Ko Aoraki te Mauka: performing my hybrid identity

ABSTRACT

Adopted at birth and brought up Pākehā, I discovered at the age of 30 that I am also Ngāi Tahu (Māori). I am hybrid. Hybridity is much discussed in Aotearoa/New Zealand; some envisage it as a productive space which can liberate the subject from not belonging, others argue that the hybrid can negotiate between races. Still, others feel an exhausting pull from one side to the other. As Ngāi Tahu, our iwi identity is already caught up with complicated issues of hybridity due to historical high rates of intermarriage with Pākehā. Using creative practice research and autoethnography I explored and expressed my new hybrid identity by filming myself speaking my pepeha, a traditional Māori introduction. As a filmmaker, I am accustomed to being behind the lens, in control, and to stand in front of it and speak Te Reo Māori was humbling and difficult. In this chapter I discuss how I worked with Māori knowledges in order to perform myself as an in-betweener and created a work that speaks to the ongoing losses of adoption and the complicated and rich space of hybridity.

KEYWORDS:

• Adoption
• hybrid
• Ngāi Tahu
• Pākehā
• Te Reo Māori
• creative practice research

Introduction

You are in a long narrow white gallery space. Projected large on the end walls, facing each other, are two videos. Turn to the left first, then stand and watch. I am on the screen, standing against a blank wall in a mid-shot, wearing a bright blue jumper. I am speaking, in Te Reo Māori, my pepeha, a traditional introduction used at formal gatherings. Rather, I’m trying to speak my pepeha. The rich sounds are awkward in my mouth. I am slow, uncomfortable in this language. I make a mistake and stop. I start again, getting a bit further this time. I forget something and start again. I get a little further, then make another mistake. I swear. I put on my glasses to check a piece of paper. I start again. This could feel excruciating to watch. Finally, finally, I make it all the way through.

The words of the pepeha appear on the screen:

Ko Aoraki te Mauka

Ko Te Ara a Kewa te Wai

Ko Rakaihautu, ko Paikea ngā Tangata

Ko Uruao, ko Takitimu ngā waka

Ko Waitaha, ko Ngāti Mamoe, ko Ngāi Tahu, ko Pākehā ngā iwi

Ko Christine Rogers taku ingoa

Tēna koutou, Tēna koutou, Tēna koutou, katoa

And then, in translation:

Aoraki is the mountain [also known as Mount Cook]

Te Ara a Kewa is the sea [the tooth of the whale, a traditional name for Foveaux Strait]

Rakaihautu and Paikea are the ancestors [who came to the South Island and made the island]

Uruao and Takitimu are the canoes [sacred canoes that brought our ancestors from Hawaiki]

Waitaha, Ngāti Mamoe, Ngāi Tahu and Pākehā are the tribes [I whakapapa to, belong to]

Christine Rogers is my name

Greetings, greetings, greetings.¹

Not only is the language strange to me, but the shape of this introduction is too, because here my name comes last, after place, after my tūpuna (ancestors), after the iwi (tribes) I belong to. I am performing an identity that is new to me. I am performing an uncertain belonging, caught between my old history as Pākehā (European New Zealander) and my new history as Māori, my vulnerabilities and hesitations on show.

Outline

In this article, I discuss the knowledge and research that led to me performing and recording my pepeha and through this, express my hybridity. First, I outline my entangled methodology of creative research practice and autoethnography built on a framework of adoption scholarship, before turning to a description of my adoption and the discovery of my Ngāi Tahu heritage. I then introduce Ngāi Tahu, outline how we are the most hybrid of tribes before turning to a wider discussion of identity and hybridity in Aotearoa. Turning then to the video Pepeha, I describe how an investigation of Māori knowledges led me to perform and record my pepeha, and conclude with what I discovered through this experiment in speaking hybridity, and through my larger creative practice roots journey that this work forms a part of.

Adoption scholarship and methodologies

At the heart of this research lies adoption studies. Adoption scholars argue that adoption creates life-long trauma, as we are taken from the mother that we have connected deeply to in the womb and who we are tied to through blood and generations (Verrier 1993; Lifton 1994). Society in the 1960s, when I was adopted, claimed we did not need to know our biological parents in order to feel whole (Nation 2001; Bowers 2020), but this has not turned out to be the case for many adoptees, including myself. Told we were ‘special’, instead we struggle with feelings of inauthenticity (Yngvesson and Mahoney 2000). Often discovering as we get older that a secure sense of belonging eludes us, we remain haunted by our missing childhood (Harris 2016) and may suffer from ‘genealogical bewilderment’ (Ormond 2018) as we struggle to work out who we are and where we belong.

