During my search of the archives, the focus was on sports. I have picked out five interesting pieces of folklore that shed a light on the culture of athletics at IU. All of my sources come from the Folklore of Student Life website. The first source is an IU rugby song called the “Haka” from 1982 and it goes as follows:
Shannon’s rugby songs from the archives:
Lyrics to IU rugby song (1982).
“Haka”
Ka mate Ka mate
It is death It is death
Ka ora Ka ora
It is life It is life
Ka mate Ka mate
It is death It is death
Ka ora Ka ora
It is life It is life
Tenei Te Tangata Puhuruhuru
This is the hairy man
Nana I tiki mai whakawhiti te ra
Who caused the sun to shine again for me
Upane Upane
Up the ladder Up the ladder
Upane Kaupane
Up to the top
Whiti te ra
The sun shines!
There is a lot to explore with this item of folklore so let us jump into the texture. This is a chant accompanied by a dance that is used to get ready for battle and to intimidate one’s opponent. Lines like “It is death / It is death / It is life / It is life” show the danger and appeal of battle. Battle and “It is death” understandably go hand in hand, but “It is life” is a little more surprising. The latter refers to the feeling of exhilaration that goes with the struggle to survive and the pride of defending one’s homeland. Another feature of this chant is the length of the lines. Many of the lines are very short and repeated, the reason for this is that this song is meant to be sung by a group and the repetition and briefness of the lines makes it easy to follow along. So, this is a battle hymn, one may wonder why the 1982 IU rugby team created it and why this song is not in English. The answer is that this song was not invented in 1982 and was merely borrowed by the rugby team. To truly get into the texture of this source, some context needs to be laid out.
This piece of folklore is especially interesting because it is a part of the 1982 IU rugby teams’ folklore as well as other rugby teams across the globe and through time and the Māori community. The source seen above is a piece of “The Haka”, a battle hymn that comes from the Māori, the indigenous people of New Zealand. Rugby, though not invented in New Zealand, is huge with the Māori people. Sports, especially contact sports like rugby, share many similarities to battle like the show of strength, abundance of machismo, and competition between two groups so it comes as no shock that the Māori people transported their song of battle onto the rugby pitch. This song, along with the dance, was so effective in intimidating their opponents that the tradition spread and made it all the way to the 1982 IU rugby team. Perhaps without even knowing what they were saying, the IU rugby team used the chant in the same way it was used for hundreds of years, to intimidate the enemy and inspire themselves before entering the fray. The Haka is performed right before the match begins and right in front of the other team to try to gain an edge in the preceding competition. This is an easy lead in to the concept of Performance.
No other concept has as obvious a link to the Haka as performance. The entire point of the chant and accompanying dance is performance, yelling in the face of a stranger while slapping your thighs in unison with your teammates is certainly set apart from the ordinary. I have seen videos of the Haka where people will even go as far as face paint to put even more fear into the heart of the opponent. The Haka is theater, it is people mustering up all their acting chops to try and frighten the person they are facing. Then comes the actual sport of rugby which is again performance and something very set aside from the ordinary. There is no opportunity in normal life to tackle someone or fighting for an oval in a scrum so the concept of performance is an easy choice for this and following folklore sources in this paper as it has such a close bond with sport.