Decolonizing methodologies to counter ‘minority’ spaces

Abstract

Māori living in Āotearoa New Zealand are strongly connected to their communities, through woven threads of genealogy [whakapapa], spirituality [wairua], language regeneration [Te Kōhanga Reo, and Kura Kaupapa Māori movements] and a distinctive Treaty of Waitangi [Te Tiriti ō Waitangi] legacy that informs relationships, expectations and guidance from past and future generations. These are part of a holistic orientation towards the force of communities and family [whānau] being able to sustain individuals-within-community. For example, utilizing whakapapa (connected layering) is about engaging in the narrative of what it means to be Māori; a stabilizing cultural identity that many non-Māori [Pākehā] find challenging to understand. Abroad, Māori are still a ‘minority culture’ as they are in NZ, and they often find themselves dispersed from the major forces of the above connectedness and unique epistemological tradition. There are touchstones to place and Indigeneity that become even more significant as they provide a means to resist the bifurcation of the self from the environment, and the individual construct from the collective. They become a crucial part of countering the diasporic anomie of being ‘away from home’. Being a member of the Māori diaspora living in Australia, I use an auto-ethnographic lens to undertake a profound decolonizing methodology in naming stories from the present and privileging stories from the past, in order to deliberately reclaim heritage.

Notes

1. Minor Culture, Conference for the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia, University of Melbourne, 2016.

2. Cindy Blackstock’s current activism highlights the effects of Human Rights abrogations against First Nations children, with a landmark decision on 26 January 2016, that: The federal government discriminates against First Nation children on reserves by failing to provide the same level of child welfare services that exist elsewhere, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal has ruled. Accessed 17 August 2016. http://www.cbc.ca/news/aboriginal/canada-discriminates-against-children-on-reserves-tribunal-rules-1.3419480.

3. ‘An Aboriginal person is defined as a person who is a descendent of an Indigenous inhabitant of Australia, identifies as an Aboriginal, and is recognised as Aboriginal by members of the community in which he or she lives’ (Commonwealth of Australia 2016). The same three components, descent, self-identification and community acceptance, are used for Torres Strait Islanders.

4. Graham Hingangaroa Smith also suggests that ‘… the lesson of the Kaupapa Māori approach from New Zealand is that transformation has to be won on at least two broad fronts; a confrontation with the colonizer and a confrontation with “ourselves”. This is … the ‘inside-out’ model of transformation – in this sense as Paulo Freire (1971) has reminded us, “first free ourselves before we can free others”’ (Smith 2007, 2).

5. On rhizomic growth as a model for understanding knowledge production, see also Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 6–7).