Adoptees commonly undertake roots journeys, physical and archival searches, to try and mend trauma and loss and seek connection with the missing. Many scholars agree that roots journeys can result in repair, in finding some bearings where one has few (Haenga-Collins 2011; Ormond 2018; Nation 2001; Yngvesson 2003). However, as I found, these journeys also remind us of what has been forever lost (Carsten 2000) as we discover that ‘origins’ are elusive and the past is not just waiting to be found (Homans 2013). Lifton argues that it is the search itself that is empowering (1994). This agency is apparent in Barbara Yngevesson’s statement that for adoptees the past is not found but made in ‘a process that is more material than intellectual, an active (re)inhabiting of events in order to lay claim to them (and in this sense to “own” them)’ (2003, 13) and this is what I discovered. As a ‘reinhabiting’, speaking a traditional introduction in Māori was powerful indeed.

Adoption scholarship is the framework that this research is built upon. It informed my decision-making, my reading, making and thinking. It offered up a series of questions and challenges that I then attempted to answer using the entangled methodologies of creative practice research and autoethnography.

As a writer, filmmaker and textile artist, my creative practice is central to my conception of myself and the world. Creative practice research differs from creative practice in that the artifact is a means to the end, and the end is knowledge (Gibson 2017). Ross Gibson asserts that the writing up process, the ‘hauling out and translating’ (2010, 7) of implicit knowledge for the academy is highly productive for creative practitioners, and I have found this to be so. His ‘cognitive two-step’ (2017, vii) aptly describes my process. I moved from the ‘immersed, messy routines of creativity’ to the ‘distanced analytics’ (vi) of a scribe, where I reflected, critiqued and theorised what I had made, and experienced as I made it. This is not an easy place to inhabit. It is complex, messy. But I take reassurance from scholars who note that this creative space, where we move between thinking and making, is a disruptive and exciting place where risks are taken and bets made on uncertain outcomes (Batty and Berry 2015). Rosemarie Anderson argues that ‘auspicious bewilderment’ (2004, 326) is a necessary pre-condition of discovery, and this openness to the complex and changing nature of creative research fits well with autoethnography which asks us to pay attention to the intuitive, the personal and the felt.

Autoethnography derives from ethnography but rather than studying the Other as an outsider looking in, an autoethnographer studies herself as Other (Harris 2014) – the body is the observer and the observed. Because of this ethnography grounding, autoethnography is an embodied practice that promotes a ‘sensuous way of knowing’ (Conquergood 1991, 180) and helps break down dominant mind-focused ways of thinking (Dominguez 2019). Autoethnography does have an autobiographical impulse, but the focus is not as much on the past and personal epiphanies as in autobiography, or on relating culture to outsiders as in ethnography, but a rich place on the border (Ellis, Adams, and Bochner 2011). Just as there are dual threads of the political and personal in autoethnography, there are also dual threads of story and theory. I take my lead from Carolyn Ellis, who argues story must come first.

Ellis determines that the way to get under the skin of a reader is through storytelling, leading with narrative strategies to first engage the heart, then turning to theory, until thinking and feeling merge (Ellis 2000). This focus on stories and the private and intimate acts as a revolt against arid, impersonal, scholarly writing that fails to engage, or change, the heart (Holman Jones, Adams, and Ellis 2013). Anne Harris (2014, 2016) in her devastating stories of adoption shows how story can more fully convey the darkness of human experience (Bochner, Ellis, and Tillmann-Healy 2000). Working together with story, theory helps the reader see a broader view, to question and query texts and interpretations and make connections beyond the ‘isolation of individual experiences of refugeity and unbelonging’ (Harris and Gandolfo 2014, 568).

Autoethnography grew out of the question whose story is it we can tell? It calls on us to acknowledge power. Adoption, my story, is political. In my examination of fraught belongings and a hybrid identity this research moves from ‘personal troubles to public issues’ (Diversi and Moreira 2018, 17), while remaining both. My in-betweenness and ultimately unsolvable attempts to be ‘either this or that’ (Yngvesson and Mahoney 2000, 83) reveals the vulnerabilities of all identities and the limits of categories. A focus on critical autoethnography helps me to speak to the political nature of this research.

