“Gather Your People”: Learning to Listen Intergenerationally in Settler-Indigenous Politics

Introduction

“Will you meet me?”

At some point in the midst of the five day workshop on tikanga Māori (Māori protocols), as the group of civil servants sit inside the wharenui (meeting house) hundreds of kilometres and a world apart from the seat of government, workshop convenor Teina Moetara stands and steps across the floor to formally separate himself from the group. He turns and asks this question. The civil servants are bewildered. “Of course, Teina—we’re meeting you—we came all this way, we are giving this time . . .”

He repeats the question. “Will you meet me?”

The participants scramble to understand. “What do you mean, Teina? We’re all in the same room together,” “I’m doing what I can,” “I’ve been learning te reo (Māori language). . . .” “I’ll try harder. . . .” A rise of heat, a tautness, an uneasiness fills the room, as each participant looks earnestly, separately, individually, towards him to meet the challenge.

He repeats the question, earnest gaze looking back at the group, one flat hand cutting the air to the ground before him like a spear.

“Will you meet me?”

A burgeoning field of listening studies helps to draw attention to the long-neglected responsibilities of and resistances to listening among dominant groups, such as settler communities. Yet without a sense of what settlers should be listening to, this runs the risk shared by recognition, multiculturalism, and inclusion scholarship of forgetting the necessity of attending not simply to those from disadvantaged positions but also to the broader systems that produce such penalty and one’s own position within them.

In light of working since 2018 with educators in Māori protocols of encounter, and with their generous encouragement to share these stories in this context, this article explores the implications for settler societies when it is deemed necessary to develop a sense of collective identity as precursor to meeting. In tikanga Māori, the individual is always engaged as part of a collective—the karanga, sung to invite a visitor onto the grounds, acknowledges the ancestors that come with them; the pepeha by which one formally introduces oneself is via an account of one’s relations; the same words are used to signal pregnancy and subtribe (hapū), placenta and land (whenua), and bones and tribe (kōiwi/iwi), and this metaphorical refraction between individual and collective “is not a mistake.” ¹ Perhaps most importantly for settlers is how this manifests in preconditions of encounter. In tikanga Māori, the protocol sequence for encounter begins at the gate, or waharoa. Before one can enter the gate, visitors must gather as a people. This means far more than clustering bodies together for smooth entry; it requires developing a sense of who they are as a collective, and why they have come. If this does not occur, the meeting cannot go further. One cannot cross the threshold to initiate the sequence of encounter.

Settler societies, as a rule, operate without a collective sense of the particular identity and history of being a settler people, or the labor involved in developing one. This is apparent both in public discourses and behaviors at the interpersonal level, as well as in paradigmatic Western frameworks for conceptualizing and modeling encounters across difference, such as “difference blind” liberalism and liberal multiculturalism. How much is missed in Indigenous-settler relations because of a failure to prepare for the encounter in this way among settler communities? What would it look like to learn to listen intergenerationally like this, as settlers? What is required to “gather our people” in order to be ready to meet?

The wager, here, is that this history of the ability, desire, and experience of being unmarked as a social group is at the heart of the particularity of settler group identity and also stands at the heart of countless failures to meet in settler-Indigenous politics. As Andrea Smith, Taiaiake Alfred, Paulette Regan, Sylvia Wynter, Eva Mackey, and others observe, decolonization requires a shift in critical attention from the “ethnographic entrapment” of studying Indigenous peoples and “solving the Indian problem,” to patterns of thought and action among settler communities that reinforce, legitimize, and obscure settler-colonialism. ² A decolonial attitude requires we learn to develop “relational ways of seeing the world”—at once seeing relations (across history and structure) as well as seeing relationally (between the worlds one sees and the “inner eyes”—lenses and logics—that limit and shape how we see). ³ This is, as I hear it, the call of waharoa; for settlers to even become ready to enact decolonial forms of encounter across settler-Indigenous lines, they (we) must not simply seek to attend to and learn from Indigenous perspectives and peoples but also learn to listen to and from one’s own group difference, to learn to hear one’s own accent, to sense and own the particular ground of history and inheritance from which one inevitably speaks, as a member of historical and structural collective. This essay thus seeks to develop terms for conceiving of this history of erasure and groundlessness as the particular inheritance and ground of ‘our’ people, as a response to the call to develop a sense of collective identity and purpose in order to be ready to meet across Indigenous-settler lines.

