“A mark on a page:” the uses of use-less research.

A version of this paper was originally presented at the inaugural Te One Kakara research symposium at Aotearoa marae (Taranaki) in 2021.

   

 

Becoming no more than 

A likeness to a faded photo

The bearer of another’s name

The end of a line

On a whakapapa

A mark on a page

A notch on a stick

A mere speck 

Of historical dust.

-        ‘At the museum at Puke-ahu’ JC Sturm

 

There is a difference between useless and use-less research. One way that research can be useless is in the sense that something useless is stink or hopeless or a waste of time. Useless research has been – and continues to be - very damaging for us all in this whare. It might be useless because it’s asking the wrong questions, because it’s exploiting or stereotyping people, because it isn’t rigorous, because the benefit doesn’t contribute to anyone but someone’s career, because it’s racist or sexist or otherwise limited... the list goes on. Surely none of us wants to do useless research. 

 

But by use-less research I mean research that has not been designed for a particular use; that hasn’t been undertaken with specific use value in mind. It won’t solve diabetes or the housing crisis, it won’t save our reo rangatira, it won’t enable us to either get a tighter grasp on capitalism or to burn capitalism to the ground (depending on how you roll). Well – maybe we could suggest it might do one or some of these things – who can tell – but that’s not the primary purpose. The kaupapa. The research question has not been on a bullet-point list supplied by a community – most people in ‘the community’ (whatever that means) might not even know the research is being carried out or might think it’s wierd or a waste of time if they did. 

 

I am wholly in support of research with utility – research that emerges from community demand – researchers who seek to engage people and knowledges in ways that create changed outcomes in a context of two hundred years (and counting) of either attempted genocide or benevolent ignoring of the astronomically disastrous statistics about us. Useful research is amazing and I am so thankful there are people who are doing it. I am not talking about use-less research in order to argue that it’s purer or harder or better than any other kind (that would be elitist, and actually kind of useless in the first sense of the word). But I wanted to share that I am a researcher whose research is quite use-less. (Hopefully only in the second sense of the word.)

 

I am currently based at the University of British Columbia where 75% of me is in English and 25% of me is in Indigenous Studies. Before this I was at Waikato in the Faculty of Māori and Indigenous Studies – before that I was in Indigenous Studies at a uni in Sydney – before that I was in the Dept of English at the University of Hawai’i-Mānoa – and before that I was technically in the English Programme at Victoria University of Wellington but in reality I spent most of my time either hanging out at, or later based in, Te Kawa a Maui School of Māori Studies. My PhD is in English with a graduate minor in American Indian Studies, which was the equivalent of Indigenous Studies at the university where I studied in upstate New York. My undergraduate and masters degrees were in English. I share these things not because my CV is very interesting or special, but to clarify that I am a literary scholar who works at the intersections of Indigenous Studies, Pacific Studies and English. 

 

Yes, English. Novels and poetry and short stories. Metaphors and alliteration. All that stuff. My disciplinary training – and most of my writing and research – is focused on things that may feel, in the midst of the predicaments of our time, like the research version of lying on the beach while there are chores to be done. Of course this is true. I regularly fret about the limits of my work, and wonder if the time and resources would be better spent on something with more use. Less use-less. (I do want to be clear, that this is not a stunt where I am begging for people to respond by saying ‘there there Alice it’s okay we know what you do has use.’ I am not seeking attention or likes or follows or retweets by standing up and undermining my own research, my writing or my teaching or institutional work – I don’t think calling it use-less undermines it. But it does describe it.) 

 

All of my research starts with the creative production or writing of Indigenous people. I am not interested in representations of Indigenous people by non-Indigenous people, or even really in Indigenous connections with non-Indigenous people – that’s all good work and some fabulous people do research in those areas, and I know enough about them to be able to teach them and even write about them, but it’s not what primarily interests or motivates me as a researcher. I’m interested in how what Indigenous people write can expand our understanding of the diversity and amazingness of Indigenous peoples, and I’m interested in connections between different Indigenous peoples that can be harder to see when we obssess on our relationship with the state. As well as being interested in Māori connections with the Indigenous people of other English-speaking settler nations (Australia, US, Canada) I’m also really interested in our connections with Indigenous people from around the Pacific region.