Stacy Holman Jones asserts that critical autoethnography addresses practices, organisations and rhetoric that privilege some over others (2018), and that this methodology promotes change (2016). The focus is on narratives that disrupt dominant stories (Fitzpatrick 2016) and allow silenced voices to speak. Holman Jones urges us to ‘create disturbances’ (2008, 235). Autoethnographer Reena Veralynne Kainamu declares that she wants her research to sit in a space where there is ‘difference or conflict or awe or tension’ (2013, 11) where it might get under the skin of the reader and make a deeper connection. In this way work can ‘jolt us out of our complacency’ (Holman Jones 2016, 1), unsettling previously unexamined ‘truths’ in order to ‘challenge processes of domination’ (Boylorn and Orbe 2016, 20).

This call to question knowledge and knowledge production fits with Linda Tuiwhai Smith’s call to decolonise our thinking, as she asks us to question how what is deemed to be academic knowledge is valued above what she calls the ‘dogma, witchcraft and immediacy’ (2012, 50–51) of people and cultures judged as ‘primitive’. By learning, speaking, and recording my pepeha I prioritised intuitive and embodied knowledges and aligned myself with my tūpuna. I also stepped into the complex space of Māori/Pākehā identity politics. Having been brought up Pākehā and spent many years in the academy, this process of claiming and speaking my hybridity involved conscious decolonising, and critical autoethnography helps me in this endeavour. I will now describe my adoption and its ramifications.

A Christchurch adoption

I was part of the ‘Baby Scoop’ era; one of 3088 children adopted in Aotearoa in 1965 (Else 1991) out of a total of just over 60,000 live births,² in the most common form – a closed stranger adoption. This meant that my birthmother was a stranger to my adoptive parents, and I was issued with a birth certificate that listed my adoptive parents as my parents (Haenga-Collins 2017). Dominant discourses in the 1950s and 1960s stigmatised unmarried birthmothers as ‘deviant’ (Ormond 2018, 150), and they were pressured to give up their children rather than raise them or undertake informal adoption within their family, as was common before World War II. Once a child was adopted, birth records were sealed so that the family could pass as ‘normal’ – related by blood. Through this ‘state-fostered severing’ (151) a new identity was created for me. Unlike many other minority groups, adopted children and their families did not typically socialise with others like them. Built on loss and often stigma, adoption was not typically seen as a cause for celebration (Novy 2011).

I was told the astounding fact of my adoption as a young child. My parents followed the recommended practice of the time, as published in The Woman’s Weekly,³ of a story along the lines of ‘we chose you’ (Else 1991). My adoptive parents, Mary and Peter, knew nothing about my birth parents and I was encouraged not to ask. One of the widely held adoption myths of the time was that we did not need to know our biological heritage because we would experience the world in the same way as children who lived with their birth kin (Nation 2001). This downplaying of heredity was expressed in the notion that we were born ‘tabula rasa’, a blank slate (Haenga-Collins 2017) to be moulded by our middle-class adoptive parents, and removing us from our mother removed the possibility of her failure and deviance being passed onto us (Else 1991). I grew up with what adoptee Robert Dessaix describes as a ‘shaft of silence’ (2017, 22) at the centre of his life. We may have appeared to fit in our adopted family but many of us felt an unease, a lack of fit, an unbelonging. An Australian National Research Study states that the ‘closed records adoption system was a violation of the human right to know oneself’ (Kenny et al. 2012, 7). In the 1980s legislation opened the way for me to find my birthmother and I applied as soon as I left home.

This early search was not successful. At the time, I did not consider trying to find my birthfather. I have since learnt that for adopted women, relationships with their birthfathers can exist outside – and trouble – traditional adoption reunion narratives, which focus on the mother and promise often-elusive healing and wholeness (Hughes 2015). I was in my late twenties when I was given official assistance to find him. Brian was living in Auckland and was immediately welcoming.⁴ It was when I first met him that I found out I am Ngāi Tahu. Brian’s mother Moana whakapapas (traces her lineage) back to Meri Wehikore and Haerenoa Te Anu, both Southland Ngāi Tahu women who married Pākehā whalers and sealers in the mid-nineteenth century. However, Brian had been brought up Pākehā, his mother discouraged from associating with her large whānau (family) by Bernie, her Pākehā husband. We became close, but he was never interested in his Ngāi Tahu lineage. This was a journey I took alone.

Adoptees who find their blood kin living in community and immersed in Māori culture can face other issues. Maria Haenga-Collins, who is Māori/Pākehā and was adopted by Pākehā parents, recorded the oral histories of other mixed-race adoptees. Carole, adopted into an abusive religious family, told her ‘I still walk no where. I still walk in-between worlds’ (2011, 46). Estelle was unable to find out her whakapapa, or her father’s iwi, and she told Haenga-Collins, ‘I’m like the moon. It’s the other side of the moon I can’t see. But it doesn’t make me incomplete, I’m still a moon’ (2017, 141). All adoptees face loss, it is only the shape of the loss that differs. As I began to explore my Ngāi Tahu lineage I discovered that my whānau story of extensive intermarriage is not the exception I thought it might be.

