Autonomous Genealogies and Indigenous Reclamations: Decolonial (and Anti-Colonial) Interventions to Genealogy

1. Introduction

Indigenous communities the world over have their own concepts of genealogy, many of which consider the living and non-living beings that we share time and space with, spanning the earth beneath us to the heavens above. However, with the colonial and settler colonial lived realities that we find ourselves within, expansive Indigenous concepts of genealogy wrestle with imposed Western notions of genealogy which are human-centered; prioritize the nuclear family, cisheterosexual relationships, and patriarchy; prioritize linear understandings of time and temporality; and restrict relationships between people and place. Western notions of genealogy that fixate on Indigenous blood and biological reproduction work to the benefit of colonial capitalism, concerned with reproducing the right kind of future citizens and containing, eradicating, or assimilating all others. The fixation on Indigenous blood also creates a limited and essentialist genealogy for what Indigeneity is, which Arcia Tecun, in this Special Issue, describes as a post-apocalyptic present. Coming from a collective understanding that colonial notions of genealogy seep into Indigenous lived realities, this Special Issue focuses on decolonial (and anti-colonial) interventions into genealogy.

Each of the authors in a variety of ways—as discussed below—build on previous Genealogy Special Issues that examine Indigenous perspectives on genealogy (Kukutai and Mahuika 2021), decolonizing ways of knowing that privilege non-Western conceptions of genealogy (Breunlin and Jackson 2020) and Indigenous conceptions of identity and community (Carlson and Kennedy 2021). Key themes include intersectional ways of looking at colonial oppression in the context of genealogy, Indigenous reclamation, resistance and healing, and the place of religion in Indigenous genealogy. Consistent across every article is memory and remembering. The scholars, in this collection, show that efforts to decolonize and apply anti-colonial interventions must be predicated on a simultaneous understanding of contemporary functions of colonialism across spaces, while also asserting and returning to Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies.

The authors in this collection are all Indigenous and mostly early-career researchers, who offer new and novel approaches that extend and deepen existing critiques on colonialism within their given contexts. They challenge colonial genealogies through writing from the way that Indigenous spaces and human and non-human practices are nuanced and layered, asserting ‘hidden’ Indigenous realities and grounded normativity in an academic context. In their prioritization of Indigenous thinking, they are calling for a world inclusive of Indigenous futurities, lifeworlds and lifeways, aligning with Native Hawaiian scholar J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, who explains, “what I am advancing here is a different ethical ground for decolonial Hawaiian futures that are based on nonproprietary relationships—those that are consensual and life affirming” (Kauanui 2018, p. 198). Hence, genealogy as discussed throughout centers Indigenous life and affirms Indigenous futures.

2. Whakapapa

Prominent in this collection is the Māori concept of whakapapa, used to rethink and expand genealogy. Seven papers in this issue are authored by Māori from various iwi (tribes) in Aotearoa New Zealand, hence the richness of discussion on whakapapa. A Māori approach to genealogy is usually described as whakapapa—although Māori scholars here are careful to argue that it is so much more. In our Call for Papers for this Special Issue, we described whakapapa as a Māori way of knowing that encompasses time, space, emotions, plants, and animals, going beyond human genealogies to include the origins of all things (Tau 2001). While the wording and scope of whakapapa may vary among scholars, the essence of whakapapa as a means for ordering the world is consistently understood, as evidenced by the articles in this collection.

In practice, however, the idea of whakapapa is deployed in a range of ways. For example, it is common for Māori scholars to recite their whakapapa—their genealogical connection to their tribal groups in Aotearoa—when providing an author biography to accompany a written article. This practice is arguably quite different to the oral recitation of whakapapa in a Māori pōwhiri (a ceremony for welcoming visitors to a central tribal meeting place, or marae), yet both methods relay Māori identity, tribal membership, and connections to entities beyond the self. Ngāti Porou scholar Nēpia Mahuika provides an overview of the ways that whakapapa has been used by Māori and non-Māori in research, and notes how whakapapa has been deployed differently in research over time. He writes that after the 1980s, in response to a groundswell of Māori activism, approaches to whakapapa shifted from “anthropological and ethnographical questions about kinship… [to] land claims and historic grievances… By the 1990s Māori were describing whakapapa approaches in various ways” (Mahuika 2019, pp. 8–9). Other uses of whakapapa include a framework for Māori tikanga and kawa (protocols and customs) in Māori institutions and research ethics. Mahuika (2019) insists that Māori genealogical knowledge or whakapapa is defined as follows:

