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New Zealand based dance group Te Ara Kuaka makes Celebration debut
- Ellie Ruel
- Jun 9
- 7 min read
A ‘magical’ cultural exchange offers inspiration for future generations
By Jasz Garrett and Ellie Ruel
Juneau Independent
While Celebration usually draws thousands from all over Alaska, this year’s event brought a dance group from the other side of the world.
The five-member Te Ara Kuaka dance group, hailing from Auckland, New Zealand, performed 30 minutes of traditional songs and dances to a packed Centennial Hall on Friday night as part of a cultural exchange.
“To our old friend, Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, the Great Pacific Ocean,” said Joshua Rewha, a Te Ara Kuaka Dancer at the performance. “The thing that connects us all, from our brothers and sisters in Hawai’i, to our family up here in Alaska, all the way down to my people in New Zealand.”
The group’s first time in Juneau was in April for the Native Youth Olympics. This also marked the first year a dance group from Hawai’i, Hālau Kamehameha Kapālama, participated in Celebration. Ariana Howell said her April trip helped her feel safe to return for the four-day biennial cultural festival held every other June by Sealaska Heritage Institute. New Zealand currently has travel advice to “exercise increased caution in the United States of America."
“We've been feeling so honored to be invited here to participate in Celebration,” Howell said. “It feels really powerful. I almost can't find the words to describe what we've been experiencing over the past three days.”
She said that in New Zealand, she attends Te Matatini, a Māori performing arts festival.
“We have the same kind of idea where dance groups from across Aotearoa come together and celebrate our cultures,” she said.
Howell said it’s been “magical” to share Māori culture internationally, and identified shared features across cultures.
“There's lots of different similarities in the regalia,” Hana-May Riedlinger-Kapa said. “Through the weaving, through the feathers, through the design styles, and the textures, and even some of the stories.”
They opened their Friday stage performance at Celebration with a song, or waiata, called “Raukūmara” which shared the natural features of New Zealand.
“It speaks about the many mountains that come where we come from,” Rewha explained. “And the beautiful place we call home for now. It also speaks about our journey to reclaim our language. But it speaks of how beautiful the language feels to the ears, to the heart, and spirit.”
Aorere Paki-Winiata explained that some of the pieces were haka, a Māori word combining the terms for “breath” and “ignite.” They paired the haka with a hand movement representing shimmering heat.
“In our culture, our movements represent truth,” he said. “You are seeing the growth of our fire, bringing us all together,” he said.
One of those haka was “Ka Mate,” famous for its tale of survival.
“As people of the land, we know about this survival,” Paki-Winiata said. “We know about life and death, bringing our culture back from the absolute brink.”
The Māori lyrics "ka mate" and "ka ora" translate to “will I die” and “will I live.” At the end, Paki-Winiata said the dancers stand strong, representing the continuance of sharing traditions from ancestors to new generations.
It was a theme the group continued to notice on the last day of Celebration. They participated in the parade Saturday morning.
“I’ve never seen a display of culture like that just waltz through the streets,” Howell said. “It felt like a reclamation of land, a reclamation of culture, a reclamation of history. And sometimes I forget that Indigenous existence has a lot to do with how the world’s going to evolve.”
Howell thanked the Worl family who invited her dance group to Juneau and accommodated their trip.
Rewha said as he gets older, cultural exchanges start to mean everything.
“When you get to see some of the elders who are probably three or four generations of dancers and singers in the same place — there's a feeling of safeness for culture when you can see that the shoots are growing with the tallest trees,” he said. “It brings me immense pride just to be allowed to stand here to soak in the magic that's happening, and just to be a part of this experience.”
He stood outside Centennial Hall on Saturday evening, waiting to enter for the Grand Exit. Behind him, the family dance group Ts’maay began to sing and drum. The name means Fourth Generation Tsimshian Dancers.
“From April at NYO, I’ve already been inspired to take up learning my traditional arts and strengthening my connections with my ancestral lands by going back and standing in places that my people weren’t taking me to,” Rewha said. “My dad doesn’t go back to his village so for me to get the knowledge, I have to take myself. I’m going to do that in July, pretty much as soon as I get home.”
He said he hopes to share the games from Māori and “open up a doorway for those conversations.” Both Howell and Rewha said they look forward to returning for the next Celebration in 2028, and have aspirations to see similar events spread for “every tribe of every nation.” Rewha said his personal goal is to get youth involved.
“We have a bit of a problem where the kids are separated from the villages,” he said. “Our older people are asking, ‘How do we get the children home?’”
He watched and listened to the Ts’maay drummers around him. The Tsimshian dance group spans from newborns to senior citizens.
“You see it, and you go, ‘This might help. This might be the medicine, this might be the therapy,’” Rewha said. “There’s no separation. The generations are blurred and simply sharing who they are at the same time. Using culture is the medium. It’s inspiring. I’ve been inspired to do so much more in my Māori communities, but as well as in my own community just because of visiting Juneau.”
After Friday’s performance, Riedlinger-Kapa said she hopes to give New Zealand youth the same opportunities to go on exchange that she had.
“We've just got a shared mission of expanding our sports and our culture for the youth as well. So we want to learn about terms of templates,” she said. “We did a lot of traveling with the games and cultural exchanges when we were teenagers. It really impacted us and set us on the course for our future, so we would love to be able to provide the same for some of the youth so that they can explore.”
Kai Montour, who is a member of Wooch.ji.een and Senior Mount St. Elias Dancers, joined the New Zealand group on Saturday for the Grand Exit. He said he was equally inspired by his family.
He traveled to New Zealand in January of 2025 to a youth warrior training camp hosted for more than 50 years on Mokoia Island. Montour said he hopes to bring back traditional Lingít warrior training by using New Zealand’s camp as a model.
“It’s everything I dream of building here in Alaska for Lingít youth,” he said, dressed in Lingít armor. “When I was going through the training at their camp, some of their trainers were second- and third-generation trainers that grew up in the warrior training camp. So it's really inspiring to me, and they were very supportive and generous, and they taught me a lot there.”
The Te Ara Kuaka dancers have a similar goal and hope to use ideas from NYO to further develop their own games.
“We still have a long way to go with how established our games are compared to how established the games are here,” Riedlinger-Kapa said. “I think that cultural exchanges are super valuable because we are able to share strings that we have within our culture, like the language, and some of our performing arts, and then learn a lot about how established the games are here, and events like this at this scale.”
The Te Ara Kuaka dance group formed after the quintet was in the same high school performing arts group. They stayed connected, and one of their family members helped coordinate the April exchange to NYO.
Rewha said the best moments of Celebration were any time the group was dancing together. For Riedlinger-Kapa, the best part of those dances is the ability to express “the full range of who we are as people.”
“Our ferocity, our joy, our play, our rage,” she said. “It's not as tolerable in this mainstream society, our culture.”
Howell said her overall experience at Celebration was overwhelming, but freeing.
“The greatest thing that I'm gonna take home with me is the aroha, the love that we've felt from all the people in Juneau, everyone in Juneau, Native and not Native, it feels like there's no difference, honestly, in Celebration,” Howell said. “It feels like such a big gift to be able to take home. It cracks my heart open and I feel this beautiful and quite emotional actually expansion of my capacity to hold and receive love.”
She said one day, they hope to repay the favor.
• Contact Jasz Garrett at jasz@juneauindependent.com or (907) 723-9356. Contact Ellie Ruel at ellie.ruel@juneauindependent.com.
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