Ngāi Tahu, a Southern iwi

Ngāi Tahu was formed out of several migrations of hapū (sub-tribal groups) moving south from the more heavily populated North Island in the seventeenth century (Anderson 1998), eventually absorbing predecessors Ngati Mamoe and Waitaha through warfare, but mostly intermarriage (King 2007). Ngāi Tahu now lay claim to almost all of Te Wai Pounamu (the South Island). This magnificent territory includes the Southern Alps and Aoraki (Mt Cook) and is by far the largest of any iwi, however, Ngāi Tahu population was always relatively small, with many parts of the territory unable to support food crops due to the cold (Anderson 1998). My tūpuna were from Southland, where kumara (sweet potato) will not grow and they were hunter-gatherers with seasonal patterns of travelling to mahinga kai (food gathering places) (Evison 2007), including out to the remote Tītī/Muttonbird Islands.

Haunani Kay Trask lists capitalism, individualism, Christianity and disease as Captain James Cook’s ‘gifts’ that he brought to Hawai’i and other Pacific Islands including Aotearoa (as cited in Smith 2012, 21). What he took home included reports of Southland’s plentiful seals. Starting in 1780, numerous colonials, including many sealers and whalers, landed in the south and over a million seals were slaughtered between 1804 and 1809 alone (Richards 1995). Māori culture began changing almost immediately. Southern Ngāi Tahu quickly began trading and working with Europeans, as shore whaling needed food and labour (Wanhalla 2007). Relationships also flourished between Ngāi Tahu women and Pākehā men.

For Māori, marriage was a common method of connecting hapū and forging alliances, and marriages or relationships with prominent Pākehā – early arrivals or successful entrepreneurs – brought mana (prestige) to a woman’s whānau (Anderson and Niven 1991). Māori also showed a strong interest in acquiring literacy (Ballantyne 2011) and other resources such as iron and guns to fight the ongoing incursions of North Island tribes. Sealer John Boultbee wrote in the 1820s that ‘the father of a family will sell a daughter or two or three, if required, for a musket each!’ (Stark 1986, 102). Knowledge of this time is primarily limited to the male voice; colonial officials, church men and the few literate whalers and sealers who kept records. Women are overwhelmingly silent, particularly Māori women (Wanhalla 2013). We do know that high-status young Māori women were allowed a measure of sexual freedom and some choice in their partners (Anderson 1998). They also inherited from both parents (Binney 2006), unlike Victorian women of the time. In return, marriage tied men into complex whānau obligations (Haines 2009). Some Europeans had what can be called a colonial ideology, considering indigenous women as natural resources for the taking, like flax, seals and whales (Haines 2009). Some abandoned their wives and children when sealing and whaling dried up, but others stayed. By 1840, the year the Treaty of Waitangi was signed, a particular marriage culture had evolved in Southland that followed Māori marriage customs but also drew on practices from the maritime world (Wanhalla 2013). Some couples, such as my great-great-great-grandparents Meri Wehikore and James Leader, remarried in the Christian church when the opportunity arose.

Māori disruption from place and culture gathered pace throughout the nineteenth century as formal land settlements increased reliance on European culture and capitalism and disease decimated traditional communities (O’Regan, Palmer, and Langton 2006). For Māori, colonialism brought ‘complete disorder … disconnecting them from their histories, their landscapes, their languages, their social relations and their own ways of thinking, feeling and interacting with the world’ (Smith 2012, 29). For mixed-race people, the pull between cultures must have sometimes felt impossible.

An in-between people

Meri and James’ three children were ‘hawhe kaihe’, literally ‘half-caste’, and Elizabeth, the middle daughter and my great-great-grandmother, married John Arnett, who was also Māori/Pākehā. The terms ‘half-caste’ and ‘three-quarter-caste’ were used extensively in bureaucratic paperwork of the time as officials tried to pin down identities, caste coming from the Latin castus, or pure (Razuki 2019). These relentless classifications can be seen in a government report that lists individuals with their blood fractions, including my relatives. Half-caste, quarter-cast (Middle Island Native Claims, 1891) – the warm bodies of my tūpuna reduced to blood quantum.

