Someone who shall remain anonymous wrote an email today in which they wrote that our Maori knowledge "cannot and should not be 'contained' within the pages of a book."
I am not writing this post tonite in order to attack this person, but to express my sadness that we continue to believe these things about ourselves and our knowledges.
Absolutely there are things which do not belong in university and absolutely there are knowledges which are only meant for some people. Certainly there have been misuses of Maori knowledge and yes writing something down adds a layer of fixedness which introduces a whole lot of complexity, especially when written things are believed more than non-written things by people who don't understand these things or where their own preference for the written comes from.
But. But. BUT.
It's 12.47am and I'm waiting for my washing to finish in the dryer in ten minutes and then I'm off to bed - I've got a big day ahead of me and need to make sure that I'm ready for a big drive! Tomorrow Nadine and I head down to Columbus, Ohio (yep, back to the US) to attend a conference which commemorates the 100th anniversary of the first gathering of the Society of American Indians which met in Columbus in October 1911.
This gathering was called together by a group of six Indigenous intellectuals from a variety of different iwi who were already making enormous contributions to American Indian scholarship and society... and they were joined by another fifty people who were focussed on making a contribution and working together in order to make a difference for their people. Over the course of the weekend, they spent time presenting to one another about their research and aspirations, and they put together a journal and several action-oriented initiatives which laid important foundations that still provide a hefty foothold for Indigenous scholars of today.
(You can find more info about them, and the symposium which is being run my my dear friend Chad, here: https://americanindianstudies.osu.edu/SAISymposium/AboutTheSAI. Oh and you might notice that the poet Joy Harjo, who had a starring role in a few posts back in early August when she visited snowy Wellington, will be there as well!)
I find the SAI inspiring, and I have enjoyed learning what I have about these intellectual, social, political and cultural leaders, and I look forward to learning a lot more about them over the next few days. Without in any way destracting from their significance, though, one of the additional things they offer me as a Maori scholar is a nudge to remember that we too have a massive legacy of Maori scholarship and intellectual leadership, two centuries of Maori writing, and Maori people have been active participants in universities for over a century. Some of the work I'm doing at the moment for my book Ghost Writers is focussed on making these intellectuals and writers visible, but there are others (researchers, students, whanau, hapu, iwi) doing this work too. These Maori intellectuals did all of this work in order to clear enough room for us to be able to stand up and walk around in university with room to breathe and grow. I remain convinced that they did not write in order to create space for all of us to have enough room to trot around saying that Real Maori People don't write, which is the only posisble logical extension of the claim that Real Maori Knowledge doesn't belong in books.
Just as the SAI crew did not seek to be the singular and only American Indian leaders, but instead aimed to make their specific and skilled contribution to their people (broadly defined) so too the existence, presence and contribution of Indigenous scholars never seeks to replace or marginalise Indigenous knowledges (and indeed Indigenous knowledge practitioners) elsewhere. This acknowledgement is not the same, however, and anti-intellectualism.
It is one thing when other people look at Indigenous people and assume our knowledges are not worthy of being considered 'intellectual' (this is why Osage scholar Robert Warrior and others have been so insistent on calling attention to Indigenous Intellectual histories; so it's not that we get to be only historical and cultural while Europeans get to be intellectual as well)... but it is entirely another when our own people take for granted that writing, university and other dimensions of scholarly life are necessarily non-Maori. Always non-Maori. Always already non-Maori.
A fair and sustained critique of the colonial dimension of European knowledge, and how this plays out in the context of universities, and how universities are hierarchical racist sexist homophobic colonising neo-liberal elitest institutions? Fine with me. I'm leading the charge pretty often on those critiques anyway, and the day I forget where I am is the day I need to pack up and find something else to do.
But, let us not throw out the kaupapa baby with the institutional bathwater.
Universities, and writing, and scholarship, and reading, and intellectualism are not antithetical to being Indigenous. Indigenous people have found ways to work for our people through and with these things as much as despite and around them.
Sure, this probably sounds defensive because I am, in fact, defending something.
I am defending intellectual sovereignty and the multiple possibilities of operating with resolve, determination and dignity in the acres and acres of grey betwen the polar marks of Indigenous and not-Indigenous.
I am defending the several million pages of writing produced by our own tupuna, our own ancestors, in the nineteenth century, many of which contain 'Maori knowledge' and none of which I wish had never been written.
I am defending all of the Maori and other Indigenous people who have found at university a series of opportunities to make their best contribution to our people and the diminishing (even by implication) of whose intellectual legacy I can neither tolerate nor understand: Te Rangihiroa, Ngata, Pomare, Carroll and the rest of them; Makereti; my great-grandfather Hamuera; Grandad and his three brothers; JC Sturm; Ta Paora Reeves; and, yes, all the rest.
I am defending all of the Maori and other Indigenous people who have been denied the opportunity to make their contribution through the university because university and the world wasn't yet ready for them and wasn't fair; all of the ones who never made it back to university for a second chance; and all of those who did, including my Mum, my Auntie and several of their cousins.
I am defending my students, including Indigenous students of various makes and models, who surprise and humble me every single class session as they grapple with these questions and more besides.
Yes, I am defending myself, and all of my colleagues and friends and peers who I know have paid huge personal costs in order to contribute what they have done through teaching, research and community involvement.
I am defending our intellectuals and scholars and researchers and students of the future, who - if we do our jobs right this generation - will be asking different questions than the ones that concern us in 2011 and different questions again from the ones the SAI asked in 1911.
Defensive? Sure. I'm happy to take that accusation. Preachy? Possibly that too.
But there is more than one way to skin this cat. I stand behind the words of Te Rangihiroa who wrote in 1950, when he heard that Ngata had passed away:
I have no more to say. I have followed the path where the spirits led me... In another field, I have tried to contribute to the name and prestige of the Maori people and when I meet my old colleagues, there will be no question of priority for each of us will occupy our separate and appropriate riches.
Or to put it another way, when thinking about the range of ways and spaces in whcih we as Maori can participate and make a contribution, including intellectual spaces, I could quote my lovely rugby coach from back in the days of playing for Teachers Eastern: 'the more the Maori-er.'
*****
Oh, and the person who wrote the email? Has a PhD. Yeah, aye.
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