How to go home to your marae
“The mataku, or fear, of being rejected from the one place you’re told and feel you truly belong is real and somewhat paralysing.” — Lizzie Dunn.
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Tag: identity
Tania Mullane: A cultural work in progress
“The biggest challenge was being in a cultural abyss, growing up in a little rural town, where I was the only Pacific brown kid who wasn’t Māori.” — Dr Tania Mullane, on being adopted by a Pākehā family.
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How far we’ve all come
“I was shaped by both my mother’s perspective on her own history, and the dismissive, often derogatory societal views about Māori at that time, where a half-done job was a ‘Māori job’, tomato sauce was ‘Māori gravy’, and someone was ‘okay — for a Māori.’” — Chris Mirams.
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Being Māori: ‘Some of us are still finding our way back’
“Growing up, my connection to ao Māori was non-existent. My dad taught us that learning Māori and being Māori wouldn’t get us far in life.” — Shiloh Ratima.
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Stacey Teague: Getting to know my bones
“I have a lot of empathy for me as a kid. For this little Māori kid who didn’t know they were Māori.” — Stacey Teague, poet and publisher, on dedicating her book ‘Plastic’ to herself.
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A Māori “home” for our Sydney whānau
“As the mother of proud Aboriginal and Māori children and the partner of a proud Aboriginal man, I’m reminded every day that even though I’m a First Nations woman, I’m also a migrant because I came here when I was four years old.” — Jo Kāmira.
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Asking the right questions
“My journey to speak Māori became an act of reclaiming my identity. I had to know who I really was, before I could speak Māori fully.” — Tainui Stephens.
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Hey, white women: Māori culture is not your birthright
“We need to reflect on those times where we have ignorantly or arrogantly claimed Māori culture as our own — as if it can be taken and used without permission, just as Māori land was.” — Debra Hunt.
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Language, identity and ‘real’ Sāmoans
“The issue of language and identity haunts all Sāmoans who were raised in New Zealand. I know this because of the recurring conversation on social media around whether you can call yourself a ‘real’ Sāmoan if you don’t speak the language.” — Patrick Thomsen.
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Crafting Aotearoa: What Planet Do You Come From?
“The ’nesian body was not welcome, nor was anything that adorned it — unless it was ‘in fashion’, doomed to disappear when the next trend arrived. The New Zealand mainstream media did not reflect the world I inhabited.”
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Don’t you want to be Sāmoan?
“Except for church, our Sāmoan-ness never made it out the front door of our house.”
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A Tongan without the tongue — a cautionary tale
“Rightly or wrongly, my father was trying to protect us from a world that treasured English above all else, that used English as a marker for intelligence.”
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‘Vea, you made me cry’
“There was a really beautiful thing that happened during the filming. We had a change of heart which changed our head.” — Vea Mafile’o on learning to understand her father through the making of ‘For My Father’s Kingdom’.
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