This was a particular Southland challenge; in 1864, when the final Crown purchase of Ngāi Tahu land was completed, 68 per cent of the Foveaux Strait⁵ population was of mixed-race (Anderson 1998, 195). In comparison, in censuses dating from 1861 to 1921 mixed-descent individuals across the North Island never consisted of more than around 14 per cent of the population (Stevens 2008). This incredible rate of intermarriage muddies the water of the ‘duality of coloniser and colonised’ (O’Malley 2014, 21) and is sometimes used to illustrate unproblematic colonisation and harmonious race relations compared to the wars of the North Island (Wanhalla 2015).

However, this was not a meeting of ‘equal’ cultures – whiteness was linked to civilisation and evolutionary development (Bell 2005) and ideas around the superiority of English ways would have held sway in the majority of European minds. Then, just as now, hybridity was unsettling, and the large Ngāi Tahu mixed-race population was seen as ‘ambiguous and potentially disruptive’ (Stevens 2008, 2). Mixed-race people troubled the ‘natural’ binary order of the colony (Paterson 2010), this order being that Pākehā ruled, civilisation progressed, and ‘primitive peoples would ultimately become extinct’ (Turner 1999, 415), assimilated beyond recognition or safe as images on postcards. Smith argues that mixed-race children were regarded as particularly dangerous because they could go ‘either way’; sometimes almost civilised, other times worse (Smith 2012). Stigmatised, they could be excluded from both settler and indigenous society.

This in-between population was seen as far more newsworthy (disturbing) for Pākehā – Lachy Paterson found the term ‘half-caste’ over 2000 times in English-language newspapers between 1842 and 1933, compared with only 155 mentions in Māori-language newspapers for the same period (2010). However, Māori could also view people of mixed race with suspicion, Paul Meredith noting contemporary derisive terms such as ‘“utu pihikete” (paid for in biscuits), “huipaiana” (an iron hoop, another article of trade), and “o te parara” (out of the [whalers] barrel)’ (2000, 2–3). There is some interesting and conflicting evidence on belonging for my great-great-grandfather John Arnett. In a letter to the editor in a local paper the writer corrects him on a matter regarding the Riverton/Aparima Native School: ‘The school was erected for the Natives, not for the half-castes.’⁶ However, John stood and spoke at the Smith-Nairn Royal Commission into the Murihiku (Southland) land purchase in 1880, telling the gathered bureaucrats, ‘I am now speaking for the natives South’ (Evison 2007, 158). He must have been well regarded to be asked to speak, as everyone else was of chiefly status.

In the colony, the hybrid needed to be catalogued and contained, and how legislation and various censuses dealt with mixed-race individuals was fluid according to the political needs of the time (Smith 2012). Rhetoric around belonging would likely have become more heated as Ngāi Tahu resources dwindled. By 1865, 99 per cent of the South Island had been acquired by Europeans, including more than 34 million acres purchased for just over £14,750 (O’Malley 2014). Ngāi Tahu began asking for promises for reserves, hospitals and schools to be fulfilled almost immediately after land deeds were settled, and part of this claim was to ensure that mixed-race families were taken care of. Walter Mantell, Commissioner for Extinguishing Native Land Claims, received 23 applications for land for mixed-race families in 1853 in Otago; however, these land provisions were for Pākehā men who had married Māori wives, not for mixed-race adults, the second generation of original Pākehā/Māori partnerships (Brown 2016).

Identity; a shifting, changing thing

The Ngāi Tahu tribal identity, intertangled so thoroughly with Pākehā, is sometimes seen as non-authentic and we have been called the ‘white tribe’ (Wanhalla 2007, 807) – a derogatory term. John Gould used census data including income, housing, employment, education and self-definition of ethnicity to construct a rating system of ‘Māoriness’ for all 16 tribes and Ngāi Tahu came last (as cited in O’Regan 2001). Hana O’Regan exemplifies this complex belonging. Pale-skinned, her ‘Māoriness’ has been challenged. On returning from boarding school where her identity had been brutally questioned, her father, Sir Tipene O’Regan, told her, ‘You don’t have to worry about being “Māori”, whatever you think that means. You are Ngāi Tahu, you have that whakapapa, and that is something that no one can take away from you’ (2001, 21). O’Regan’s classmates did not see her as Māori because she did not pass (Fortier 2000) – her body did not match her stated identity. Her poetry speaks to this – ‘My body is an outsider/to my heart/a Māori heart’ (O'Regan et al., 2007, 151).

