i (heart) identity

Today I gave a lecture on 'identity' at Macquarie University for a class of first year Indigenous Australian students.

Now, I had to giggle that I was talking about identity because I spend a lot of time defending my work against being described as "being about identity." Of course what I do is connected to identity but it can feel, as I've said elsewhere, that describing my work as 'about identity' is like an accusation: that those of us who didn't get the easy monoliths of identity (language, proximity to marae, boilup for dinner, whatever) need to take the chance to get an identity (or perhaps some identity) later. This feels like my work is understood to be kind of peripheral and navel-gazing and maybe even a bit selfish, and therefore not politically engaged, urgent or ultimately significant. Perhaps I protest too much: perhaps that is what I'm doing - of course it is, on some level. And there's nothing wrong with studying identity anyway. I just don't like the implication (felt even if not expressed) that 'identity' work is less than other work. That any research can't be doing 'identity' work as well as a few other things as well.

So here I was, talking about identity on someone else's land. And one of the things I talked about was what it means to say I am Te Atiawa. I am Te Atiawa and Te Atiawa is me. I talked about the reciprocity between individual and colelctive identification and how they're all about claims of connection: that when I tick an 'iwi' box out of a list, I would tick the box that says [ ] Te Atiawa. On the other hand, it doesn't stop with being in individual identification: if Te Atiawa was reciprocally ticking boxes, one of the boxes it (we) would tick would be [ ] Alice Te Punga Somerville.

One of the things I really noticed about this is that my discussions of being Maori were much more iwi centric than they would have been if I'd given the lecture six years ago, or even three years ago. He won't remember this at all, but a couple of years ago my good friend Paul M said to me (at 4am in Minneapolis when we were supposed to be sleeping before hs presentation at the NAISA conference the next day) that your iwi history is the closest to you. He patted his pillow as he said it: 'your iwi history is the closest to you.' I had been raving on about the limits of iwi histories and how so many Maori experiences are totally off the record/ invisibilised/ marginalised/ silenced by a set of assumptions about 'real' Maori histories and although I still agree with myself (heh heh), and although I recall that I responded by disagreeing with him at the time, I have also thought a lot about what Paul said that night. To return to my ticked boxes, my iwi history history is the closest history to me not only because I am a product of certain (Te Atiawa) experiences but, at the same time, my experiences are a part of Te Atiawa history - I'm here and so we are here. This doesn't require me to be a specifically remembered or significant part of Te Atiawa history! - but it means the contours and landscapes of Te Atiawa experiences include this one.

And what does all of this mean?

Well, the thing I'm thinking as I type this in my PJs and can feel my eyelids already getting heavy, is that my time at home over the past six years (the years between living in the USA and in Canada) has given me an opportunity to engage more deeply with my iwi identification. Other ways I've thought about myself haven't necessarily changed, but the iwi dimension of my identity has, well, deepened. This makes me stronger as I prepare to go to Toronto, but it also gives me more of a reason to come home.

And you know what they say about home. It's where the heart is.