Western approaches to encounter have long been critiqued for perpetuating colonial presumptions and effects; this essay seeks to offer new conceptual and practical terms for just response by settlers in light of these failings. In substantiating the “standing ground” ⁴ from which settler peoples perceive, act, and relate, it connects burgeoning efforts to “provincialize” or “de-parochialize” the particular difference of Western political thought ⁵ to the need for material redress of colonial theft and displacement. ⁶ Though meeting is neither inevitable nor demanded of Indigenous communities and marks only the beginning of an uncertain process through which questions of land may and must be addressed, it nonetheless requires this essential and long-overlooked work of becoming “responsible for ourselves” before we settlers can presume to pass through the gate.

Failing to Gather at the Gate

It is our second weekend of Ruku Pō, a year-long programme convened in Manutuke by Teina and Ngapaki Moetara on Māori protocols of encounter: specifically, the protocols of the Rongowhakaata iwi, designed to enable the iwi to meet any visitor at the gate, and respond appropriately. We choose a specific role within the protocol sequence we wish to work on and place ourselves where that role occurs, spanning front gate (waharoa) to the back pole of the wharenui, as if an invisible marae (meeting grounds) filled the dining hall where we are working. One participant volunteers to “arrive at the gate,” so we can refresh ourselves of the overall sequence by enacting each role we’ve chosen to play in response to this visitor. The participant arrives, and the person enacting the role of matataki steps forward to meet her and initiate the sequence. The task of matataki is, we’re learning, to determine the visitors’ intentions and ensure they are alert and ready to meet. This is performed by laying down a challenge; if this is picked up—literally or metaphorically—this is understood as contracting in to complete the part of the sequence that occurs outside the wharenui known as pōwhiri, a sequence through which parties declare all that lies behind the meeting and through which even enemies can come and leave with everyone’s mana (honour/integrity) intact.

Our visitor pretends to don a clipboard and insists noncommittally that “they sent me” to “run through a checklist,” persistently vague and dismissive despite the matataki’s probing questions. We’re frustrated as a group—she isn’t playing along. I’m impatient, awaiting my turn to practice my role in the sequence and the chance to learn more about the whole sequence. Another participant takes on the role of matataki, and then another, each trying all they can to find out about who this visitor is and why she’s come, to initiate the sequence. Our visitor refuses to cooperate. We are stuck at the gate.

We are told this is important—that we cannot anticipate what will happen, skip over to what lies next, or allocate set time to a given stage. One must not even hold the whole protocol sequence in one’s mind’s eye, because out on the marae “you can only see to that next step, and be in the one that gets there”—you must wait to see another’s response in order to respond accordingly. We are told that “your wānanga ⁷ can only be as successful as what happens outside the house.” We will meet, we do meet (and, for some, we are) people who are not prepared to meet.

The purpose of waharoa is to slow things down—so that visitors can see what they’re approaching, but also have time to prepare and gather themselves, to become clear on who they are and what they bring. We are told, “You would not meet, you cannot meet a group” until they have gathered themselves in this way.

Liberal approaches to structuring encounters across difference are among the most prevalent in contemporary settler-colonial communities. “Liberalism,” as Duncan Bell has shown, has such internal diversity and historical plasticity that it defies essential definition, and yet “[most] inhabitants of the West are now conscripts of liberalism. . . . Today there is little that stands outside the discursive embrace of liberalism in mainstream Anglo-American political debate.” ⁸ It is no accident, then, that two of the most foundational theories animating current white settler states (Canada, the United States, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand) have been two central threads within mainstream liberal thought for the past half century—the classical liberal “difference-blind” variant and liberal multiculturalism.

Both of these approaches to structuring encounter have been subject to extensive and well-warranted critique. These critiques, to date largely in isolation, begin to take on new meaning in the context of this call to “gather at the gate” and to develop a sense of collective identity and purpose as necessary precursor to encounter. The demand of waharoa draws out two distinct features of each of these approaches that may lie at the root of and connect these critiques. Firstly, these prevailing settler approaches to protocols of encounter fail to consider the very existence of preconditions to ethical Indigenous-settler encounter. Secondly, they therefore fail to develop a sense of collective identity and purpose, the call of waharoa that is seen as vital to meeting as members and inheritors of particular histories, worldviews, and experiences. Seen in these terms, difference-blind classical liberal and liberal multicultural frameworks for Indigenous-settler encounter are all inheritors of a very particular, distinctly settler history that obscures its own particularity and naturalizes its own difference, making meeting across these differences far more difficult. By virtue of being distinctly unmarked, the most common settler approaches to encountering difference continue to reinforce entrenched inequalities and occlude them in the same gesture.

