‘I Have Māori in Me’: Shades of Commitment and Negotiation of Subjectivity in an Aotearoa/New Zealand School

ABSTRACT

Based on ethnographic fieldwork (1997–1998) at a secondary school with a Māori−English bilingual unit in Aotearoa/New Zealand, this article examines two different ways students with Māori ancestry identified themselves contextually: those in the bilingual unit identified themselves mostly as being Māori, while those in mainstream classes identified themselves mostly as Pākehā (white New Zealander) but occasionally as being Pākehā but having Māori in them. Existing analytical frameworks, such as symbolic ethnicity (Gans 1999) or citizenship (Ong 2003), fail to capture the contextual and dialogic display of these different shades of identification practices. Applying the notion of commitment and its disavowal proposed by Doerr for this special issue (2013), this article analyses these two identification practices as a proactive commitment and a hedging commitment linked to institutional belonging to the bilingual unit and mainstream classes, respectively, and to the wider cultural politics of the official yet tokenistic biculturalism of Aotearoa/New Zealand.

KEYWORDS:

• Identification practices
• bilingual education
• Māori
• Pākehā
• Aotearoa/New Zealand

Acknowledgements

I thank the people who supported my fieldwork, especially Rex Kerr, Mel Cooper, Akuhata Akuhata, Alistair Murchie, Hine Wilson, Pania Te Maro and Jackie Holland; researchers in Aotearoa/New Zealand, especially Jill Bevan-Brown, Michael Goldsmith and Paul Spoonley; the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad programme which funded my fieldwork; John Borneman, Benedict Anderson, Jane Fajans and Hérve Varenne as well as Youngmi Lim, Shinji Sato and Char Ullman who commented on earlier drafts; the editor, Mark Graham, and anonymous reviewers of Ethnos for their constructive comments; and Jaime Taber for copyediting the drafts. The text's deficiencies are wholly my responsibility.

Notes

1. In the 1980s, some Māori demanded instead biculturalism, a term used earlier by the Māori scholar Sir Apirana Ngata, albeit differently, that recognizes the special status of Māori as an indigenous people and as a signatory of the Treaty of Waitangi (Walker 1990). Official statistics recognized the following groups: ‘New Zealand European’ 67.6%, ‘Māori’ 14.6%, ‘Asian’ 9.2%, ‘Pacific peoples’ 6.9%, ‘MELAA [Middle Eastern, Latin American, and African]’ 0.9%, and ‘Other ethnicity’ 11.2% (Statistics New Zealand 2007: 7).

2. For example, breaches of Treaty of Waitangi were often redressed in commodified terms – as transfer of assets rather than shared decision-making power (Bargh 2007; Smith 2007).

3. http://www.stats.govt.nz/Census/2006CensusHomePage/QuickStats/quickstats-about-a-subject/maori/language-ko-te-reo.aspx (Accessed 13 May 2011).

4. In the non-census domain, the Electoral Amendment Act of 1975 defined Māori as ‘a person of the Māori race of New Zealand: and includes any descendants of such a person who elects to be considered as a Māori’ (also see the Māori Affairs Amendment Act of 1974; emphasis mine).

5. Because some administrators taught regular classes, I call these administrators ‘teachers’ hereafter.

6. There were 37 mainstream and 6 (ex-)bilingual teachers at Waikaraka High School in total. All (ex-)bilingual teachers identified themselves as Māori. Mainstream teachers identified themselves as Pākehā (34), Māori (1), British (1) and Canadian (1).

7. Although the students who identified themselves as being Pākehā who have Māori in them introduced were both female, I did hear male mainstream students express their ethnic affiliation in that way. The same holds true in the case of female bilingual students' identification as being Māori.