Is, and always has been, grounded in cultural protocols and contexts that are paramount to the way Māori identify and relate to each other and the world around them. Whakapapa as an approach, whether it be relevant to genetics, history, education, or elsewhere, is inextricably connected to underlying protocols and tribal ethics

(p. 10)

One potential tension associated with a focus on ‘decolonial and anti-colonial interventions’ that center Indigenous approaches to genealogy, like whakapapa, is a loosening of tribal ethics. Whakapapa understood through a tribal context manifests as shared assumptions and cultural norms (tikanga and kawa) that are performed and practiced among community members. Yet, as contributors of this collection show, whakapapa is also a means for asserting a way of knowing and being in the world that sits outside of the colonial–capitalist patriarchy that seeks to dominate settler societies.

The authors shared much common ground in terms of how they thought about whakapapa as an epistemological and relational practice, yet as Palawa scholar Maggie Walter (2022) reminds us, “colonization is inscribed into the lived realities of Indigenous Peoples, now and then, and remains the primary source of the massive societal disruption of Indigenous social life across the Anglosphere.” (p. 13) Indigenous lifeworlds structured by colonization invariably affect how we encounter and use Indigenous knowledge. Therefore, any decolonizing project that aims to understand ‘as fully as possible’ the effects of colonialism should also be vigilant of ways that colonial hegemony is reproduced in the process of uncovering. To this end, we ask the following questions: How do Māori think about and deploy whakapapa in service of decolonial and anti-colonial interventions? What underlying protocols are at work in this instance?

Different temporal concerns across the past, present, and future feature in the seven articles that discuss whakapapa. For some, memory and remembering of the past becomes vital for healing and connection in the present; for others, whakapapa is tightly wedded to and practiced in the present moment, while for others whakapapa offers “enduring lifeways that are ancient in origin but that will carry [Māori] into the future and enable [Māori] to navigate the complex systems of power that are part of our colonized realities”. (see Simmonds, this special issue, p. 2) This powerful statement from Simmonds’ piece emerges from the pedagogical potential of whenua (land), who nourished our ancestors before colonization and can continue to guide us strongly through present-day challenges toward promising futures.

3. Autonomy and Genealogical Reclamations

Individual and collective autonomy is a powerful outcome of Indigenous genealogical practice. As the authors demonstrate, whakapapa is enacted to eradicate colonial violence and assert a full Indigenous humanity that is not on offer under the settler colonial status quo. Beyond whakapapa, Arcia Tecun, in his exposition of global Indigeneity, uncovers the dystopian realities of today’s status quo for Indigenous people. He argues that understanding the more complex relationalities across time and space that form oneself in the present offers a new genealogy toward a post-post-apocalyptic future in which one’s Indigenous humanity is complex yet full. Here, Indigenous autonomy is possible in its holding together of tensions. Similarly invested in the uncovering of coloniality, Lopesi and Keil map a gafa or Samoan genealogy of Samoan women’s reproductive labor through a Pacific feminist lens to both critique and find new possibilities. Promiscuity, Lopesi and Keil argue, is one way to step out of colonial genealogies that police and restrict Indigenous bodies. They argue that promiscuity can delink one from colonial genealogies and reconnect one with expansive Indigenous genealogies that are otherwise precluded within coloniality.