“Difference blind” classical liberalism emerged in efforts to account for pluralism and establish just terms for meeting across difference. For John Rawls, Brian Barry, and others, just terms of interaction within diverse communities are achieved through the recognition of universal individual rights, equal treatment irrespective of social difference, and limits imposed by a common framework of laws. ⁹ Yet this “difference-blind” approach has been critiqued for taking culturally specific values and frameworks as neutral ground for such meeting—by adjudicating difference according to “universal” liberal principles; by presuming that moral, cultural, and religious views can be bracketed from the public sphere; or by the “supposedly neutral set of difference-blind principles of the politics of equal dignity” requiring assimilation into a hegemonic (settler) culture. ¹⁰ In the context of the call of waharoa, it is telling that major critiques of difference-blind classical liberal approaches to encounter could be reframed in terms of a culturally distinct propensity to project Western (settler) cultural difference as neutral and universal, and in doing so not only inadvertently perpetuate inequalities and exclusions even in terms established to enable meeting across difference, but also prevent its adherents from developing a sense of our collective group difference as prerequisite to meeting.

The second predominant approach to structuring the protocols of encounter from a Western (settler) perspective, liberal multiculturalism emerged in response to such critiques of “difference blind” strains of liberalism. Spearheaded by Charles Taylor’s and Will Kymlicka’s recognition and rights models, respectively, liberal multiculturalism seeks to achieve justice through acknowledgement and active support of minority groups, within the context of a liberal society committed to fundamental individual rights. ¹¹ There are important positive dimensions to liberal multicultural theory and policy, including, as artist and scholar Richard Fung notes, their successes as a “lever and context for raising the question of systemic racism,” discrimination and exclusion, ¹² and providing an alternative to forcible assimilation into dominant (settler) culture for Indigenous nations and ethnocultural minorities. Yet there are aspects of liberal multiculturalism—as theorized by Taylor and Kymlicka and practiced in liberal democracies like Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand—that reveal a similar tendency to confuse Western identity and values as neutral ground and read collective difference as something only “others” possess.

While claiming to reinscribe difference within and thus transform “an evolving [national] identity,” ¹³ liberal multiculturalism in theory and policy often continues to distinguish “diverse cultures” from national (settler) culture, the former tolerated, even celebrated, by an unmarked and unshaken dominant culture. ¹⁴ Moreover, such “diverse” cultures are often not construed as legitimate in themselves but validated in light of their perceived contribution to national culture; “while Anglo-Celtic culture merely and unquestionably exists, migrant cultures ‘exist for’ the latter,” justified as a “resource” through a “discourse of enrichment.” ¹⁵ We see these presumptions in both Kymlicka and Taylor; despite their valuation of and care for minority difference, a language of an “us” who recognizes difference from the mainstream—or, in the case of Kymlicka, by the state—whose authority to recognize or accommodate “them” is never questioned. ¹⁶ And whether this recognition or accommodation of others’ group difference is justified in terms of its contribution to personal autonomy and “contexts of choice” (as it is for Kymlicka) or intersubjective understanding (as it is for Taylor), the difference of “others” seems to require some external justification not required of the dominant (settler) culture. ¹⁷ Finally, as Bhikhu Parekh, Rita Dhamoon, and others observe, liberal multiculturalism as described by Taylor and Kymlicka still presumes the superiority of liberal values, such as autonomy and choice; as a result, “underlying liberal multicultural discourses of diversity is an expectation that multicultural subjects will conform to a set of ostensibly superior liberal values.” ¹⁸

Liberal multicultural policy can also be seen to reflect a presumption of a central (settler) culture that tolerates, even celebrates, “other” group difference, but whose own group difference remains unmarked and whose authority to name and acknowledge the difference of others remains unquestioned. For example, traditional multicultural discourse and policy often reveal a presupposition that cultural and ethnic groups are pre-given, essentialized categories, connected to distinct history and territory as well as cultural property that is seen to signal this identity. Thus official multicultural policy often articulates its mandate in terms of “preserving” cultural “heritage,” running the risk—as so many scholars note—of reifying cultural identity rather than enabling self-determination and a pluralization of self-identifications that reflect the multiplicity that is always already present. ¹⁹ Further, to name cultural groups in this way, though motivated by the desire to address historical exclusion, nonetheless assumes state authority and control over stable cultural definitions. Perhaps most significantly, in focusing on cultural diversity rather than structural group differences, liberal multiculturalism has been critiqued for blanketing over the specific histories that undergird presently entrenched inequalities. These settler-colonial, liberal multicultural states have yet to ask, as Richard Day does, “How is it that ‘we’ came to be in a position of granting or denying recognition to ‘them’ in the first place? Who is this ‘we’ that gives the gift of liberal multiculturalism?” ²⁰ Perhaps most importantly in the context of settler-colonialism, liberal multiculturalism as practiced in Canada, Australia, or Aotearoa New Zealand obscures the ongoing theft of Indigenous land and unceded sovereignty of Indigenous peoples through such performances of authority of a settler state to name, adjudicate, and recognize “others,” including Indigenous nations.