 

To be clear about my own position and commitments in my research: I often describe myself as an irridentist – not someone interested in fixing your teeth, as I joke with my students, but someone who advocates the return of land currently under the control of a foreign power. I also believe that something transformative can happen when we engage with the writing – the words, the thinking – of our own people. Perhaps the kind of transformation I’m talking about here is not useful in the sense of aligning to particular kinds of utility – but, and this really matters to me, our collective legacy of writing and creative expression certainly challenges the false idea that we as Māori are useless.  

 

My main current project, which was supported by Marsden funding when I lived in New Zealand, and which has also been supported by the more invisible-yet-tangible resource of having permanent academic appointments, is called ‘Writing the new world: Indigenous texts 1900-1975.’ The project is focused on published writing by Indigenous people in four sites (New Zealand, Australia, Fiji and Hawai’i) with a focus on periodicals – magazines, newspapers, journals, newsletters – and on creative publications. My research seeks to challenge the idea that Indigenous people only started publishing in the 1970s, and it also seeks to trace the many connections (creative, activist, diplomatic, literary, interpersonal) between Indigenous people in different places. I brought a whole bunch of Māori and other Pacific researchers on the ‘Writing the new world’ journey, and we even produced a podcast called ‘Writing the new world’ available on all your usual podcasting apps. The two postgraduate researchers connected to the project are working on published Indigenous language writing: Wanda Ieremia-Allan’s doctoral focus is on a Samoan language publication, and in his masters Ammon Apiata looked at some really interesting Māori language publications from the early twentieth century.

 

It may be useful to explain that this project attempts to extend two really important strands of Indigenous literary studies. It might be useful to know that, although Māori literary scholars (at least those trained in English) are pretty rare, English has been one of the main disciplines where Indigenous people in North America have been working for decades. (This is why I did my PhD on Haudenosaunee territory in the USA – to get to learn from and about American Indian literary scholarship.) So, in the US and Canada, Indigenous people have been doing really interesting things with literary studies for a while. 

 

One of the strands from there (now, here!) that my work draws on is often referred to as Literary Nationalism. A key text in this school of thought is Craig Womack’s Red on Red 1999 (yes the same year as LTS Decolonising Methodologies) in which Womack inverted the trunk/ branches of American Literature (rather than the trunk of the tree being ‘American Lit’ and ‘American Indian Lit’ being one of its branches, what if the trunk of the tree was the literatures of the Indigenous peoples of the place?) which opened up questions that reframe Indigenous literary texts and scholarship. If the trunk is Indigenous, how can we think about continuity of expression? What happens if this brings to the centre of the story a wider range of genres (and languages) than most English depts? Another key scholar in this whānau is Robert Warrior who has made longstanding and empowering arguments about Indigenous literature -including all kinds of writing like non-fiction - as intellectual history.

 

The other strand that has influenced my current work is that focused on Indigenous/ Indigenous connections. Often this is called global or comparative or relational Indigenous studies.  Probably the key text for this strand is Chadwick Allen’s Trans-Indigenous but his earlier book Blood Narrative (that came out while I was a PhD student) read Māori and American Indian texts next to each other in ways that were convincing, compelling and fascinating.  This strand looks at our relationships with other Indigenous people (and migrant/ enslaved/ refugee people) and delioberately sidesteps the idea that the state is the only frame that matters. Settler states like to keep us thinking we are restricted to their political borders, which can mean we forget about the 20% of the Māori community that lives outside New Zealand... but it can also mean that we don’t remember – or don’t remember to remember – the ways that we’re not all Indigenous to everywhere inside the borders of the NZ map. 

 

This use-less project has helped me think more about the use of writing and research that may, on first read, feel use-less. One of the publications I’ve spent a lot of time with is Te Ao Hou, the NZ govt magazine published between 1952 and 1975. The magazine was set up so the govt could communicate messages about modernity and how to be modern (including helpful instructions on how to run a meeting or feed your baby – skills that one might presume we already had given that we had still managed to exist for more than one generation), but the first editor was the Swiss migrant Erik Schwimmer who somewhat rebeliously introduced the magazine in the first editorial in 1952 as “a marae on paper.” As soon as Māori people realised this was an opportunity to be published, this concept of Schwimmers became true – the magazine is full of amazing writing by a really wide range of people. 

