Diluting the vocabulary we use to describe racism dilutes the potency of the problem, writes Eridani Baker.
Yanaguana, the river in San Antonio, Texas, and Eridani, the river constellation, feature in the book Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education. The two rivers, earthly and celestial, meet to make a bridge tīpuna used to travel between worlds, a path for ancestral knowledge. Kia ora, ko Kāi Tahu ahau, ko Eridani tōku ingoa. I was named after the river of stars. It’s a big name to live up to. The last name I use is Baker – it’s my dad’s adopted father’s name. He was an Anglican lay minister. Ko Hakiri tōku ingoa whānau, it means someone who speaks the truth so that the listener feels it. Whakarongo mai, my tīpuna have something to say.
Professor Linda Tuhiwai Smith, one of the book’s authors, is a speaker at Te Tiriti Based Futures and Anti-Racism 2022, an online event put on by a coalition of 36 organisations. The word “anti-racism” has intentionally been used in the event’s title, rather than “diversity”. Why did we do this? Because the word “diversity” can obscure the issue, allowing the problem to continue.
Naming something does not bring that thing into effect. AUT’s “Māori and Pacific Early Career Academic Programme” candidate information pack notes that AUT “aspires to be the university of choice for Māori and Pacific communities”. But just because a diversity policy exists, doesn’t mean diversity practice automatically follows. Claiming my “Māori-ness” at the university was greeted by some as a challenge to the authority of the dominant culture within the institution. It feels like a political act. I’ve given up worrying that I’ll be seen as precocious when I email lecturers some variation of “aroha mai, but you’ve left te ao Māori out of this week’s reading material, here is something that might be useful”. You can be Māori within the academy, but it’s extracurricular.
The effort to challenge the status quo is wearying and often leaves me feeling threadbare, but it’s not optional. A tangi spilled out of me when my best school pal suggested I “take a day off from being Māori at uni”. Her willfully ignorant suggestion was the product of a society that wants to sweep away the Indigenous experience, a society that is racist. I am Māori, it’s not optional. Diversity policies have their whakapapa in the institutions “failure to be equitable” but they are then used as evidence of practice, while racism can still remain.
The popularity of the term “diversity” has meant that terms like “anti-racism” recede from use. Diluting the vocabulary dilutes the potency of the problem. In Aotearoa, when words like anti-racism disappear from policy, the history of the genocidal treatment of Māori is obscured. We are mana whenua and we will not disappear.
Hearing Pākehā debate Te Tiriti can be triggering. During a Zoom lecture, a Pākehā student commented that my “anger” at seeing Te Tiriti ignored put her off trying to understand her obligation to it. When she labelled me as “just another angry Māori woman”, my private messages filled with offerings of support. But my friends, self-identified “allies”, stayed silent. That was a really bad day. I remember looking at their little Zoom squares and realising that they weren’t going to help. Weeks later one of them apologised for being “a chicken and a coward”. She didn’t speak up because she felt like she had too much to lose. She has the privilege of being at home in an institution that enables some to be; others not.
We won’t end inequity if “diversity work” is only done by minorities. To enact change, we all have to have the guts and reflective function to see racism as racism and call it out. That is why we need communities of learning like Te Tiriti Based Futures and Anti-Racism 2022.
I’m working on this event because of Heather Came, who is Pākehā. She begins her lectures by projecting an image of her ancestors, names them as colonisers, apologises for the trauma they inflicted on tangata whenua, and commits to “paying back rent and upholding Te Tiriti o Waitangi”. She is doing the work. She initiated this event and persuaded others to join her. Ka whawhai tonu mātou mō te āke, āke, āke! I wanted to be on the team.
Te Tiriti Based Futures and Anti-Racism 2022 runs across 10 days featuring 38 webinars, and is designed to provide practical tools to advance anti-racism. Professor Tim McCreanor, professor Dominic O’Sullivan, associate professor Heather Came and associate professor Jacquie Kidd will present their Critical Tiriti Analysis. This new tool has been utilised by activists, policy-makers, scholars and Crown agencies to inform the development of actionable policy. Their tool includes evaluation and planning strategies that ensure policies don’t sit dormant. It is simple to use and at its heart is a tool for advancing racial justice.
A Kāi Tahu whakatauki says: Mō tātou, ā, mō kā uri ā muri ake nei – for us and our children after us. My great nannie Hakiri knew I would exist. She fought for our whenua in the land courts, and publicly for the retention of mātauranga wāhine. The fight to uphold Te Tiriti can feel like a fight for life, but I’m not here alone.
University can feel like an unwelcome utilitarian place to be Māori. It’s an inherently colonial institution. Even if no one at the university is racist, any colonial institution is still embedded with racism and white privilege. I’ve seen te ao Māori slides, tacked to the end of presentations and then skipped over entirely, by professors who have built their careers on “diversity”.
Witnessing your worldview treated as an afterthought makes you feel like an afterthought. I cried and held hands with the only other tauira Māori in my cohort as Te Tiriti was discussed and comments like “it was so long ago, can’t they get over it” were made. The institution is racist, but naming it doesn’t change it, action will. Anti-racism is a verb, it requires you to do something, that is what we are doing with Te Tiriti-Based Futures and Anti-Racism 2022.
In the foreword to Ngā Kete Mātauranga, Professor Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes about how “power, energy and diversity…can be brought into the world by Māori scholars”. I want more mātauranga everywhere, we must remove the hazy veil of perceived incompatibility between Indigenous knowledge and the presumed superiority of ‘scientific’ knowledge. I want Te Tiriti to be upheld. We should be a priority, not an afterthought.
Heather Came calls herself an activist scholar, that’s me too. I am fighting for racial justice. It can feel like a futile effort that scratches only the surface. There is hope when you look to your side and see that you are part of a collective. The speakers at our event are experts in dismantling the master’s house. He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tāngata he tāngata he tāngata!
You can register for the event here. Nau mai, haere mai, we’d love to have you.