For these reasons, liberal multiculturalism has been critiqued as a means of managing or containing difference, a subtler form of domination than previous decades’ overt racist and assimilationist policies. ²¹ Encounters with difference within such paradigms do not generally entail possibilities for unsettling and transforming the dominance of European settler communities entrenched through colonization; they often lead to “affirmative” rather than “transformative” approaches that “leav[e] intact . . . colonial domination.” ²² This is the imperialism that Spivak identifies in certain forms of ostensible benevolence, the dominance and even hostility that Derrida sees at work in models of welcome that still presume the position of host. ²³ This is a model of engagement that shores up a national identity even as it engages difference, the former stabilized, validated, and naturalized through how the latter is engaged; as Glen Sean Coulthard writes, it reproduces “the very configurations of colonialist, racist, patriarchal state power that Indigenous peoples’ demands for recognition have historically sought to transcend.” ²⁴ It is for such reasons that many Indigenous scholars have rejected a “politics of recognition” altogether, opting instead for a politics of refusal of encounter in such terms and resurgence in its stead. ²⁵ Inherent in liberal multicultural approaches to acknowledgment and encounter is a reassertion of dominance in the very gesture of “reconciliation” or recognition; this means that, as Richard Day observes, “[a] difficult choice faces liberal multiculturalism: in order to become what it says it wants to be, it will have to sacrifice much of what it has always been.” ²⁶

These critiques of predominant (settler) approaches to engaging differences are, in some academic circles, well known. What is new is a key characteristic they all share and that the call of waharoa brings into view. Despite their very purpose, these approaches fail to acknowledge or begin from a position of collective group difference; each presumes not only that neutral ground or universal terms are possible, but that highly specific terms borne of equally specific histories can be taken as neutral or universal, mobilized to make, exchange, and adjudicate meaning and yet remaining, in a sense, unmarked. This in itself is remarkable; this capacity, desire, and history of being unmarked is highly particular, borne, among other factors, of settler-colonialism. Only a few have either had or wished to have the luxury of presuming we speak without an accent—to struggle to either know to or how to gather ourselves, to sense how we are marked and what has marked us.

To search out the particular history and identity of these approaches to difference inflects these frameworks for meeting in new ways, highlighting both the oft-inaudible accent of such communities and how such views and their obfuscation have stood in the way of the meetings across difference they ostensibly seek. What might it entail to “gather our people” in this way—to seek to hear the source of the inaudibility of this particular accent?

What follows is an effort to sketch this outline of a people whose ground is a particular history and epistemology of groundlessness. Seeking to “gather our people” in this way risks all the pitfalls associated with articulating group difference—simplification of a collective that is richly heterogeneous, and essentialization and objectification of a group that is inevitably porous and dynamic. To articulate group difference is to generalize and so is at best “artful” rather than full and final and at worst does violence to this complexity and dynamism. What follows, then, is to be considered in such light—as a contribution to the risky but necessary art of drawing what too often goes unmarked, albeit with careful caveats and contingent lines.

Gathering Our People: “Unmarked” as Settler Particularity

We gather around the table in the wharekai (dining hall) to begin our first wānanga. Teina has given us a provocation to begin, an offering of the layered stories of the coast of what is now called Gisborne, stories of encounter among iwi and between local iwi and Captain Cook in what the latter dubbed “Poverty Bay” when the meeting turned foul. Teina has brought us to that very bay to hear these stories. We return now in order to respond.

“Encounter” (including colonial encounter) as opening to wānanga: many zones of my brain fire at once. This is a theme I feel myself wound up in, as identity and responsibility; it is a theme I feel myself shifting to speak to borne of years of academic work. What do I know about encounter, that is relevant here, of potential use?

We’re here to learn about what wānanga is, but we learn by doing—and doing poorly. In fact, I learn most from the sensations of spillage, sludginess, and wobble that our frail and earnest attempts to enact wānanga produce, and the particular ways Teina describes our spectacular messes.

“I can see you all trying so hard, but using the wrong muscle.”

“Ensure you’re not just speaking from ego . . . [concerned with] being seen or understood accurately.”

“No one is being responsible for themselves.”

These last two phrases linger, and still linger as navigational directions via the contradiction between them. “Responsible for oneself.” Yet without concern for “me.” What does this mean?

I can hear my own voice in the wānanga speak in generalities, describing the terrain of “colonial encounter” and its legacies as such. I offer findings from research, arguments that have convinced me, to describe that world. Where was I, in that voice?