 

So - during the upheavals of the mid-twentieth century, Māori people wrote articles and poetry and short fiction in both languages. As I read through the magazine, I realised that while the government wanted to talk about the practicalities of life, our people wanted to write about whakatauki, pūrākau, whakapapa; our people wanted to create stories for children, to write poems and short stories, to know about art and sports and fashion. When you read Te Ao Hou from cover to cover you realise that after something was published, heaps of other people would write in letters to the editor to explain that the person was wrong, or had missed a bit, etc – in the magazine there was vigorous engagement with ideas. A marae on paper indeed. My use-less research about Te Ao Houdrew my attention to all of this amazing and totally use-less mid-twentieth century writing.

“A mark on a page.” The person who wrote the poem at the beginning of this kōrero is JC Sturm, the Taranaki iwi writer who was born in, and is buried in, Opunake. These are her words. I love how “a mark on a page” comes between “whakapapa” (names and namesakes) and “a notch on a stick” – for this poet, writing – a mark on a page – is a part of Te Ao Māori. When we are in a wharenui we might be comfortable thinking about likenesses and things that are said and notches on sticks – but writing and photographs are a part of our world too. By ‘our world’ of course I mean te Ao Māori. But also, more specifically, Te Ao Taranaki. 

 

JC Sturm is one writer from Taranaki whose amazing words have been a part of my current project. (It will probably be no suprise that the other famous writer from here whose writing I’ve been reading quite a bit is Te Rangihiroa – although there are others – including Kara Puketapu who has great articles on sports in Te Ao Hou but also a poem published in Fiji about being in Hawai’i and reflecting on Te Rangihiroa’s legacy there.) JC Sturm was the first Māori writer included in a collection of NZ short stories back in 1966 and was a prolific correspondent who sent in many kinds of writing including some legendary book reviews – but she was also an incredible poet. 

 

Actually, she has been part of my own research journey. Her book Dedications was the first book of Māori poetry I ever bought myself for me – the first one I bought for a reason other than being a required text for a uni paper. I bought it at Whitcoulls on Queen St after finishing my last undergraduate exam at Auckland. On my way to the end of that Bachelor of Arts I had dropped a law degree – much to the concern of lots of people who felt I was throwing something away – ‘an opportunity to contribute to my people’ was an argument I heard a lot, especially from people who weren’t in fact my people. For these people, something use-less could only be understood as useless. 

 

It was my grandparents who supported me most strongly – I clearly remember them saying to me ‘we don’t know why we have someone interested in poetry in your generation – but if this is who you are, this is who you have to be. This is your contribution.’ So, JC Sturm’s poetry has been nudging and inspiring and shaping me for a long time but also, I want to acknowledge her poetry helped make something visible to myself that I didn’t even know at the time I purchased the book – which was that Māori writing in English would be at the centre of my research and even as one of the key centres of my life for decades to come. 

 

It can be valuable to think about the range and focus and perhaps purpose – maybe even the kaupapa - of research we want to undertake and that we want someone (maybe us, maybe someone else) to do. When we do this, I want to humbly advocate for use-less research – research without explicit use. Not to champion myself or my own research (cos that would be awkward and embarassing) but to champion all the uri of Taranaki whose research questions, whose disciplinary training, whose passion is not what we think we ‘need’ as much as other (yes, useful) questions or training. But, if the research that is of use is the research that is demanded or required by the community, aren’t we all the community? Who knows what incredible range of questions Taranaki researchers are asking at this moment all around the world. Who knows what research our mokopuna’s mokopuna will wish to connect with through written and spoken archives. 

 

I hope our thinking about Taranaki research has a strong grasp on the urgent and significant research needs of the present moment. But I hope it also includes in its scope the full range of useful, kind of useful, and use-less (but hopefully not useless) research that Taranaki people are carrying out now – and will carry out in the unknown marvellous Taranaki future. After all, as Taranaki researchers surely our strength is that we are:

A likeness to a faded photo

The bearer of another’s name

The end of a line

On a whakapapa

A mark on a page

A notch on a stick

A mere speck 

Of historical dust.

 

(Pic of my daughter at Aotearoa marae in 2021 where/ when this paper was first presented. I wonder what the Taranaki research world of/ by/ for her mokopuna's mokopuna will be like.)