There is an implicit tension, however, that is not only attributed to this Special Issue but also to writing about Indigenous approaches to genealogy and Indigenous perspectives within academia more broadly. That tension is how Indigenous knowledge systems in this context are constrained by the medium of academic journal writing. Constructing a written argument for research purposes forces the author to delineate conceptual boundaries around something that is in theory unboundable (i.e., whakapapa). Understanding how Indigenous approaches to genealogy are controlled and curated by the writing process can encourage writers to adopt more innovative and less constrained narrative approaches for academic writing (see Gillion, this Special Issue). Indigenous people have long adopted storytelling methods and methodologies within their academic work while using these processes to demonstrate how something as expansive as whakapapa ‘works’ in real life. As apparent in a number of articles, decolonial and anti-colonial thinking and practices of genealogy are not an academic thought exercise but an approach to living and thinking that authors then reflect on through their academic work.

4. Genealogy in Context

Each contributor locates, reworks, and remembers genealogy within various contexts. While there are numerous points of connection across the collection, we have developed four subthemes that describe these various contexts: Global movements; Aotearoa and memory, environment, and well-being; Aotearoa and colonial institutions; and Aotearoa and embodied experience.

• Global movements

While Aotearoa is the geographic focus of this Special Issue, a non-Māori global Indigenous and diasporic Indigenous positionality routed through Aotearoa is also of note. Arcia Tecun writes on the global Indigenous positionality as an Indigenous person who previously lived in Aotearoa with strong ties there still. Through his lived experience accrued globally in various settler colonial host countries, Tecun offers a unique insight into the varied and complex experience that makes one’s Indigenous subjectivity in the present. Namely, Tecun identifies Indigeneity as a result of colonial modernity, describing today’s world as post-apocalyptic. Confronting colonially purist and racially essentialist categories of Indigeneity, Tecun offers Global Indigeneity and Indigenous metaphysics as a portal and entry beyond coloniality through fugitive sociality and subversive relationality, resulting in an alternative genealogical consciousness.

Lana Lopesi and Moeata Keil are also concerned with an alternative genealogical consciousness. As two Samoan scholars with strong connections to Aotearoa (where Lopesi was born and raised, and where Keil now lives and works), their article focuses on the colonial shift of Samoan genealogies as relational to wider kinships and the environment to the colonial emphasis of heteronormative nuclear families. Within this context, Samoan women are disciplined into good reproductive laborers who reproduce the moral family, more laborers, and wider society. In the end, Lopesi and Keil argue for promiscuity as a way of stepping out from the labor of reproduction, theoretically recovering an Indigenous Samoan feminist genealogy where Samoan women’s labor is part of Indigenous feminist world-building and not colonial-imposed genealogies.

• Aotearoa and memory, environment, and well-being

One consistent thread through a number of the articles is memory. Collective memory through memorialization is one way that memory becomes solidified and externalized. Liana MacDonald explores collective remembering through the Boulcott Memorial Research Project, which sought to include iwi Māori perspectives on the battle of Boulcott’s Farm, countering the Western collective remembering prioritized in such memorials. Whakapapa, as epistemology in this context, then enables for a relational approach re-emphasizing the importance of Māori perspectives here. MacDonald draws on whakapapa, wā, and wānanga to show how Indigenous collective remembering through oral traditions is a means of practicing whakapapa that aligns with Māori temporalities and is tied to the changing circumstances of iwi politics and settler colonialism.

Naomi Simmonds, Meri Haami, and Joni Angeli-Gordon emphasize remembering, reclaiming, and reconnecting with Indigenous epistemologies and whakapapa to break ties with colonization and settler colonialism and strengthen well-being. Simmonds locates genealogy within the context of memory practice through retracing ancestral steps. Simmonds discusses a 2020 journey of seven Raukawa women who rewalked the journey of their ancestor Māhinaarangi. Retracing the footsteps taken by Māhinaarangi today is a process of reconnection, positively impacting one’s well-being. Simmond’s reveals the relationship between whakapapa and whenua for women as a way to deepen knowledge of Māori women’s maternal health. Through the process of rewalking Māhinaarangi’s journey, the wāhine reclaim embodied knowledge held in the land.