Difference-blind classical liberal and liberal multicultural frameworks can be seen to largely fail to “gather at the gate”; in their most common iterations, they offer models of encounter that do not require that settler communities develop a sense of collective identity and purpose. Each theorizes the encounter itself as all that is salient, without a sense of any work that must precede it. Moreover, working with Western liberal norms and institutions as an ostensibly neutral overarching framework, even when explicitly seeking to acknowledge and accommodate social difference, they too often remain oblivious to the particularity of such frames as well as a belief that we can meet across difference in a (de)colonial context without dominant communities being themselves marked in their difference. This presumption is apparent in more than these formal processes and policies; it is on display in countless interactions in everyday life where settler communities resent and resist being characterized as members of a social group, from the claim that “straight white male” is “this century’s N-word” to reticence and even vehemence for being called Pākehā in Aotearoa New Zealand, though it simply means “New Zealanders of European background.” ²⁷ To suggest that either our experiences or our perspectives have been socially conditioned is, for some, not just a foreign notion but highly offensive.

Where does this difficulty in conceiving of oneself as part of a collective come from? Provoked by Teina Moetara’s call to “be responsible for oneself,” I began to see this propensity to fail to perceive affiliation with or speak from a collective position as highly particular, borne of both the particular cultural frameworks and settler-colonial histories of these communities. This gesture to mark settler difference is connected to broader movements to “de-parochialize” or “provincialize” political theory, which, as Leigh Jenco and others argue, works to expose that “presumably universal values . . . are in fact particular.” ²⁸ Yet what I am arguing here is not simply that such “universals” are particular; I seek to go farther by exploring how the very propensity to universalize is highly particular, part of a “perceptual tradition” ²⁹ that presumes and desires to be unmarked, as well as exploring the legacies of domination and entrenchment of such views in settler societies. Both this settler worldview and its dominance in settler-colonial societies make it at once difficult and undesirable to hear one’s own parochialisms as such.

I am about to make another argument. One made via generalized claims about the world as such, in which I am not present, not quite. Perhaps adjacent to. Inferred in. This is the language of a people who presume and value universality and autonomy, the language with which I signal legitimacy and authority.

How can I at once speak as an academic and be “responsible for myself?”

In at least three notable ways, the particular histories of settler communities can be seen to contribute to their (our) propensity to go unmarked—predominant philosophies that have set being unmarked as both ontology and ideal, the dominance of settler communities in places of settlement that enables these groups to go “unmarked,” and the willful forgetting of the colonial histories brought about by such dominance. Each of these particular inheritances of settler communities contributes to a propensity to confuse particulars for universals, for settler-colonial culture and history with nation, “common sense,” and norm itself. Each forms part of the particular ground from which settlers see, speak, and act, so often characterized by a historical and persistent difficulty in perceiving and acting from a sense of collective identity and purpose.

Firstly, if, as Moana Jackson writes, all ideas have a whakapapa or genealogy, ³⁰ being unmarked as both ontology and ideal in Western political thought can be seen as early as Plato’s Phaedo, where we first see the belief that certain knowledge of universal truths is achieved through distancing oneself from the messy, particular, changing realm of lived experience. These ideas and desires persist in René Descartes’s mind-body dualism in pursuit of “clear and distinct knowledge,” free from the haunting specter of doubt, and culminate in the Enlightenment aspiration, as in Immanuel Kant or Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, to perfect reason through a universal civil society; these notions of universalism and abstraction are among the most influential philosophical genealogies that Friedrich Nietzsche identified as “far less a discovery than a recognition.” ³¹ This particular whakapapa appears today in the attendant suspicion, even abashedness, at the particularities of embodiment that still characterize much of conventional Western philosophy today. As Susan Bordo observes, while the notion of disembodied reason offers the promise of distance from and mastery over the world, “as bodies, we are most definitely not masters of our own lives, let alone the universe.” ³² Western epistemologies typically seek to “se[e] everything from nowhere”—what Donna Haraway famously called the “god trick” of transparent and total vision unmarred by the imperfect and distorting effects of personal perspective. ³³ Within such epistemologies, independence from the world of lived experience is construed as not only possible but desirable, as the means to accessing universal truths and as an aspiration in itself. As such, it “leav[es] the viewer safely out of the picture . . . [while] it invisibly posits the watching ‘us’ as the stable center.” ³⁴