250 ways to start an essay about Captain Cook

It's the season for Thoughts About Captain Cook, given the interest some people have on the 250th anniversary of his 'encounter' (the euphemism of choice around these parts).

Here's an article I wrote about this commemoration. It was published in April in the New Zealand Journal of History 53 (1) 2019. Their publication is only available to subscribers but I have been advised I can circulate the pdf around my networks. So, my network, here it is:

Two Hundred and Fifty Ways to Start an Essay about Captain Cook

Waitangi Day 2019

 You walked out to the car 

as soon as you heard me pull in the driveway. 

Do you talk to your landlord often? 

I was up for hours last night with a teething toddler

and left for the Auckland airport at 6am with a grieving husband

so he could fly home to bury his grandmother. 

I was exhausted, even with two coffees on board,

and was aware that buckled-in baby had just woken again. 

Who? 

Your landlord…

Then something about the way our tree should be trimmed 

where it hangs over your driveway.

I couldn’t agree more;

we recently noticed how much it has grown since we moved in,

and we had planned to do it this weekend

if things hadn’t unfolded they way they did in Suva. 

We own this house. 

And that’s the bit you couldn’t comprehend:

that we weren’t tenants. 

But the Fijian guy, isn’t he your partner? 

As if melanin was magic enough to cancel out mortgage documents,

builder’s reports, land deeds, council permissions, rates,

and all that insurance.  

As if girls like me who have babies with guys like him,

and families like ours whose Māori and Fijian words float over your fence,

are disqualified from something you think is only for people like you. 

No, he’s my husband. And we own this house. 

I wanted to pick up baby, and I wanted to pick a fight: 

the eternal Waitangi Day dilemma. 

But more than either of those, I didn’t want to be the one

who was left to feel uncomfortable.

As if I was the one who should be embarrassed about a tree, 

or home ownership, 

or being Māori,

or marrying someone from Fiji.

So after clarifying the legal situation (a spouse, a house),

I asked you why you had thought we were tenants. 

The slow motion genocide of life under siege in a settler colony 

Is undertaken by quiet conversations,

small unbreakable silences, 

comments left to fester,

an unspoken expectation of neighbourliness

that means it’s not rude for you to assume we couldn’t own a house

but it would be rude for me to draw attention to your assumption. 

179 years sat there between us, 

looking from one side of the fence to the other,

wondering who would make the next move. 

(We all know that no move is your move, or at least it scores a point for you.)

Why did you think we were tenants?

You tried to say something illogical about what the agent said

which couldn’t possibly make sense,

but it didn’t matter:

we both knew what had gone on here.

In my head, while you mumbled, I smiled to myself. 

Because I had decided to write a Waitangi poem today.

I’d been thinking about metaphors

while I steered, sped and braked through acres of literal violence: 

through so many Waikato killing fields, 

alongside farms on stolen land drenched with Banaban bones, 

and past the faded sign for a café called Cook’s landing.  

And then the poem walked out to the car 

as soon as it heard me pull in the driveway.

An Indigenous woman scholar’s prayer.

May I grow old enough to be forgotten.

May my questions become passé,
may my bibliographies become outdated,
may my theories be superceded,
may I be obsolete.

May I teach students who teach students who teach students:
may I meet these younger thinkers at conferences,
may I read and cite their work,
may I watch them stand more stably than I could ever have dreamed.

May I sit in committee meetings where young colleagues raise new challenges
because the old ones have finally been put to rest.

May I watch the old guard quietly move on, but more than this:
may I live long enough to be part of an old guard
who younger scholars wish would retire.
(May I get to retire.)

May I see scores of Indigenous scholars
write hundreds of Indigenous books
that ask thousands of Indigenous questions.

May I meet Indigenous vice-chancellors, presidents, professors, and deans;
may they not all be men.

May I lie on a future death-bed and look back with regrets related to work
rather than regrets related to family.

May my passing be unshocking, not early, not unexpected.

May I run out of ideas before I run out of time.

The problem with being 100% Māori.

Māori TV’s programme ‘Native Affairs’ recently ran a story which followed up on a story about ‘Māori identity’ they aired in 2016. A presenter who appears regularly on the programme undertook an Ancestry.com DNA test, and in the story this week her results were released: she is 100% Māori! As soon as this news is announced by the white Ancestry.com scientist, the presenter beams and raises her hands in the air triumphantly. She has won! She has overcome! Something in her saliva told a commercial geneticist something which she didn’t know about herself before! In a follow-up piece published by The Guardian, she describes her own daughter reading about the outcome of the test online and responding with similar glee: “My daughter... stormed my room this morning brimming with pride.”