The emphasis on skin colour to denote identity is pervasive, and it can be seen as a desire to know and to understand that which is often very complex. For Stuart Hall identity, even for those who are not adopted, is fragmented and full of gaps, ‘contradictory … composed of more than one discourse … composed always across the silences of the other … written in and through ambivalence and desire’ (1991, 49). Hall concludes that identities are about the stories we tell ourselves and the fictional nature of this narrative does not undermine how effective this narrative is (Hall and Du Gay 2011). Identities are invented and conditional (Conquergood 1991), they are multiple and shift and change (Yuval-Davis 2006) and involve a ‘continual rearranging and reframing of one’s selves’ (Kraus 2006, 104). Each shift in identity carries the impression of all previous identities which continue beneath the surface (Rambo 2005). I argue that adoptees, with our grafted beginnings, have an innate understanding of fluid, multiple and unresolved identities.

No matter your skin colour, if you have one or more tūpuna listed in the Blue Book⁷ you are Ngāi Tahu. Some indigenous people, for example Hawaiians and Native Americans, must satisfy ‘factional criteria’ (Te Punga Somerville 1998, 95) in order to be eligible for funds, quota places and even land inheritance. Ironically, the Ngāi Tahu policy is not unlike the ‘one drop’ theory from the United States, where only one drop of negro blood from a distant ancestor was seen to ‘contaminate’ a white person (Boyes 2006, 20). By inhabiting and expressing my Ngāi Tahu-ness I join other Aotearoa hybrids who struggle with issues of identity and belonging.

Hybridity; a bridge or flowing rivers

Homi Bhabha calls hybridity the ‘third space’ … [which] ‘displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures’ (as cited in Moeke-Maxwell 2005, 502). Stephanie Wyse argues that Bhabha’s hybrid is a cultural broker who speaks from two spaces, inhabiting neither, and from this in-between place the hybrid may interpret and arbitrate difference and sameness (2002). This hybridity is pro-active, mediating between binary groups to mend division, but not all hybrids see their role this way. Tess Moeke-Maxwell contends that the hybrid label helps liberate her from a not-belonging and estrangement, and that this place of ambiguity and negotiation crosses the divides of ‘native/colonial, colonized/colonizer and Māori/Pākehā/Other’ (2005, 503). However, she admits that this border crossing can be difficult. Ngāi Tahu/Pākehā writer Keri Hulme calls herself a ‘mongrel’ (as cited in Te Punga Somerville 1998, 17), pointing to the rarified status of the pure-bred in the dog world, but also suggesting the kind of energy and raw grit we might associate with a bitser, or mixed-breed dog.

In Avril Bell’s study of four Aotearoa hybrid writers, Meredith regards himself as a mediator, defining his role as a ‘half-caste’ to be a ‘cultural lubricant’ (2005, 128), working to improve relationships between Māori and Pākehā. Heeni Collins focuses on ideas of fluidity and motion through the notion of ‘nga tangata awarua … the flowing of two rivers’ (2005, 128–129), but she emphasises that people can be pulled between one side and the other, and how exhausting this can be. Kelly Bevan focuses on the politics of identity choice, extolling people who are in-between to pick a side, that is, Māori. Most controversially, Michael King, a Pākehā, decided that he and others like him, born in Aotearoa, had become ‘white natives’ (2005, 132), made indigenous by time and continual occupation of the land. In this move King attempts to sweep colonisation and exploitation aside.

I am drawn to the border-crossing expressed in Moeke-Maxwell’s description. I recognise that to represent myself as hybrid is political and controversial and I am picking sides, as Bevan said I should. I return to how Patrick Evans describes Hulme as replacing the ‘bicultural “either-or” with … “both-and” … a double-ness’ (as cited in Ramsay 2008, 569). Both-and suggests fruitfulness and promise and double-ness reflects how I look to my Ngāi Tahu identity and blood kin and to my Pākehā identity and adopted family. One cannot be separated from the other (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Pepeha (4’45’) still from film, cinematographer Catherine Gough-Brady: https://vimeo.com/440905932.

Pepeha; self comes last

In a Māori worldview, belonging and identity is expressed through place as much as people. Where your kaumātua (elders) lived, and you live, is asserted through whakapapa, a once oral personal history that connects you to your hapū, iwi, ancestors and waka (canoe). Whakapapa shows the world as a tangled series of relationships interconnected through genealogy (Tau 2001) and is always emplaced, as recited in the pepeha, a memorised introduction. As an adoptee wishing to explore and express herself as Ngāi Tahu, I felt it was vital for me to engage with Māori knowledges and Te Reo Māori (Māori language), although I have no skill for language.

