Posts by Manakura
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Che, I hear what you're saying, but reading about all that is no good practically, i.e. you read it, or hear about it, and it gets difficult not to get bitter, and very angry, both of which are great antidotes to thinking, yes? Its difficult to convey the raw emotional impact that reading about such things has on someone who has that sort of violence as part of their lived experience. For example i find it near impossible to read the colonial history of my iwi unless i am somewhere far away from other people, somewhere extremely reflective, like a bush hut in the middle of the Coromandel. The sort of feeling that gets generated are distracting to say the least.
Anyway, back to rational argument mode. I would disagree that indigeneity confers rights, rather it entails obligations and responsibilities. My status as an indigenous Aotearoan gives me nothing that i see as rights, and if it did I would likely reject them.
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Damn it, where is the cavalry, i'm running out of breath over here!
When i say familial, I mean blood, ancestral - it a genealogical link to the land, where aspects of the land are your ancestors, and ultimately the land and sky are your cosmological parents.
I have not ever doubted many or most Pakeha have developed a strong attachment to Aotearoa - to do so would be to disrespect a large part of my own ancestors. I just recognise a difference between the way Maori tend to relate to whenua and the way Pakeha tend to.
Urban Maori is a difficult, complex and painful issue. But in short, no matter how socially cut off you are from your whakapapa and ancestral homes, the connection remains. It is there and never goes away, but can lie dormant I guess, or be ignored, or whatever. Thats a hard question, with no easy answer, but I believe any Maori can find and reactivate their whakapapa, if the have the desire. The trouble is that most urban Maori suffer the worst from what I call post-colonial stress disorder (tongue sort of in cheek!) And the definitions of indigeneity and how that gets translated into the redistribution of wealth, land, etc out of the Treaty settlements for example, is that because they have no iwi affiliation they miss out on what is supposed to be an integral part of remedying what ails them. Incredibly complex stuff.
As for the idea that my ancient ancestors came here on a waka, well thats is true for a lot of hapu. Personally I don't whakapapa back to a waka, I trace my descent directly back to a specific landscape. as far as I am concerned my Maori ancestors never came from anywhere else. But that is besides our point here.
What I have been trying to stress is how long you have been here, and who was first, etc etc is irrelevant when it comes to indigeneity. It is what you beleive that counts, and how you put that into action in your everyday life. I think one day all the peoples of Aotearoa will eventually have ancestral relationships with the whenua here as beleifs slowly change and as Maori assimilate the rest of the population!!
Now
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O um, tauiwi, "Strange tribe, Foreign Race" as defined by Herbert Williams in 1852, implying it was used back then by any hapu in reference to anyone not of their hapu. Current usage just means non-Maori, due to the evolution of a nationalised 'Maori' identity. Funnily enough, with reference to that silly debate about 'New Zealander' being an ethnic category or not, the indigenous peoples of New Zealand were originally called 'New Zealanders'. We preferred Maori (meaning pure, or ordinary).
The real complexity lies in what Pakeha, Maori, European, New Zealander and Aotearoan (which is being used increasingly by the sort of peple who wear Huffer, love Scribe and listen to bFM) mean in relation to each other, and what they will come to mean in the future.
For the record, I no longer really think of myself as Maori, especially when i am in Aotearoa, I identify myself by hapu then iwi. When I go abroad i 'become' Maori, and then I am also Pakeha. Along the Pakeha branch, I could identify as Spanish, Irish, Scottish, Cornish. This is why terms like 'Maori' "Asian' etc are meaningless - what relevance do any of the census terms have to a mongrel like me?
As for nomadic peoples... no idea, not that familiar with nomadic cultures. But just because a people is nomadic, doesn't mean they don't have a familial relationship with the land the roam over. I guess if they have an ancestral relationship to particular landscapes, and/or have been colonised then, yes they would come under my definition of indigenous. Just because you roam doesn't mean you have no home (thats an advertsising jingle i think).
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the aspect of indigeneity being overtaken by the disciples of Michael King is the attachment to place.
Perhaps, but there is a lot of resistance to it. Have you read Jeff Sissons 'First Peoples', published this year? He doesn't seem to think King's version of indigeneity cuts any ice either, not that he mentions King specifically, and Linda Smith certainly leaves no room for the descendents of settlers to be 'indigenous.
I agree there is an identity emerging amongst non-Maori Aoteroan, but it is not an indigenous identity, being that it is largely associated with the descendants of colonials, and however deep the attachment to land it is not ancestral. No less valid for not being indigenous though. The co-option of the term indigenous is a colonial move, in that it takes a marker of identity for the colonized and reshapes it to suit certain nationalist ideologies insecurities or whatever.
Not saying that you, or Chris, or anyone else have bad intentions, but when you are born out of a history of being colonized any co-option by the dominant group is to be viewed with intense suspicion.
I don't see why people who adhere to this idea of a new identity emerging that is tied to Aotearoa and the descendants of settlers aren't happy with the names generously gifted to them by Maori: 'Pakeha' or maybe Aotearoan. But not indigenous, it just doesn't fit.