The problem with race and blood

The story aired on Native Affairs opens with a series of clips about race, including Hitler addressing a large rally, and an excerpt from Martin Luther King Jnr’s famous ‘I have a Dream’ speech. In this way, the story is positioned as part of a global story of oppression on the basis of race. At one point in the story, this focus on race is localised as the presenter considers a series of anti-Māori claims in New Zealand which hinge on the idea that there are ‘no real Māori’ left anymore. The logic goes that if there are no Māori people then there is no reason for Māori rights of any kind, which on the face of it feels racist, and certainly it emerges from the same historical context as the kind of racism alluded to in the Hitler and King clips. And absolutely Māori people have been, and continue to be, subjected to racism in many forms.

However, the idea that ‘there are no real Māori people left’ is a specific kind of claim: the ‘elimination of the Native’ (as Patrick Wolfe put it) relies on a particular colonial anti-Indigenous logic. Once Indigenous people are removed, land and other resources become available. This removal has taken various forms over time. In all colonies, albeit to varying degrees, the removal of Indigenous people has taken place through violence: massacres, armed warfare, genocide, deliberate acts of starvation and disease, and so on.   In some places, most notably Australia, Indigenous people were legally assumed to not exist (and so the continent became British on the basis of terra nullius which means there was noone there before). In other places, Indigenous people have been physically removed (as in the major forced migrations undertaken in the US of many Indigenous nations in the nineteenth century, including what is now known as the Trail of Tears). And, in many settler colonies in which the pesky Indigenous folks refuse to be physically exterminated, claims about Indigenous disappearance morph into the cultural realm: ‘real Māori people’ shouldn’t speak English, occupy postions in the middle class, live away from the pā, etc etc etc.

But one of the other ways that Indigenous people have been removed has been through a very powerful story: a story in which the passing of the last Indigenous person is widely mourned or celebrated. These ‘lasts’ are found all over the map: Truganniny the ‘last’ Tasmanian, Tommy Solomon the ‘last’ Moriori, Ishi the ‘last’ of his tribe in California; often their bodies (living or not) have been displayed and paraded publicly. Focusing on ‘lasts’ is actually a good strategy if you are trying to acquire Indigenous land and resources. All you need to do is come up with a definition of ‘Indigenous’ which is ever-shrinking, and this is where blood quantum comes in. Each of the ‘lasts’ noted above were known for being the last ‘full-blood’ person of their community, an idea which suggests an Indigenous community only exists as long as there are individuals who are ‘purely’ (yep, 100%) Indigenous.

The idea that blood is able to be divided into fractions is only able to be understood as a metaphor. Countless people have reflected (some hilariously, some devastatingly) on the problem of imagining that blood can be drained from an individual and sorted into separate bottles by racial type. And yet, the idea that people can be half something and quarter something else is a powerful metaphor, and one which is used against (and in some cases by) Indigenous communities in many places. For years, New Zealand census data listed Māori people as full-blood, half-castes and quarter-castes. Wherever it is used, you can trace the blood quantum back to land and resources: in Hawai’i, for example, Hawaiian homestead land can only be inherited by people who have at least 50% Hawaiian ‘blood,’ a situation which has pretty bleak implications for individuals making decisions about family and partnerships. (See Kehaulani Kauanui’s book Hawaiian Blood for the backstory and analysis.) The idea that ‘blood’ can be sorted into fractions contains its own mathematical trap: as one of my students put it several years ago, ‘you can only lose Indigenous blood.’  Colonialism and claims of race and blood have played out in opposite ways for enslaved and Indigenous people: while the colonial project benefits from enslaved people of African descent to never ‘lose’ their blackness (because otherwise they would revert from property to humans), it simultaneously benefits from Indigenous people being incapable of retaining (or at least, being able to claim) indigeneity.

