[LINK] Paul Tapsell on being a Maori anthropologist

[rfmcdonald]

Savage Minds features a guest post by one Paul Tapsell reflecting on his personal life and his professional career, as someone of Maori background in a rapidly changing New Zealand.

The greatest challenge of being an anthropologist is being me. From one decade to the next I have been a cross-cultural island of self-consciousness, framed by the cross generational memories of wider kin. Wisdom comes in many forms, but as I tell my students, at least those who turn up to class, it cannot be found on the Internet. Somewhere between my father’s Maori generation of desperately trying to be English and my children’s reality of being overtly Maori you find… me.

Raised in the tribally alienated rural heartlands of Waikato naivety (built on 19th century confiscations at gunpoint), my view of the world was one of barefoot summers by the ocean, while the rest of the year was underpinned by frosts, fog, rugby and ducking for cover in a rurally serviced school surrounded by affluent dairy farms and horse studs. Right from the start teachers placed me neither at the front or the back of the classroom. Kids in the front were mostly fourth generation descendants of English settlers, while at the back were the ever sniffling Maori who had no shoes and walked five miles to school across farmlands, one steaming cow pat to the next. And there I was, from age five, placed right in the middle, on the boundary between a white-is-right future and an uncivilised dark skinned past.

Weekends provided respite, often spent with my grandmother while dad mowed an acre of lawn on our tribal property back in Rotorua. She used taonga (ancestral treasures) to instil in me a deeper understanding of the proud history to which Maori belonged, decades before these stories found their way into mainstream classrooms. Taonga either at her museum or off the mantelpiece made history all the more real to me, especially when performed during death rituals on my ancestral marae (community villages) of Maketu and Ohinemutu.

Life in the 1960s-70s seemed so simple, so straightforward. You were either Maori (dark like dad) or English (lily white like mum). If you were Maori, society deemed you dirty, lazy and only good for fixing roads or driving buses. Whereas if you chose to be English, no matter your skin colour, you could participate in a national ideology of being “one people”, but only so long as you played by the rules. I did not play by the rules. My very left wing Irish grandmother filled my head with a whole different way of seeing the world. For her, colonial New Zealand was extremely unjust and Maori had been royally screwed by the English. She kept the home fires alight, becoming the most feared” Maori” in our village. In 1915 her husband and twenty-five other kinsmen had fought for God and Empire on foreign soil, killing indigenous people of another land in the name of an English King, but for what? To return home as second rate citizens, shot to pieces, and dig ditches on lands now owned by wealthy farmers? No, her world was now here.

This changes.

More, at the site.