are living on Māori tribal lands."Pacific Indigenous" and "Indigenous Ocean" are bold identity statements issued in research publications (Enari et al, 2024;Salesa, 2023).But without first acknowledging this Indigenous agenda is playing out on soil that one's people are not Indigenous to brings the agenda into question.
As creative pracitioners who make Aotearoa language films, we have invested substantial time and thought into working through how our research converges with, and diverges from, Indigenous peoples' scholarship; in particular, the creative approaches of Māori filmmaker Barry Barclay and Native Canadian documentary filmmaker Dorothy Christian (Barclay, 2003(Barclay, , 2015;;Christian, 2017Christian, , 2019)).We have carefully reflected on our relationships with tāngata whenua in the university.In terms of social reciprocity, we genuinely respect one another's language and culture, and for us, we are mindful not to misappropriate the Indigenous rights and special status of mana whenua.Moreover, we practice reflexivity through self-awareness of how our identity as migrants from Sāmoa, Tonga, and Punjab is markedly different to the identity we grew up with in our lands of origin; the villages and districts where we learned place-based identities as sons of the soil. 2he one taonga (treasure) we have carried across ocean and kept alive in everyday life is not the village, in the physical sense.The villages we come from exist in their rightful place, Sāmoa, Tonga, and Punjab.Rather, it is our language, our mother tongue, which connects our free spirits to ancestors and homelands throughout the practice-led thesis journey.(Vaioleti, 2006;Hindley et al, 2020).O le filmed talanoa ia te a'u o le Samoa i le talanoaga ma le tuagane ma le uso o lo'u tinā e i ai ona tapusa (Filisi, 2023).

Samoan to English
My name is Fritz Filisi and I was raised by my maternal grandparents in the ancestral village of our Tofaeono 'āiga, Si'umu.Situated on the southcentral coast of Upolu Island in Sāmoa, Si'umu has a population of eleven hundred-plus people who are mostly younger generations under thirty and the elderly.Si'umu people of my generation are the smaller share of the village population living at home because most are migrant workers on temporary visas to New Zealand and Australia, or permanent residents raising our families in these countries.The story of mass migration for the international labour market is not Sāmoa's alone, but an accurate reflection of how an interconnected global economy has impacted village life; emptied villages of the labour force; and created generations born overseas where every generation experiences more people feeling distant from their village roots and gagana Sāmoa (Samoan language) (Sagapolutele, 2018).to Tongan educator Timote Vaioleti's approach to talanoa being a free-flowing conversation on an equal playing field where the researcher and participants collapse social hierarchy (Vaiolete, 2006;Hindley et al, 2020), filmed talanoa for me as a Samoan researcher in conversation with my maternal uncle and aunt was the reverse scenario (Filisi, 2023).I mean that filmed talanoa was in actual fact conversations conducted in formal Samoan language that were dictated by vā, the relational space between a nephew and his close kinfolk of an uncle and aunt.Irrespective of my matai titles, I was talking with my elders on camera about a topic -gift exchanges between Samoan families at funerals -which we felt as a family was an important discussion to be had.Certain rules of communication became imperative in the relational space in which my role was to listen carefully and not interrupt with pesky prods.Very little is published about the auala ceremony in Samoan villages, but quite possibly, it is the most important funerary tradition to have been maintained from pre-contact times up to the present day.Auala means pathway, and the funerary ritual involves village and district matai gathering to recite genealogies and oratories to send a deceased person safely on their journey from this mortal life to pulotu, the place of spirits.

Tongan to English
My name is Sylvester Tonga and I was born and raised in my paternal village Leimatu'a on the largest island of the Vava'u Group, 'Utu Vava'u, in northern Tonga.There are sixty-one islands of all shapes and sizes in Vava'u that are home to a population of just over fourteen thousand people.My mother comes from Lape island, which is twenty kilometres southward of Neiafu, the main town of Vava'u.In December of 2023, I journeyed home with my family to film for my doctoral project based in Leimatu'a.We travelled by boat for a day visit to Lape and you can view a non-narrative video here to gain a visual impression of how important sea transport is to Vava'u people located more than three-hundred kilometres north of Nuku'alofa, the capital of Tonga (Tonga, 2024b).When I was growing up, I never thought of Vava'u as small islands of small village populations.Our social world was an expansive network of connections, relatives, and affectionate relationships, and our village stories spoke of the significance of Vava'u in Tongan history.Even after living in Aotearoa for thirty years, I still see Vava'u as loto māfana, the warm-hearted, larger-than-life people of northern Tonga.I came to postgraduate study at AUT more than a decade ago with one goal in mind: that was, to work towards completing a doctoral thesis about my people in Leimatu'a.At master's level, my learning journey took me from studying public policy to Pacific development to communication studies (Tonga, 2020).In February of 2021, I returned to Te Ara Poutama and was admitted to the doctoral programme.