The story of blood quantum underpins constant bubble of questions in New Zealand about whether there are any ‘real’ Māori left, which in turn are underpinned by an assumption that there are not. This is a useful strategy for people who want to make contemporary anti-Māori claims, because it allows them to simultaneously acknowledge prior Indigenous presence while insisting on current Indigenous absence. (This duality, of course, both updates and draws on the ‘smoothing the pillow of the dying race’ colonial claims of the late nineteenth century.) It feels tempting to challenge the claim there are no ‘real’ Māori left by producing an example of a ‘real’ Māori. ‘See,’ some people on social media have agreed with the TV presenter, ‘there are some full-blooded Māori out there! So now those racist people can stop saying there aren’t any!’ But like attempts to ‘disprove’ stereotypes by proving their opposites (eg by producing a sober Māori person for someone who claims all Māori are drunks), this approach to colonialism fails to understand that the original colonial claim (eg that there are no ‘real’ Māori left) is not operating according to logic; rather than nodding the head and saying ‘aha! I see! There are real Māori people left after all!,’ the claim will keep shifting to enable a claim to be made about Indigenous absence. The way to challenge stereotyping, and the way to challenge claims of Indigenous absence, is not to disprove them by proving their opposites. Instead, it is only possible to challenge them by pulling them apart: by understanding their history, by understanding their deeper claims, and by refusing to engage with them as logical (and, thus, ‘disprovable’) arguments.

Saying “I am 100% Māori” reinforces, rather than undermines, a claim that there are no ‘real Māori’ left: it allows the logic underpinning a colonial argument about blood quantum and ‘purity’ to remain unchallenged. (And, irresponsibly, it implies something about Māori people who would not receive 100% certification from Ancestry.com – triumphantly putting one’s hands in the air quietly suggests how less-than-100% Māori people should respond.)

The problem with genes and science

When I posted the story on my facebook newsfeed, someone I don’t know wrote a fairly lengthy reply which assumed I (and others commenting) had not actually watched the Native Affairs story or read the accompanying article. But, more concerningly, the person assumed that the ‘science’ peddled by commercial organisations like Ancestry.com is beyond question. The percentages and their associated claims offered by the TV presenter and Ancestry.com were repeated by this stranger as a kind of ‘truth’ about which I was having an inappropriate response. But what kind of ‘truth’ can a saliva test at Ancestry.com tell?

There are (at least) two answers: one is that a wide range of experts have weighed in on the limitations of this kind of genetic testing; and another is that (a little like engaging with blood quantum) it is important to take a step back and ask a broader set of questions about the uses of western science against Indigenous people.

It is simply not possible for a single genetic test to make a set of claims about the DNA of a single individual: these tests either trace the mitochondrial DNA (mother’s mother’s mother etc) or the Y chromosome (which the TV presenter would not possess if she is genetically female. And so, any one test can only trace, and thus account for, a particular lineage. But, more broadly, the important thing about genetic testing for ‘ancestry’ is that there is no single genetic marker which is found in, and only in, each respective community. Instead, companies like Ancestry.com compile all the results of all of the people who have done tests with them and line these up with the claims these people make about where they are from. This allows them to build up a series of genetic markers which they suspect is more likely to be found in a particular large grouping of people. The presenter is advised her DNA contains a certain percentage (98%/ 100%) of ‘Polynesian’ genes – there is no specific genetic marker for being Māori. There is nothing about the presenter’s genes which say ‘this person is Māori’ as much as there appear to be similarities between the DNA found in her saliva and the DNA foud in saliva contributed by other people who claim to be Polynesian. The idea of specific genetic percentages is itself as metaphoric as fractions of blood.

What does 98%, or 100%, actually mean? It is a scientifically impossible yet easily-extrapolated claim based on a set of claims about being based in science which is itself dubious (or, at best, extremely limited). Then why would it feel like ‘truth’ to the stranger who wrote on my facebook wall and, indeed to the presenter? Because we are constantly told a series of stories about science as a (neutral, unchallengeable, simple) arbiter of ‘truth’ – and the interesting thing is that genetic science is just the latest in a long, long history of science being used in order to reinforce colonial claims about Indigenous people. Through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scientists pulled out measuring tapes and metal instruments to record the dimensions of skulls, limbs and other body parts in order to produce a picture of humanity in which people could be sorted into racial types. It can be easy to blindly accept the ‘science-ness’ of genetic testing in the early 21st century even as we imagine we would never be fooled by truth claims about racial difference (and racial hierarchies) made by this kind of ethnographic science of a century ago.