These Western ideas of unmarkedness—of universalism, abstraction, objectivity—grow and embed exponentially in the Enlightenment period, particularly as liberalism develops; as Bhikhu Parekh notes, “liberalism . . . abstracts the person from all his or her ‘contingent’ and ‘external’ relations with other people and nature.” ³⁵ Likely exacerbated by liberalism’s emphasis on individualism and competition as fundamental to human experience, ³⁶ this longer history of unmarkedness as ontology and ideal lends itself to the twin features of settler-colonialism, migration and domination ³⁷ —manifest in the Enlightenment notion of European history as World History; manifest in modern science’s drive to master and harness nature through reason and Lockean logics of private property through personal labor; manifest in the 1493 Doctrine of Discovery that enabled claims of European sovereignty of lands where Indigenous inhabitants did not share belief in a Christian god and were thus deemed “inferior and uncivilized.” ³⁸ As Denise Ferreira DaSilva, Andrea Smith, and others observe, the Western colonial subject sees themselves as at once universal and superior, capable of excluding “other” subjects from this narrative of universal nature and history while also seeking to assimilate them into it through colonization. ³⁹ Put differently, while propensity toward unmarkedness may not inevitably lead to domination, in seeking to “see everything from nowhere,” Western ways of knowing can claim “a certain ownership of the entire world,” with colonization and the elimination of Indigenous peoples a material extension and manifestation of this logic. ⁴⁰

There have been many critical movements from within and without the European philosophical tradition that have worked concertedly to critique and disenthrall us of these ideas—feminists and new materialists working on situated and relational forms of knowledge, Indigenous scholars marking these “universal truths” as particular Western inventions, the Empire writing back regarding the extent to which discourses about colonial “others” prove most revealing about imperial subjects themselves. And, much as Duncan Bell describes the liberal tradition, this broader tradition of unmarkedness as ontology and ideal is at once internally diverse and historically contingent; indeed, liberal multiculturalism’s own grappling with this inheritance, seeking to acknowledge cultural context and group identity, testifies to this change and complexity within the tradition over time. These ways of seeing, knowing, and speaking nonetheless remain inarguably part of past and present frameworks for sense-making and social formation in settler-colonial societies. Among various features of Western foundational frameworks, I raise this propensity for unmarkedness—via universalism, abstraction, individual autonomy—because it makes perception of collectivities (of worldview, history, or social position) most difficult for settler communities by disavowing indebtedness to or inheritance of the broader, specific context from which one sees, speaks, and acts. This is not to conflate the heterogeneity and internal contradictions within Western (settler) thought—though, as Linda Tuhiwai Smith notes, settler resistance to this collective characterization may be linked to the fact that until now only Western cultures have been allowed to be internally diverse and contradictory. It is, rather, to outline a particular whakapapa within that more richly diverse inheritance of Western (settler) thought—a particular collective difference in this tradition of at once presuming and striving to be without difference at all.

Ngapaki and I are reflecting on the recent gathering I convened as part of research on diverse approaches to fostering listening, where she and Teina were present to share something of their work. I had sought to apply the framework we have been learning from Teina and Ngapaki, to structure the encounter.

“The very second you ask for the framework to be used, your project becomes the little thing among the bigger thing which the framework values more, which is actually the people in the room. . . . Why are you holding so tightly to your [research] questions? . . . Researchers . . . are so hell-bent on their question that they forget about the people . . . they’re so caught up in their cerebral, data-driven, result-driven way of working, that it actually cuts off the connection to people. . . . That’s what Ruku Pō is trying to say, the people come first, not our agendas, and if we put people first, many things can emerge out of that, but it’s working the other way around. You have to let go of this current way that you’re working to pursue that kind of path.

“Obviously you’ve been working in this way for a while to get to where you are in your work. Are you interested in . . . questioning that approach that you currently use? Or are you more looking for a toolbox to put inside what your overall frame of working is?”

Ngapaki’s questions unsettle foundational terms of what it is, for me, to know and seek to know. I remain unsure of what it means to be a researcher in light of them, but by way of beginning, they mark differences that often get to disappear from view.

If inherited worldviews shaped by epistemologies of unmarkedness make collective social imaginaries difficult, settler-colonial history compounds the difficulty. Desire and presumed ontology might fuel projects of expansion and domination; intergenerational histories of domination write settler values, discourses, and identities into the very fabric of settler societies—from its institutions and laws to its most quotidian expectations of behavior and relationship—to create an affirming echo of these ideas-as-reality, such that these logics and sensibilities, borne of specific histories by particular peoples, come to stand in for logic and norm itself. Domination thus turns desire into ability, and the particular “accent” of these Western ideas is all but inaudible beneath claims to universality and neutrality, while marking all others against such terms. If settlement is a “structure not an event,” as Patrick Wolfe famously observed, processes and frameworks of settlement are institutionalized and embedded to such an extent that their cultural and historical distinctiveness is invisible to settlers themselves, and settlers fail to develop a group consciousness. ⁴¹

