Moana Currents - Early Pacific Migrants

The Kronfeld and Greig families were calabash cousins through their two matriarchs Florence Greig and Louisa Kronfeld. Both women gafa to Samoa; the village of Lotofaga for Louisa and Fasitoʻotai for Florence, and were early Pacific migrants to Auckland.

Their early cosmopolitan travels eventually brought each of them to Aotearoa New Zealand in 1890 and 1907 respectively, where they settled and continued to raise their families in the nascent Pacific community of Tāmaki. Maintaining links, teu le vā, to families they had left and nurturing new relationships as they navigated life in the burgeoning city of Auckland.

Andrea Low is a great-grandaughter of Florence and Emily Parr is a great-great-granddaughter of Louisa. Each scholar has placed family at the centre of their research and will share stories and images of these early Moana migrants who made their homes here.

About the speakers
Emily Parr (Ngāi Te Rangi, Moana, Pākehā) is an artist living in Tāmaki Makaurau. Weaving stories with moving-image, her practice explores relationships between people, political frameworks, whenua and moana. Her recent Master’s research on settler-indigenous relationships of Te Moananui a Kiwa traverses oceans and centuries, seeking stories in archives and waters on haerenga to ancestral homelands.

Dr Andrea Low (Samoa, Hawaiʻi, Fiji, Tongareva, Scotland) is a curator and artist in Tāmaki Makaurau and is a multi-disciplinary researcher who brings together archival studies, ethnomusicology, Moana/Oceania/Pacific history, photography, biography and de|colonial perspectives.

Image: Left: Louisa Kronfeld, c1879. Right: Florence Greig, c1899.

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