We’ve seen this all before, of course: certain kinds of science being used in order to prove ‘once and for all’ truths about Indigenous people for which Indigenous people already have complex explanations. The history of human migration across the Pacific region, for example, has been carefully preserved by people across the region in oral traditions, songs, dance, material culture, technologies, and so on. For generations, Europeans have sought to ‘prove’ things about human migration across the region through various strategies which claimed to be the ‘final’ word on that migration because it was scientific. The most recent version of this has, of course, been genetic science: the tracing of history through DNA tests which gained some wider interest around a decade ago, such as through the popular 2006 documentary. The opening words of the documentary? “In New Zealand, we all come from somewhere else.” While Māori people have no problem discussing and celebrating our migration histories in most contexts, it seems striking that these opening words gently reinforce the idea that Māori have no special or particular relationship with New Zealand. The elimination of the Native indeed.

No, the point here is not that Māori don’t have ancestral connections across the Pacific region. The point is that we allow ‘science’ to make a set of claims about us that are presented as if there is a ‘truth’ that science has access to which our other accounts of who we are simply cannot grasp. A claim about Māori lineage accompanied by a mathematical expression like ‘98%’ feels more ‘true’ than other kinds of claims.

We also see it elsewhere: genetic science (and especially commercial enterprises like Ancestry.com, although they are by no means the only players in this marketplace) being used in order to ‘prove’ or delegitimate all kinds of Indigenous claims of connection and heritage. Among others, the Indigenous Studies scholar Kim TallBear has written and spoken widely about this in the context of North America (especially in her book Native American DNA); she problematizes the science, but also the ways in which this ‘science’ is used in, as well as against, Indigenous communities in order to undermine (to trump, if you will) other claims of connection and belonging which have worked for millenia. She has also explicitly responded to claims made in ads for these genetic ancestry companies in which people ‘discover’ they have a certain percentage of what is described as Indigenous ancestry. Interestingly, there is a link between the anti-black racism alluded to by the footage of MLK at the beginning of the Native Affairs story: these genetic ancestry companies have also built up a large market among the African American community, providing ‘answers’ to questions about African origins which centuries of enslavement have rendered irretrievable. It seems Ancestry.com has figured out all of our weak spots.

These comments about science and colonialism are not themselves anti-science. They are, instead, comments about the ways in which we should hold science to the same accountability we hold any other source of information, and we should not get all distracted by the truth claims made by people who spit out percentages despite their scientific method being widely critiqued. Responsible scientists working in the area of genetics would presumably clarify the limitations as well as possibilities of any claims they make.  

The problem with colonisation

So then, why would a TV presenter who publicly demonstrates her grounding and proficiency in Māori language and culture feel so triumphant about someone telling her (yes, on the basis of fuzzy science) she is 100% Māori? Why would she report on a global news site that her daughter is just as thrilled? What is it about all of the things she already knows about who she is (tribally, linguistically, culturally) that they feel insufficient when compared to the ‘truth’ offered by the man from Ancestry.com? How can a percentage derived from questionable commercial science be such a source of pleasure?  

Why would something posing as ‘journalism’ fail to draw on any analysis of the ways in which blood quantum has historically, and continues to be globally, used in order to undermine Indigenous people? Why would it fail so spectacularly to challenge rather than reinforce the colonial logics of blood quantum, even as it attempts to gesture to the problematic way that a story of ‘no real Māori anymore’ is used to challenge Māori people? And, why would a TV show which purports to centre ‘Native’ affairs, screened on a TV channel which purports to centre Māori perspectives, be prepared to provide free and uncritical advertising for a specific company?

The Kenyan writer and scholar Ngugi wa Thiong’o has famously spoken about what he calls the ‘colonisation of the mind,’ and the ways in which decolonisation is not just a political or singular act but an emotional, psychological and ongoing process.

We already have our own ways of knowing who we are: they are connected to the transformative, complex and dynamic concept of whakapapa. I hope that one day we will feel more confident about making a set of claims about who we are – not just ‘factually’ - but according to our own logics.

Sadly, but surely obviously, you can’t have it both ways: you can’t claim to be undermining the damage done by claims about disappearing Natives while presenting yourself as Native #1. 

You can’t fight blood quantum with blood quantum. But you can fight it with whakapapa.  

Native Affairs