A HOLIDAY READING LIST

As the Gregorian calendar year winds towards an end, I am preparing to take a break from the daily grind and go on ‘holiday’. 

The dictionary says that the word ‘holiday’ comes from the Old English ‘hāligdæg’, meaning ‘holy day’.  It also tells me that the modern meaning of holiday is “an extended period of leisure and recreation, especially one spent away from home or in travelling.”  But for me, and I suspect most Iwi insiders, ‘holiday’ mainly means going home to the amazing places and people who raised and imprinted us from birth to be and to belong.

Even though my body has not yet hit the beaches, bushes, valleys and vistas of home, my thoughts are there and my preparations are under way.  That includes compiling my holiday reading list, much of which consists this year of academic papers, treatises and theses downloaded from academia.edu, a free research sharing website.

My current focus and interest has been sparked by the relatively new field (in New Zealand anyway) of ‘critical white studies.’  As an Iwi insider, I suffer from research fatigue, particularly research carried out on Iwi Māori by scholars steeped in Eurocentric pedagogies and methodologies.  They may mean well in most cases, but unless they are aware of their own ethnicity and its attendant privileges, they are quite hoha.

So, I am glad to see more and more white scholars turning the research lens on their own ethnicities and checking their own assumptions, imaginaries, isms and impacts on the indigenous Iwi in whose lands they live.

My list opens with a paper by Vincent O’Malley and Joanna Kidman titled, Settler colonial history, commemoration and white backlash: remembering the New Zealand Wars.  It researches the backlash that occurred when students from a North Island secondary school began a petition to Parliament in 2014 seeking a national day of commemoration for the victims of the New Zealand Wars and sparked a national debate about how, why and whether New Zealanders should remember the wars fought on their own shores.

Other papers on my reading list include Katie Higgins, The migrancy of racial and settler imaginaries: British migrants in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, as well as, Settling in: The politics of Pākehā Ethnicity by Steve Matthewman and Douglas Hoey, and Jerssica Terruhn’s paper, Everything is different now: Memory and settler identity in Aotearoa New Zealand.

  

I have two main purposes this summer holiday; first, to refresh myself through my mahi toi (arts and crafts), whanaungatanga (relationships) and whakangahau (social occasions).   And second, but just as importantly, to better understand how such a significant section of our population have managed to become so selectively amnesiac about the privileging of white people off the back of ongoing Māori dispossession.   

When I return next year, it will be with greater clarity in my work of redressing the damaging imbalances wreaked on everyone as a result.  Mauri ora!