A third and final dimension of settler-colonial history that contributes to this capacity, desire, and experience of being “unmarked” or “ungathered” is a collective and structurally sustained amnesia regarding settler-colonial history. As Bernhard Giesen observes, perpetrators and their descendants bear such history often by way of “collective schizophrenia, by denial, by decoupling or withdrawal.” ⁴² This serves the dual purpose of naturalizing and thus legitimating claims of belonging in what was, until recently, not one’s home, as well as assuaging the guilt and shame that accompany acknowledgment of the acts of violence, betrayal, and theft entailed in the process of settlement. And it has resulted in generations of settlers believing they live in a land of “harmonious race relations.” ⁴³ Historical amnesia is so integral to settler societies—in both senses—that Stephen Turner treats them as synonymous in his work on “settlement as forgetting,” observing that in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand, the “will to forget the trauma of dislocation and unsettlement has taken the form of a psychic structure,”

and now significantly determines a wider cultural outlook, ranging from the realism of academic study—the idea that New Zealand is an object of knowledge rather than a state of mind—to the emphasis of mainstream culture on sport . . . a state of forgetfulness, dislocated from but not independent of historical factors . . . currently enables New Zealanders to live ahistorically. ⁴⁴

This can even take the form of settler communities claiming indigenous status, as heard in the refrain that resurfaces in popular and political discourse that “we’re all indigenous now” ⁴⁵ —the claim that the conditions of settler-colonialism’s twin processes of migration and domination “birthed” a distinct cultural and national identity that, somehow, bestows primordial status to it. ⁴⁶ To be at home, for settler communities, is to work actively to repress the particular histories of that process of home-making. This is not simply a matter of personal will or forgetfulness, but—like the cloaking effect of embedding settler perspectives and values into society’s institutions, languages, and practices—a “matter of structural intent . . . that operates according to the logic of the weight of settler numbers. Living the dream—actively, productively, unselfconsciously—makes the place that dream’s reality.” ⁴⁷

These three dimensions of the particular history and inheritance of settler communities enable and encourage an epistemic and affective difficulty in sensing collective social imaginaries. Inhabiting and navigating systems that presume and value universalism and autonomy as taken-for-granted “givens,” alongside a historical amnesia regarding how they came to be in the first place, gives rise to what Mark Rifkin calls “settler common sense”—“certain modes of feeling, and, reciprocally, particular affective formations among non-Natives normalize settler presence, privilege, and power.” ⁴⁸ In this way, everyday experiences of sensed and unsensed dimensions of settler-colonial societies are a consequence of, but also a key contributing force to, the ongoing dynamics of settlement. Settler mentalities and sense experiences are infused with a pointed obliviousness to the structural and historical conditions that have shaped the present, producing and protecting a sense of “permanency and inevitability” of present power relations. ⁴⁹ This “settler common sense” does not simply blot out the past but orients present attention and response, implicitly defining horizons for perceived possibility. Eva Mackey explores how this deeply and largely unconsciously held sense of certainty and entitlement—of land, place, and future—explains the most virulent and violent of reactionisms among settler communities when challenged by Indigenous land claims. Experiences of uncertainty in these moments provoke such anxiety, dread, and anger precisely because of this underlying, structurally reinforced collective and taken-for-granted sense of certainty (and right to expectation of certainty)—because these claims expose how “the certainty of settler entitlement to Indigenous land has been made to seem certain, over time and in specific places.” ⁵⁰ As Keri Hulme notes in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand, Pākehā

are hurt and bewildered and resentful of Māori land protests, Māori rights marches, radical and very vocal Māori militants. . . . “But we’ve always got on together so well,” they say in hurt and bewildered tones. “Why, some of my best friends are Maoris.” ⁵¹

This experience of going unmarked is undoubtedly a privilege, one that comes with inhabiting positions of power and that, in turn, naturalizes foundational frameworks that entrench these very power asymmetries. And yet, seen in the context of the call of waharoa and its connection to the call to decolonize by problematizing the “unquestioned normalcy of these beliefs and assumptions,” ⁵² it can also be conceived as an ineptitude as well as an obstacle to decolonial forms of encounter. Settlers are, as a rule, “hard pressed to know where our families originated, how they got here,” and severing ourselves from these histories as well as the long history of the land we claim, we remain “undeveloped and inarticulate” as a people, “orphaned in the very world where we want to feel at home.” ⁵³ Moreover, this “lock[s us] within a colonial dynamic” that prevents the redress of inequalities it has produced. ⁵⁴ Turner describes this as the “fretful sleeping” of settler dreaming; James Baldwin, speaking of white Americans, likens this state to a butterfly impaled on a pin,

dimly, or vividly, aware that the history they have fed themselves is mainly a lie, but they do not know how to release themselves from it, and they suffer enormously from the personal incoherence. ⁵⁵

Discourses of unmarkedness, coupled with the capacity to build these into the very fabric of society and to erase the histories that made this possible, cohere to produce what Charles Mills calls the “ironic outcome that [powerful groups are] unable to understand the world they themselves have made,” including themselves. ⁵⁶

For our first formal gathering at Manutuke, we have been asked to introduce ourselves to one another via “naming the elements” of the encounter and “laying down a kaupapa” (purpose for meeting) connected to our “source.” I struggle to know what this means—the elements of encounter, generally? What does he mean by “source?”

