Kirjahaku

Native identity is usually associated with a particular place. But what if that place is the ocean? Once Were Pacific explores this question as it considers how Maori and other Pacific peoples frame their connection to the ocean, to New Zealand, and to each other through various creative works. Maori scholar Alice Te Punga Somerville shows how and when Maori and other Pacific peoples articulate their ancestral history as migratory seafarers, drawing their identity not only from land but also from water. Although Maori are ethnically Polynesian, and Aotearoa New Zealand is clearly a part of the Pacific region, in New Zealand the terms “Maori” and “Pacific” are colloquially applied to two distinct communities: Maori are Indigenous, and “Pacific” refers to migrant communities from elsewhere in the region. Asking how this distinction might blur historical and contemporary connections, Te Punga Somerville interrogates the relationship between indigeneity, migration, and diaspora, focusing on texts: poetry, fiction, theater, film, and music, viewed alongside historical instances of performance, journalism, and scholarship.In this sustained treatment of the Maori diaspora, Te Punga Somerville provides the first critical analysis of relationships between Indigenous and migrant communities in New Zealand.

A first book of poetry from acclaimed Maori writer and scholar Alice Te Punga Somerville.Shrink-wrapped, vacuum-packed, disassembled, sold for parts, butt of jokes, scapegoats, too this for that, too that for this, gravy trains, too angry, special treatment, let it go . . ."Always italicise foreign words," a friend of the author was advised. In her first book of poetry, Maori scholar and poet Alice Te Punga Somerville does just that. In wit and anger, sadness and aroha, she reflects on "how to write while colonised"—how to write in English as a Maori writer; how to trace links between Aotearoa and wider Pacific, Indigenous and colonial worlds; how to be the only Maori person in a workplace; and how—and why—to do the mahi anyway.I wanted to pick up baby, and I wanted to pick a fight: The eternal Waitangi Day dilemma.

Shrink-wrapped, vacuum-packed, disassembled, sold for parts, butt of jokes, scapegoats, too this for that, too that for this, gravy trains, too angry, special treatment, let it go . . . ‘Always italicise foreign words’, a friend of the author was advised. In her first book of poetry, Maori scholar and poet Alice Te Punga Somerville does just that. In wit and anger, sadness and aroha, she reflects on ‘how to write while colonised’ – how to write in English as a Maori writer; how to trace links between Aotearoa and wider Pacific, Indigenous and colonial worlds; how to be the only Maori person in a workplace; and how – and why – to do the mahi anyway. I wanted to pick up baby, and I wanted to pick a fight: The eternal Waitangi Day dilemma.