Aotearoa and Becoming “Us”
This article by Hannah Chapman is the second of two looking at our local response to the the murder of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests here in Aotearoa. The first, “Why George Floyd Matters in Aotearoa”, can be found here.
Dr. Martin Brokenleg (Lakota Sioux) says that heart knowledge is the resilience of indigenous peoples that has helped us survive colonisation. My father is Māori and my mother is Irish. Two different families, from two different cultures, but with a common reason to figure those differences out – becoming “us”.
The term “ally” has a place in a global dialogue about issues of racial justice and reconciliation and I value it. But this article isn’t about “how to be a white ally”. This article is about lessons I learned from adults in my Māori and Irish families that I hope might be helpful to Pākeha people who want to strengthen their heart knowledge - that justice might roll down like a river in Aotearoa. Here is what they taught me.
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They knew who they were
God designed and intended for you to be who you are. If you don’t know your whakapapa then I encourage you to find out. If your response is, “I’m white”, who were you before you were white? Whiteness is a construct that is wielded as a weapon of oppression and which requires you to sacrifice who you were in order for it to exist. When you can celebrate who you are, you honour the one who made you so, and you also push back against the oppression that ‘whiteness’ perpetuates.
My Uncle Reuben used to greet my Mum by calling out, “Hey, Pākeha!” and she’d respond in kind, “Hey, Māori!” With cheek and banter their greetings were banners held aloft that proclaimed, “I see you, I love you.”
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They invited each other in
When I say that my freedom is bound up with yours, it’s because I choose to submit myself to a dream of a future of ‘we’ in Aotearoa. I often hear Pākeha people say things like “we’re holding space”, or “making space” for Māori. But that’s often because they’ve assumed the spaces are theirs to start with. There’s no ‘we’ in that.
In our family ‘we’ looked like tables laid with fresh soda bread or barmbrack with jam alongside a pot of boil up, served with stories and laughter. Those tables happened because the adults chose to create and occupy a space together, each bringing whatever they had for the wellbeing of all. Therein lay freedom.
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They had a vision of the future
Decolonisation matters greatly, as does the future that lies beyond the deconstruction. What kind of future can you envisage? Where are you located in that future and what steps are you going to take next that will direct you towards that place? How are you being a good ancestor now? Our family living in post WWII Ireland and England were inspired with a new vision for the future by one sentence from a letter Poppa’s brothers wrote while posted in NZ, “The streets here are lined with orange trees.” What is your inspiration?
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They listened and learned
Our family stories weren’t always easy ones to hear - post-treaty Ireland, WWII, land confiscations and attempted cultural genocide, yet children were always included. Let the children listen to the stories that come easy and the ones that come hard. Don’t be in a hurry to offer a resolution when there is none. Kids can handle ambiguity and mystery better than many adults can. Hold them when their feelings are big. As my parents would say, “Insulate your children, don’t isolate them”. Model too, what good listening looks like. It’s a posture. Through story, give them opportunities to develop a resilience and strong heart of their own.
Learning flourishes imagination, and imagination, action. We need to be sure that our imaginings are rooted in our own soil so that the resulting actions have real meaning and consequence that can be sustained. Find the voices of authentic leadership here and seek to understand their work. Invite them to dinner! Draw from contributions from overseas too but be sure to do the work to contextualise them.
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They dwelled in each other’s inter-connectedness
My beloved Irish grandparents chose to be buried as close as they could be to our marae urupā. There aren’t any words for how that makes me feel. Reconciliation for Māori and Pākeha cannot happen outside the inter-connected relationships we have with each other, whenua and wairua. Pākeha need to figure this out in their own local context. There is no room for, “I can’t” in NZ – it’s too small. There is only, “It’s too hard” and that just isn’t good enough.
What if local churches contacted mana whenua to honour them for maintaining their kaitiakitanga which the church has benefitted from, rather than to benefit the churches “bicultural journey”? What if denominational leadership consolidated assets so that they could give land back to mana whenua with no strings attached? How could these kinds of actions help bring about justice? How might they contribute to our collective heart knowledge?
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This stuff isn’t easy, nor are any outcomes certain. Justice and reconciliation are messy and require of us a willingness to step out together on to the common ground of Jesus’ way and commit to doing that time and again. Know that the feelings you feel along the way are not new to us as Māori. Being generations deep in holding onto hope, we know how painful this can be. Do it anyway.
By the time I came along, my Māori Koro called my Scottish Great-Gran, “My Sweetheart” and she called him, “My Darling”. Somewhere along the way, they figured it out. I reckon we can too.
By Hannah Chapman.
Hannah Chapman is Ngāti Tuwharetoa, Whakatōhea and Irish. She has the privilege of living on ancestral lands in the whānau papakāinga in Turangi with her 3 children and wider whānau. Committed to racial justice and reconciliation, Hannah is a Kaikōkiri for Ngā Wai Hōhonu, the Aotearoa partner of NAIITS: An indigenous Learning Community and contracts to Te Ora Hou Aotearoa and the Venn Foundation.