I was researching in the Ngāi Tahu archives at Canterbury University in Christchurch when I was given the late Jane Arnett’s pepeha by librarian Nekerangi Paul. Because Jane was a relative, I was able to take this as my own. The pepeha is a traditional Māori introduction, used at formal gatherings, a performed statement of identity and belonging, unique for each hapū, which would have been learnt and passed on. In this introduction ‘personal identity takes second place to collective identity’ (O’Regan 2001, 52) with the name of the speaker coming last, after landscape, after mythical ancestors, after the waka that brought our ancestors to Aotearoa, and after iwi. Māori saw themselves and the natural world as being intrinsically the same, and they created and represented the world through naming it (Murton 2012), and through speaking the words of the pepeha I helped create myself as hybrid.

The gift of the pepeha was unexpected and thrilling. Yngevesson argues that adoptees undertake roots journeys because we believe that an ‘alienated self must be reconnected to a ground (an author, a nation, a parent) that constitutes its identity’ (2003, 13) and here was my identity written on the page. I was also thrilled to be connected with such an esteemed ancestor (Jane Arnett’s son Peter is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist). I determined to learn to speak the pepeha aloud and to film myself doing so. To this end, I returned the following day and asked Nekerangi if I could record him speaking it so that I could listen and copy. As he prepared to do so he commented that he would ‘put on a Ngāi Tahu accent’ and I was struck again by how little I know, how cut off from this culture I am. I cannot speak Te Reo, let alone recognise an iwi accent. I listened repeatedly to this recording and spoke aloud these unfamiliar words. There was frustration but also pleasure in my mouth making these strange, sonorous shapes and sounds as I performed a language the sounds of which have always haunted me, bringing my emotions quickly and inevitably to the surface whenever I heard it.

Speaking, performing, witnessing

Once home in Melbourne, I asked filmmaker and colleague Catherine Gough-Brady to film me speaking the pepeha to camera, and I stood in my lounge and attempted to speak it off-by-heart to the unblinking eye of the lens. As a filmmaker I am used to being behind the camera, directing actors or action, being in control. As a young woman I had been determined to become an actress, but in my early twenties I had played the lead in an experimental play and my performance had been (justly) criticised. At that moment, I decided I would never let myself be that vulnerable again and turned my ambition to being behind the camera. Here I was again, over 30 years later, facing the camera and remembering the thrill and terror of performance. However, in following the call from autoethnography, I felt I needed to be visible, to claim this as my pepeha. I was also determined to explore more experimental filmmaking modes. Finally, I did not have a result in mind. This was itself a major departure from my prior practice. I was determined to let the work develop organically, for it to lead.

My forebears relied on their memory to speak without written prompts, as ‘immense tracts of history’ (Kelly 1999, 7) were routinely memorised and related in tauparapara and patere (chants), whakapapa, karakia (prayers) and waiata (songs). In turning my reliance on the written word to reliance on my memory I was honouring what Smith calls ‘the ways of knowing and the languages for knowing’ (Smith 2012, 72). This was both a decolonising process but also an autoethnographic one, where I was stepping out of the comfort (and tyranny) of the written word to experience other ways of knowing and being. But this turned out to be much more difficult than I first thought. Before Catherine called ‘action’ I had imagined that I would speak the pepeha through several times, and in the edit choose the best version. Instead, I found that in the unblinking eye of the lens I was uncertain, forgetful, even shy. There was a great deal of awkward and frustrating stopping and starting. I forgot words, mispronounced, swore, and bent repeatedly to pick up the piece of paper with the words on it to try remind myself of what I was meant to be saying. When finally I had spoken it right through without a mistake Catherine told me that she had kept the camera running the whole time.

It was when I came to the edit that I saw the brilliance of her move. It was in the hesitations, mistakes, my frustration and annoyance that the power of the work lay, so I cut the video to include many of my mistakes. On screen, I express how the identity I am claiming is a difficult one to step into, as I perform it as novice, mispronouncing words, nervous and ill-at-ease, but also taking a visible pride in the beautiful words that I speak. When the cut was complete, I saw that the work revealed my desire to belong in an almost painful manner. Through working in what Batty and Berry call a ‘playful space’, where research and practice merge and ‘boxes leak and ideas spill over’ (2015, 187) I had made a video which was distinctly different from my usual practice and showed in a powerful way the complexity of my relationship to my hybridity. This introduction introduces more than my connection to place, iwi, hapū and my tūpuna. It introduces the pain of the newly-minted hybrid, as I step into a space that my adoption cut me off from.

