Browsing by Author "Morris C"

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    Not-Talking/Not-Knowing: Autoethnography and Settler Family Histories in Aotearoa New Zealand
    (MDPI (Basel, Switzerland), 2022-03) Morris C
    Critical family history analyses have generated powerful insights into the history and ongoing workings of colonization by bringing to light forgotten family histories and reframing them as stories of colonialism. Such work unsettles the descendants of early colonizers by compelling them to acknowledge the ways in which they continue to benefit from the colonizing actions of their ancestors. My family were colonizers, and some not-very-distant ancestors were part of the first wave of “settlers” who dispossessed Māori of their land in coastal Taranaki. Where my family differs from the families of many writers in the critical family history field is that they remain almost to this day on the land first taken by our direct ancestors. The question I address is how these settler farmers deal with the fact that the land that is now theirs is only recently so, and only became so through acts of violent dispossession, and that the descendants of the original possessors of that land continue to live on the Coast. I argue that one way that settler-colonizers deal with this uncomfortable history is to erase it. The erasure of this history is accomplished through the simple but effective strategy of not-talking about it, which leads to not-knowing about it. This practice, I suggest is critical for the subjective security of settlers, and it remains a crucial strategy in ongoing practices of quotidian colonization. My analysis emanates from a critically reflexive exploration of my memories, of what I know and what I do not know about the history of the farm I grew up on, and demonstrates that autoethnography as a methodology is particularly useful for interrogating and breaking the silences about colonization that contribute to its perpetuation.
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    Small stories, small acts in sites of struggle: the establishmentof Māori wards in Taranaki
    (The Royal Society of New Zealand, 7/03/2023) Piwari A; Bennett A; Morris C; Wynyard M; Shaw R
    Between 2001 and 2021, the eight iwi of Taranaki entered into Deeds of Settlement with the Crown. These settlements, which saw the Crown acknowledge and apologise for its historical breaches of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, also served to extinguish the rights of Taranaki Māori to seek further redress from the Crown. The Treaty Settlement process over, Taranaki Māori and the many non-Māori that have settled in the rohe (tribal territory) are left to themselves to deal with any lingering tensions, ongoing enmity and forms of structural injustice stemming from the settler-colonial process. This paper is not about the formal processes of colonisation or Crown-initiated attempts to atone for the past through the Treaty Settlement process. Rather, this paper concerns the painstaking work of change undertaken on the ground by local people, Māori and non-Māori alike. It concerns the ‘small stories’ of colonisation, the myriad endeavours of local people working for change in local contexts. In particular, the article concerns the fight for Māori wards on Councils in New Plymouth and South Taranaki, and the extraordinary work done by ordinary people in attempting to forge some kind of future of togetherness in a region riven by the violence of colonisation.