By undertaking a practice-led thesis producing a sixty-minute nonfiction film in the Vava'u dialect of Tongan (Taumoefolau, 2012), I am exploring how Leimatu'a farmers and women crafters maintain their traditional agricultural lifestyle with the support of Leimatu'a migrants in Aotearoa who are the overseas market (Tonga, 2024a).The film artefact is supplemented with an exegesis in English explaining the creative and collaborative process.Creative research has involved collaborative work between me -the researcher, and Leimatu'a participants.By this, the research project used a cooperative design.In partnership with the participants, the preparation stage before filming was thorough and time consuming, so that the Leimatu'a people featured in the film felt their voices and views were incorporated into the way the stories about our village were being crafted and conveyed to audiences.I acknowledge that without my people's generous contributions of time, care, and knowledge I would not have a film (Helu-Thaman, 2008).There are interrelated factors I want to make clear about insider filmmaking as a Leimatu'a villager and migrant to Aotearoa whose people are the film subject.Firstly, my personal story is intricately woven into the stories presented on-screen by others who are my kith and kin.Relatedly, only an insider of the Leimatu'a communities at home in the village, and overseas in Auckland, could ever gain access to the participants who are telling the story of us, and by us, as a people.It is not that Leimatu'a is a closed society.I believe we are open-minded and kind-hearted about welcoming outsiders to our village territory in Vava'u.My point is, a screen production by Leimatu'a about ourselves, our distinct way of life, requires a filmmaker to not only be one of the people, but known and trusted by the people.The separation of our land and people had catastrophic consequences with more than a million people slain while scrambling across the India-Pakistan border.

Māori, Tongan, Samoan film crew
Still, to this day, the Punjabis of India and Pakistan lament the divisions forced upon us in which a militarised border was erected to deliberately disconnect our people from one another, and our shared cultural heritage and language.The Punjabi language is as diverse as her people with eighteen different dialects belonging to tribes, clans, and their territories within the greater Punjab region.Nowadays, our cultural and dialect diversity is dying because people have been removed from their origin places of ancestry for almost eighty years.
Without giving away too much about the storyline, I have purposely created a seventy-minute nonfiction film in the Punjabi language for my practice-led doctoral project.My submission date for examination is fast approaching mid-year.Hence, I am conscientiously reflecting on the past four-plus years of Covid-19 disruptions to filming, along with the spirit of my South Auckland Punjabi community who have stood with me to see this film made by us come to fruition.The story about us is one of separation and inter-generational grief and trauma.But it also a story of small, humble wins in migrating to South Auckland, where most Punjabi migrants from India and Pakistan live in Aotearoa and having every opportunity to rekindle our kinships and friendships.Just being able to mix freely has strengthened our relationships as ethnic Punjabis and made us better human beings for valuing unity, and prioritising our shared cultural values, amidst our diversity.
Returning to the question I raised about a Māori, Tongan, Samoan film crew shooting my doctoral film, Sanjha Punjab (Mukhtar, 2024), it has been an honour to work with Rewi Amoamo, a grandson of Te Whānau-ā-Apanui, Te Whakatōhea, and Tonga, and Niko Meredith, a grandson of Samoa and Tonga.Aside from their professional filming expertise, they taught me the true meaning of social acceptance in the way they both worked respectfully and humbly through film shoots with the Punjabi cast.Their conscientious efforts to fit in quietly with the cast and watch carefully for ques on how to operate their camera and sound recording equipment with the least possible interruption to the flow of dialogue between characters, allowed me to see that they genuinely accepted my people as a fellow community of South Auckland.They treated my people, migrants from the Punjab region, with similar amounts of respect they would give their own people.