Haami calls to remember Māori genealogical connections, including those to the environment. In her article, Haami recalls her own whakapapa to the Whanganui River, through which we learn about how whakapapa is expansive and non-human centric. Remembering here is a decolonial act of connecting oneself to the environment through genealogy. Haami then discusses how Māori creative expressions, such as waiata, are a channeling of whakapapa that disrupts colonial violence and trauma. Creative expression thus is one way that whakapapa is remembered, though it has also been impacted by settler colonialism. Hence, returning to creative expression can be a pathway to potential healing as embodied processes of settler colonialism are dealt with.

For Joni Angeli-Gordon, the environment serves as a powerful tool for maintaining, reclaiming, and reinforcing Indigeneity. Strengthening the connections between whakapapa and the environment offers significant avenues for decolonizing Indigenous minds; Angeli-Gordon considers how strengthening ties between whakapapa and the environment enhances the optimal states of Mauritau (mindfulness) through Whenua Kura (placefulness) to release colonized ways of being.

• Aotearoa and Colonial institutions

Implicit in anti-colonial and decolonial rethinkings of genealogy is a critique of how genealogy functions currently in normative contexts. As Hemopereki Simon examines in his article, genealogy can be appropriated as a form of control. Specifically, Simon looks at the appropriation of Māori genealogy by the Mormon Church and their alterations described as a “fundamental falsification of Māori belief”, where Māori ancestors Ranginui and Papatūānuku were replaced with Adam and Eve. This reworking of whakapapa altered Māori genealogy, whose origins shift from Māori ancestors to those of the church, to place Māori as genealogically Mormon, essentially turning Māori white. While false according to Te Ao Māori, genetic science, and human migration studies, these nonsensical claims demonstrate settler invasions of Indigenous sovereignty through one’s ancestry.

Hine Funaki-Cole offers a Māori philosophical way of theorizing hauntology and its relationship to time, space, place, and belonging through a whakapapa perspective with a specific focus on Māori doctoral students. Funaki-Coles presents a whakapapa approach to time, space, and place—Whakapapa Kōrero—comprising the Māori concepts wā, wānanga, and te wāhi ngaro. For Māori, ancestral presence is a normal part of life that can help Māori Doctoral students in hostile educational spaces feel at home and heal from struggle and trauma. Whakapapa, as a process of connecting to those who you may ‘feel’ in a space, can, as Funaki-Cole argues, turn a space into a place, while, in contrast, the hauntings of a ‘foe’ can make one feel uncomfortable and leave a space.

• Aotearoa and embodied experience

Finally, Ashlea Gillion embodies genealogy through poetic layers of connection which build temporally and puts into words the layering of purposeful lived experiences and memories that have formed her journey from a fat Māori girl to a women. Poetry, as she describes it, is a reflection of whakapapa, which pushes beyond a single moment in time but rather sees one’s lived experiences as where the past, present, and future converge. Gillion’s captivating piece weaves together and concentrates the many threads of the author’s lived personal experiences into one reading moment. As an anonymous reviewer so aptly wrote, “This article embodies and reflects the ancient and highly developed Māori discipline of whakapapa and pūrākau, of layered storytelling that relates personal experience and personal realities and the inherent wisdom, teachings and learnings they bring”.

5. Conclusions

In closing, we return to the words of Tanana Athabascan scholar Dian Million (2009), who we were thinking about in the original Call for Proposals for this Special Issue. She writes that “to ‘decolonize’ means to understand as fully as possible the forms colonialism takes in our own times”. Throughout this collection, these authors have uncovered the sinister ways that coloniality has shaped Indigenous lives and imposed genealogies onto us that are not ours. And, simultaneously, they have regenerated Indigenous possibilities and futures. This is decolonial and anti-colonial work. As editors, we feel as though through this project we have found our people and are affirmed in the enhanced sense of well-being that writing about and validating ‘hidden’ Indigenous knowledge holds for us as an Indigenous collective. Further, we position this scholarship as part of an existing Indigenous genealogy of thinking engaged in decolonial and anti-colonial projects and look forward to working with future scholars who join this project and push it toward more liberatory futures.