TOWARDS A METHOD OF BELONGING: CONTEXTUALIZING GENDER VIOLENCE IN MĀORI WORLDS

This embodied, storied research engages the project of decolonizing gender violation by examining how the production of contemporary violences impacting Māori (indigenous peoples of Aotearoa/New Zealand) is undergirded by both struggles for land and intimate relationality. These struggles/positionings and the violences they produce shape our social relations and belongings. The thesis utilizes textual analysis of pūrākau (contextualized stories) and mōteatea (sung poetry), 19th century Native Land Court cases, 20th century biographic writing, and in-person interviews to produce a new pūrākau—one that maps circuits of marginalization and belonging across three generations of Māori women in the author’s family. Utilizing analytics of disappearing/reappearing, entanglement/relating, and hunger/homelessness/hysteria, I work to map the ways colonial proximities (enacted by settlers and Māori) foreshadow the violences that come to be visited on bodies already made marginal. I also place these violences on a genealogy that includes pre-contact stories as a means by which to make space for a more nuanced and vibrant accounting of our histories—histories marked by a full and fragile humanity. By making visible racialized and classed variations in property rights, mobility, and agency I make critical interruptions concerning the stability of the binary indigenous/settler, as well as the utility of culture and return as viable decolonizing frameworks. Instead, my work with the textual archive suggests the need for a multiplicity of stories—particularly those that rehabilitate, reanimate, and recenter our female ancestors. My work suggests that healing our stories in this way can also become a powerful method of belonging for those who have been taken or lost