He aha tāku e pānui ana: Dr Hinemoa Elder tells Eleanor Black what she's reading
I was excited to finally get my hands on Tina Ngata's eloquent essays, Kia Mau: Resisting Colonial Fictions. Ngata has been most familiar to me in her straight-up-the-guts comments about indigenous justice, politics, the environment, and the connectivity of all these factors on Pukamata (Facebook). She is a voice at local and international - at UN - levels. A powerhouse. Just in case you don't know who she is, she is a Ngāti Porou leader who is unwavering in her actions fighting for indigenous rights.
So you get the picture as to why I was hanging out to read her book.
"Māori are at the centre of this nation's identity," says Ngata, identity being a fundamental aspect of wellbeing I am critically interested in. She unpicks the global power play underpinning how the history of our country's identity came to be defined as the story of discovery by a man called Captain James Cook.
The Doctrine of Discovery was something I had heard of but wasn't really up to speed with in terms of its influence. Ngata lays out the details in the context of the TUIA 250 events of 2019 as a salutary reminder to us all that those who tell the history have the power. She explains how this imperialist drive continues to determine how we as Māori still don't have dominion over telling our own history, and subsequently determining our own identity.
