TUATAHI: KA AO (IT IS DAWN)
I don’t know how I arrived here. I was sure that academia had given me so much insight into my life, but I can see now that it has also changed the way that I perceive the world. I’m trying to grasp onto my stories, those things that make me who I am, but I can also see how they appear conflicted in this thesis. I keep wanting to change the academic speak, so it isn’t so jarring alongside the stories that have shaped my life, but the student in me is afraid.
I. Am. Afraid.
Regardless, I keep plodding along, hacking away at the undergrowth that has formed because I am clearing a path towards an endpoint as yet unnamed, but in my urgency to get there perhaps I have neglected to turn back and to whakapai, to clean the pathway that I have created. In going forward, I need to clear a way back so that I can return to where I started. Returning is important. It is a constant reminder that it all originated somewhere. My origins and my life source is my whakapapa. It is my genealogical link to the gods.
And so where am I? I have come to an unknown place at an unknown time to discover that I don’t in fact know much. I take comfort that I have brought the threads of my whakapapa with me though. I silently weep that it is not a lot, but I have a firm grasp on the glimmer that I have. I align it alongside my academic alter ego and I pray. I’m not the praying kind, but I seek to make way for this union between my Māori soul and my scholastic ego. It almost feels impossible to be seeking this, and yet in the awkwardness of it all I am driven forward. I have found myself a place to stand, and in one hand I clutch to my whānau stories and in the other I keep a firm grip on academia. I am a conduit for both, and it is a responsibility that is flourishing within me.
I have become the vehicle representing two different aspects of myself, made manifest through this thesis. My aim is to do justice to the narratives of my family. What I seek is to bend scholarship and mātauranga Māori into each other. In seeking this my realisation is that my pathway back is a pathway around. The path is circular and infinite. That is the power of whakapapa.
Whakapapa. It is my stronghold. No one can take it from me.
(Journal log, 26/11/16)
(This is an excerpt from my Ph.D. dissertation ‘Ka ao, ka ao, ka awatea: emergent Māori experiences of education employment transition’)