Tangs for the reading tips - does the Aussie tome contain anything about the history of colonisation there? if so, i don't think i can read it - that histroy is too horrendous to stomach, all the more so because it continues today. After I read Pilger's short account in 'The New Rulers of the World' or something similar I decided my constitution wasn't suited to hearing about what has been and is been done to Aboriginal Australians.
And no Pakeha is not an insult, at least not originally, Europeans were honoured guests on the lands of many powerful iwi - to have a missionary or white trader living within your mana whenua was once a means of increasing a cheifs and his hapu's mana, how things change - so it is counter intuitive to suggest Pakeha is inherently insulting. It has just accumulated a lot of bad press over the years, for obvious reasons.
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hey, um, Chris and Manakura, i hate to wade into your argument here, but you are both arguing the same point.
O christ no! Arguments over the small matters of semantics are hard enough to follow when only two egg heads are involved, chaos reigns when interlocuters step in. lol
Anyway, no there is a crucial difference, which is over what indigenous means and who is allowed to use it. Chris seems to be arguing that inter-generational occupation is worthy of being conferred, but I hold that indigeneity is more about ancestral relationships to land, and also where a person or group sits in colonial relationships... hence semantics!
Its one of those "my dad is tougher than your dad because..." situations.
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Chris, yes! You are absolutley right, indigeneity, and the usage of that word that is currently discursively empowered comes from an international sharing of humour, histories and experiences of colonization, largely amongst peoples who have an ancestral relationship with their land. Historically speaking, I think it was largely the efforts of AIM (Stuff the All Blacks, Jimmie Durham is my hero!)
Yes, non-Maori are of the space of Aotearoa, but they are not descended from the land, therefore non-indigenous. I do not dispute tauiwi have a relationship with Aotearoa, clearly they do, but it is not an indigenous relationship. Add to that definition that indigeneity, as currently used in indigenous discourse, also refers to the world's peoples that have been and/or still are being colonized, again not something that is part of the lived experience of Pakeha.
Yes my thesis is interesting, I can't wait for my first guest appearance on 'Better Living' with umm, ... what is that woman's name? i swear she is actually an android or some sort of domesticated zombie.
O hang on, your location is Canberra Chris, spose you don't know what the Better Living ad campaign is?
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Here we go, something from one of the world's foremost scholars on indigeneity and education and research:
Indigenous peoples "is a term that internationalizes the experiences, the issues and the struggles of some of the world's colonized peoples ... enabling communities and peoples to come together, transcending their own colonized contexts and experiences, in order to learn, share, plan, and organize struggle collectively for self determination on the global and local stages. [Indigenous peoples] have been subjected to the colonization of their lands and cultures, and denial of their sovereignty, by a colonizing society that has come to dominate and shape the quality of their lives, even after it has formally pulled out." (L.T. Smith, 1999)
Is that some contemporary, transnational, indigenous and discursive shit or what? Not a lot of room for non-Maori indigeneity to Aotearoa in that definition is there? And it isn't even similar to my definition. But wait it gets better:
Indigeniety "has been co-opted politically by the descendants of settlers who lay claim to an 'indigenous' identity through their occupation and settlement of land over several generations or simply through being born there - though they tend not to show up at indigenous peoples' meetings nor form alliances that support the self-determination of the people whose forebears once occupied the land they ahve 'tamed' ... Their [settlers] linguistic and cultural homelend is somewhere else, their cultural loyalty is to some other place. Their power, their privelege, their history are all vested in their legacy as colonizers."
Ouch.
What scholarly texts on 'contemporary transnational indigeneity discourse have you been reading Chris? Clearly not the same ones as me, so i am really interested to have a read up on where you are getting you're arguments from.
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I would hope so, bless there lil' lamb blood stained cotton socks. Can't even begin to tell what it was like to be in a small rural community decimated by the neo-lib reforms, having the towns biggest employer shut down, and a year later The Skeptics release AFFCO, it replaced the national anthem in our household for quite some time.
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glad wrap roasting bad
FFS $50, 000 plus on tertiary education so far and I can prattle on like a complete ivory tower w*nker with the very best of them, but I still can't spell.
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contemporary transnational indigeneity discourse
I am currently writing a thesis on, among other things, indigenous indentity politics in a post-modern pre-trans-industrial vacuum sealed glad wrap roasting bad, and I can honestly say that even I haven't written something that flash but ultimately meaningless yet. I am genuinely impressed.
Sorry I am being a smart arse, what I meant to say is: Care to explain what you mean by "contemporary transnational indigeneity discourse"
I understand 'contemporary'well enough, and if by discourse you mean 'a sign system that rhetorically produces bounded fields of knowledge in accordance with complex power relationships that operate at both a macro (i.e. societal) level and and a micro (i.e. subtextual or pre conscious) to convince subjects of the certain truths claims' then I am still with you, but somewhere at the uneasy juncture of transnational and indigeneity I get lost?