For some time, I did not know how Pepeha would be included in my body of work, or how it would be exhibited. Then, in 2019, I applied for an exhibition at First Site Gallery, RMIT University. Before preparing my application, I stood in the long rectangular gallery space and looked at the large white walls at each end. I saw that Pepeha could be projected on the wall at one end of the space, and at the other end, I imagined a new work, Pepeha Christchurch,⁸ that would speak back to it. This work would be in English, and borrowing the form of the pepeha, I would introduce my adopted family, adopted ancestors and the landmarks of my Christchurch childhood. When my application was accepted, I completed the new work. In my show, titled 100% Not Sure: Identity and Belonging, the two works spoke across the space to each other. Filmed two years apart, there was time and change marked on my face and in my performance. Here was my complex identity on show, the familiar and unfamiliar, the past and the present, bound together in the body of myself. In a feedback session I was thrilled to be told that the work was rich with honesty and vulnerability.

Conclusion

The pepeha that I was given places the Arnetts in Southland, looking north to Aoraki, then south to Te Ara a Kewa (The Tooth of the Whale, or Fouveaux Strait). Contrast this place specificity with how Westerners often introduce ourselves – our name, the name of where we come from and what we ‘do’. In the situating of the pepeha can be seen a deeper connection with the world around us, a connection I believe the world is now calling out for. In reciting the pepeha, I performed and narrated myself as Ngāi Tahu, and showed this to be difficult, contingent, but also tremendously important to me. As Hall reminds me, ‘identity is not something which is formed outside and then we tell stories about it. It is that which is narrated in one’s own self’ (1991, 49). My hybridity is there in my stumbling and painful delivery of Te Reo Māori. Autoethnography calls on researchers to make ourselves vulnerable and to honour embodied complexities and this is what I did.

Pepeha was recorded as part of larger creative practice adoption roots journey, and just as Yngvesson (2003) had warned me, I discovered that I could not go out and just pick up the past, like a jawbone on a foreshore. Homans argues that adoptees must engage in ‘imaginative work and emotional labor’ (2006, 6) to build an origin story. I needed to build ‘different narratives’ (Brookfield, Brown, and Reavey 2008, 476) about how family is made, away from the dominant Western discourses of blood and genetics. I turned absence into presence through my creative practice, making my past. I undertook imaginative work and emotional labour through creative practice and found the process more important than the outcome. I did to an extent repair precarious belongings and an uncertain identity, soften absences, begin to heal wounds and speak into silences, but this was not through simplifying. It was through experiencing and expressing my belonging and identity as more complex, complicated, through ‘both-and’.

Homans argues that ‘the capacity for self-invention … may be the adoptee’s secret blessing’ (2013, 149). In this practice of self-invention, I rewrote my narratives and expressed myself as a hybrid, an in-betweener. In-between Pākehā/Māori and in-between my ‘unnatural’ adopted self and my ‘natural’ connection to my blood kin. This is not a stable place. I move between these ways of being as Elspeth Probyn (1996) suggests: my belonging and identity in movement as I am pulled towards my blood kin and my new history, and then toward my adopted identity and belongings. This uneasy space is important – Diversi and Moreira reassure me that ‘decolonization needs more gray areas’ (2016, 585) that step away from imperial ideas of authenticity and purity and encompass the complicated blood lines many of us carry.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded through an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT University).

Notes on contributors

Christine Rogers

Dr Christine Rogers is a writer, filmmaker, and textile artist. She has multiple screen credits in drama, education and digital stories that have screened on television and at local and international festivals. Her fiction and non-fiction writing has been published in journals, anthologies, newspapers and blogs. She recently completed her PhD at RMIT University, Melbourne, where she was a recipient of ‘The Vice Chancellor’s Scholarship’. She is currently a lecturer in film at Queen’s University, Belfast. See www.christine-rogers.com

Notes

1 This was explained to me as a greeting to your body, a greeting to your mind and the final to your spirit.

2 Stats NZ http://archive.stats.govt.nz/infoshare/ViewTable.aspx?pxID=2bc5a6bd-4b91-41cf-871a-483d9d9cc20a, accessed 6 April 2018.

3 A weekly women’s magazine full of articles, recipes and advice.

4 I did meet my birthmother shortly after meeting Brian, but our relationship was strained and fell apart under the weight of unmet expectations, a very common experience (Nation, 2001).

5 Foveaux Strait, or Favourite Strait, is the stretch of water between the bottom of the South Island and Stewart Island/Rakiura and other surrounding islands, including the Tītī/Muttonbird Islands.

6 Western Star, 20 October 1886, https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/WSTAR18861030.2.9.1?query=John±Arnett, accessed 11 April 2018.

7 Named for the colour of its cover, this book is a census, a collection of names of Ngāi Tahu kaumātua (elders, but also adults) who were alive in 1848, based on censuses carried out by the Crown in 1848, 1853 and 1879. Collated in 1925 by the Maori Land Board, it was further revised in 1929.

8 This work can be viewed on my website: christine-rogers.com.