To walk into that building
you just knew, it's us.
Pasifika Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, us.
You could go to the Consulate General get your passport done,
you could go to the dentist.
There was a little café there.
It was the beating heart for our people.
More recently, with the whole gentrification,
the whole movement of our Pacific communities
out of inner city Auckland.
It can be felt that it's missing its people.
That's fundamentally the question to pose
back to the community, back to the government.
What is this building and what's it for now?
I've been obsessed with the building for ages.
I used to live on K Road. So I’d walk past
and I’d be like “Samoa House, what is that?”
It looks completely different from every other building,
it says Samoa, we’re Samoan.
Walking down K Road, you’d just see that “Maota Samoa” sign.
I had no idea that the fale was even in there.
Coming here
felt like more of a connection to my grandparents.
I still get people coming all the way up the stairs
and being like, “Oh, I want to learn more about my heritage.
Is this the place to come to?”
It's just quite confronting because it's like,
oh, this isn't the consulate anymore.
Historically, this is the first maota
to be built outside of Samoa.
And you have a sense of the alofa, you have a sense of the spirit,
you have a sense of the people's dreams.
You have a sense that this is a place where things will happen
for your future.
Basically, Dad ended up with a bunch of documents that belonged
to my grandfather.
One thing I've got here, it's a typed script for a speech.
“My speech before launching fundraising for the Samoa House
now standing at Karangahape Road.
The reasons for wanting to
erect a modern building are to lift up our people
in education, physical and spiritual.
Do you think as a New Zealand citizen and a Samoan
to see our people in desperate plight, that it doesn't concern us?”
This other part that you said reminded you of him.
“If we are waiting for the right person or persons to come along,
nothing will ever happen.”
It's kind of the opposite to what Polynesians would do generally.
Just to put this out into the open and speaking
openly against some of the things that were happening,
I feel quite proud of my dad that he did that
The struggle that the community,
especially the inner-city community,
went through in the 1960s, '70s and '80s.
A lot of those people
who were quite seminal in building this were fighting that struggle.
That got woven into
the genealogy and the stories that went on in this building.
For me, the architecture is only the apparatus
or the thing that structures our lives and hold our stories.
People come and go and they would leave stories
that will be embedded in the building.
And you can't just get rid of the structure.
You get rid of that structure,
you destroy those stories and those vā linkages to what happened
with our community here in their struggle
to find their own self identity.
The Prime Minister, Robert Muldoon,
the driver of the dawn raids, the overstayers.
The very same man is then given the opportunity
to open Maota Samoa.
Our parents were giggling
because they saw an irony here.
They saw that this is the man that harassed Pacific people,
and at the same time he’s having to open a building
that symbolises the presence and contribution
of Pacific nations people.
So we’re in Karangahape Road,
and we’ve just come off from the Ponsonby Road intersection.
And so back in the days in the sixties and seventies,
this is the road.
It's a spiritually, culturally exciting road to be on.
And all our grandfathers, parents
at the peak of their youthfulness.
They're the exciting young people
that are going to make changes, contributions.
So we see a connection from the ‘70s, but it's now 2023.
Where's our history? Where's our presence?
And so the Maota project becomes a very vital link
of that healing, of our sovereignty, of who we are.
Where’s the lights?
Oohh… Holy crap.
Look at all these paintings.
Oh my gosh it’s mouldy.
Oh no.
Oh my god it’s in the toilet.
Is it in the toilet? - It’s a toilet full of art.
This is quite sad, eh.
Yeah.
Do the Samoan Consulate know that these are here?
Okay, so in 2016,
the Samoan Consulate moved out to Māngere, to Bader Drive.
And it kinda feels like they really left quick.
Because at the moment
we don't have access and that is one of the core problems.
To get access we have to go through
a pālagi company who owns the lease of this space
and pay for this access of something
that was built for us.
I get emails every day asking us if Samoan organisations
and Pacific Island organisations can use the fale.
I want to say absolute, like immediately
this is what the fale was made for,
because that's what we've understood
through our historical research.
But I'm not in charge of
who gets access to that fale and who gets access to this building
and the people that are in charge of who gets access to the fale
quite often are saying, “Sorry.”
I think what we want is it to be back
as it was intended when it was opened in 1979.
And we need to educate.
And actually what's happening now,
nobody will realise, they won’t know.
Yeah, but I also think the awareness that we're still here.
Yeah.
And we still want to connect with this
and we still want to have access
and we still wanna utilise this place for education.
We could have our health services,
we can have education, we could have multiple things here,
we could have arts, we could have shows, we could have celebrations.
You've got to remember that a lot of the funds that allowed for
the complex to be built were raised by
the local Samoan community here in inner-city Auckland.
The consulate and the Samoan Government,
they own the property
but the important historical, cultural belonging
is with the community
and some of the very personal connection to the community.
I haven't been there for years and I was shocked
when I went in and saw, with great sadness,
the decline of the building.
I find it very difficult to understand
where we fit when it was built for us
and by our people, for us.
It is a shame for it just to sort of fade away
and be left to whoever, or whatever,
when there is so much potential, even just for younger generations,
to even just be aware that it exists and like this was actually made
by your ancestors.
That’s why it's really important that we move quickly to restore
the mana of this fale again.
I would love to take my children up there
to tell the history of our people, of K Road
in Maota Samoa.
I think for us is the hope
that one day it can be recognised
for the historically significant heartbeat and home that it was,
and that it can still be.
And as the migration out of inner-city Auckland began to happen,
we then began to see that
our presence is becoming invisible.
And so what we see is all of a sudden this push
to push out people out into South Auckland, we see this push of taking away
our presence on this road and we've begun to see that we're
becoming invisible.