Keeping company

We are always looking for what was lost, always trying to map connections. Once I thought I could be an archaeologist, but now I see that what I might become instead is an excavator of stories. Sometimes these stories can be dug out of family graveyards, sometimes found in the wilderness of imagination; sometimes it is tempting to pick on the living, but I can see that they won’t be happy about it and I’d prefer to go on being loved, or at least, tolerated.

I wonder whether my preoccupations are connected to that first, primal, lost relation in my life, though I wouldn’t like to place too much weight on this conclusion. There are no straight lines. There is no clear path. Excavation is the clearing of dirt: patient brushing away of layer after layer of dust, the use of fine tools. A light tap, a slow chipping away. Careful! You don’t want to damage the last remnant. Have you done the right karakia? Are the gods on your side?

‘Stories define the potentialities of our existence,’ according to Kapur.²⁷ Tangata Whata, Te Puponga, Ika. That these Päkehä were given Mäori names, even in jest, shows the intimacy they shared with Mäori. They took a different approach to engaging with the ‘other’. These first European settlers chose to see what was here already. They looked to the land and seas and peoples they encountered, and decided to bind themselves to the lives and customs that already existed. They didn’t try to superimpose their world on the land they came to.

Of course, like many good stories, this one touches on the challenge of prejudice, the mediating power of sex, and the triumph of mythology. From the first I was made aware that I came from two peoples, and that these two peoples had a lot of unfinished business page 20 to attend to. This was done explicitly and implicitly on many levels through intimate family relationships and impersonal national media. Like many mixed-origin people, I’ve encountered racism from both sides, which is to be expected, since both feed each other. What made me interested in the stories of my Päkehä Mäori ancestors was this: if we have been intermarrying since earliest European contact, and if our earliest white ancestors in New Zealand were willing to approach their ethnic identity in a fluid and adaptable way, why wasn’t the development of New Zealand culture more representative of the experiences and approaches of these men?

Perhaps a new approach lies in the convoluted mass of stories from our collective past. My heritage has only ever consisted of a multitude of messy, conflicting, surprising stories. The more of them I discover, the more I am content that my personal story of loss and confusion and strange beginnings is not so unusual. I’ve sought them out, these fiercely independent, alternative-lifestyle Päkehä grandfathers, to keep me company. To keep company with the kauri-brown ancestral wahine toa I like to visit often. I bet they like it there. They know their place, and it’s better than where they came from. They’ve paid the prices that were asked of them, adopted the reo and tikanga, earned their turf through work and war and the making of babies. Their stories represent an earlier whakapapa, an alternative form of settlement. While Päkehä Mäori ancestors had their own issues, could their stories represent another model of intercultural interaction for all of us? Could the story of Aotearoa–New Zealand develop differently if we recognised all the stories, not just those of conquest and confiscation, of laws and land courts, but the unexpected, the unpopular, the unwritten?