In the past ten years of living as a Punjabi migrant in South Auckland, there have been times when I have felt that my people, and South Asians from the Indian subcontinent more generally, are unwelcome and unwanted in Aotearoa.However, my film crew who are the descendants of migrant grandparents from Tonga and Samoa have given me hope that my children growing up in Aotearoa will have different experiences to mine.In time, as they reach young adulthood like Rewi and Niko, I believe they too will have empathy and compassion for all migrants who have braved the journey to new lands, new lives, and a lifetime of learning how to form new communities without borders (Mukhtar, 2020).
Talofa o lo'u igoa o Fritz Filisi.Sa fa'afailele mai lo'u olaga ma ou ola a'e ma matua o lo'u tinā i totonu o Si'umu, o le nu'u o tua'a o lo'u tinā i le aiga o Tanuvasa-Tofaeono.O Si'umu o lo'o i ai i le ogatotonu o le itu i saute o Upolu i Samoa, e tusa ma le afe selau ma ona tupu ona tagata, e to'atele i tagata talavou i lalo o le tolusefulu tausaga ma tagata matutua.O tagatanu'u o la'u augatupulaga e ititi lona faitau aofa'i i totonu o le nu'u ona ua tele ona galulue i fafo i galuega fa'avaitaimi i Niu Sila ma Ausetalia.O nisi ua maua pepa nofomau i nei atunu'u.O le to'atele o tagata femalagaa'i i galuega fa'alevā o malō fa'avaitaimi e le na'o Samoa e a'afia ai, ae o le ata lena o le a'afiaga o olaga i totonu o nu'u ona o feso'ota'iga tau tāmaoaiga o le kelope; ua mou ma leai ni tagata faigaluega i totonu o nu'u, ae ua atiina ai augatupulaga e fananau i fafo ma ola a'e ma lagona taumamao i fa'asinomaga i aiga, nu'u ma le gagana Samoa.O lo'u auai i le AUT i lalo o Te Ara Poutama sa amataina ia Me i le 2021 ina ua taliaina ma maua lo'u avanoa i le Master of Philosophy e fa'atinoina ai i se ata i lalo o mea moni sa tutupu pe o lo'o tutupu ma ona fa'amatalaga auiliili.E sili atu ma le lua tausaga sa taumafai ai fa'a part-time ma fa'auma ai lenei ata i le gagana Samoa, Fa'alavelave: Samoan Gift Exchange, fa'atasi ai ma le Ekesise po'o lona fa'amatalaina auilili i metotia o tu ma aganu'u o le ata filmed talanoa.E i ai sona ese'esega ma Timote Vaioleti o le tagata a'oa'oina lelei o Tonga e tusa ai ma le talanoa, ona o lana ia fa'amatalaina, o le talanoa e leai ni ona tapusa e tutusa uma i le tagata sa'ili ma le tagata auai e leai ni fa'asologa po o le fa'atulagaina o le va nonofo ai
My elders led the dialogue and set parameters on what needed to be said about the topic of discussion, and what was irrelevant.Currently, I am preparing my research proposal for admission to the doctoral programme at the October 2024 intake.I intend to create video sketches or short nonfiction films of Samoan language conversations with matai -orators and chiefs -from the villages of Si'umu district on the significance of the auala funerary ritual.Further to this, I want to find out how the contemporary practice of auala might have undergone change due to mass migration having relocated the adult working population to other countries.

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. Tālanga: Sylvester Tonga (front-right) taking part in an interactive social exchange between Leimatu'a migrant men at a kava club gathering.
creates a nonfiction film in Tongan about anga fakaleimatu'a (the Leimatu'a way) in relation to farming traditions.The filming takes place with Leimatu'a migrants in Auckland and Leimatu'a villagers back home in Vava'u.Asim Mukhtar is Janjua.Janjua is a clan of the Punjabi Rajput tribe of the Punjab region.His village is Jodhay in Narowal district.He is preparing to submit his practice-led doctorate for examination.His research has produced a nonfiction film in Punjabi about Punjabi migrants from India and Pakistan living in South Auckland.Expressly, the camera is focused on how the Punjabis are rekindling their kith and kin relationships after almost eighty years of being separated by a militarised border in their home countries.