Each of us introduces ourselves in turn, some giving whole family genealogies, some prompted to disclose core and sometimes highly vulnerable memories, many sharing objects as sacred as talismans. We take progressively longer with each turn, become progressively more emotional, until one speaker begins already in tears and renders herself bare with tales of meeting the descendants of those her settler ancestors killed.

We break for lunch. When we reconverge, Teina and Ngapaki refresh our sense of this stage of meeting, known as whaikōrero. It is formal, highly disciplined—a space of meeting before we are connected, where we lay down our purpose, distilled and clear, so we can see each other across the distances between us. The “sludginess” we feel, the heavy emotion and exhaustion of the group—these are the result of failing to do this.

For many, this is the first time we have sought to answer the question “what is your source”—and it shows.

Avril Bell notes that the two most common settler responses to Indigenous claims are denial and guilt. We can see the former in claims that “we’re all indigenous now” and calls to “get over it,” to be “postsettlement,” to be “reconciled”; the latter, taking the form of either focusing on settler feelings of rather than reasons for guilt that still enables settlers to hold the center, or reestablishing innocence through a romanticization and adoption of Indigenous ways. Both, Bell notes, are forms of elision. Both slip settlers out of positions that implicate or demand responsibility:

the politics of refusal and the politics of guilt seem to operate by precisely the same structure, blocking access to debate over injustice by centering on the issue of Pākehā innocence or guilt. ⁵⁷

Marking the particular inheritances of settler communities allows us to see how much this shapes the form such elisions take. Robin DiAngelo, R. Patrick Solomon, and others observe that universalism and individualism are among the most common “discourses of denial” encountered in antiracist pedagogy and activism; when implicated in histories and structures of racialized and colonial power, white (settler) groups often explain experiences of relative struggle and privilege as the deserved consequence of personal choices in response to equal life chances. ⁵⁸ Unmarkedness as genealogy of ontology and desire; embeddedness of these logics and frames into the institutions, practices, and norms of settler societies; and collective forgetting of specific histories to render the settler-colonial present seemingly self-evident and inevitable—these particularities create the background conditions that allow settlers to “erase history” and feel “outside of socialization,” ⁵⁹ and produce universalist and individualist genres of framing and response among white (settler) groups, both of which disavow and obfuscate any sense of collective social imaginary.

I believe we can see these two frames at work in attempts not only to avoid encounter but also in efforts to meet—epitomized, on the one hand, in the first meeting that opened this article between earnest civil servants and Teina Moetara’s insistent invitation that their responses from a position of individuals could not answer and, on the other, by our collective difficulty to “be responsible for ourselves” in our first wānanga in the tendency to speak of everything from nowhere, in abstracted and general terms that presume unmediated vision. Manifest, too, in the most common settler approaches to encounters across difference at the level of process-design and policy, namely classical liberalism’s “one law for all” and liberal multiculturalism’s “neutral” ground of secular liberalism. Both of these frameworks—universalism and individualism as ontology, desire, and experience—are inheritors of particular histories of settler-colonial peoples that work to make the acknowledgment of collective responsibility and relationship difficult. Both stand in the way of tending to broader structural and historical context as precursor to meeting.

What, then, are the routes to meeting across such lines, beyond the persistent reach of universalist and individualist logics? As much as it becomes vital to learn to attend to one’s inheritance in terms of worldview and social position, I wish to distinguish an attempt to fulfil the task of waharoa from two problematic common approaches to acknowledging collective inheritance and responsibility by settler communities. The first of these is that of “checking one’s privilege”; Andrea Smith, among others, notes that as much as these gestures seek to acknowledge histories and structures shaping personal identity and experience, they often remain highly individualistic insofar as they function akin to personal confessions and self-improvement strategies that do not translate and indeed can deflect attention from collective action to address those very structures. ⁶⁰ “Gathering our people,” by contrast, is a matter of learning to sense inherited histories of perception and position as the ground of difference from which we meet in the present, not as sin to be absolved for individual inheritors through confession but as the means to become “responsible for how we see,” which, in turn, is precondition for encounters across these differences. It is to seek to turn the taken-for-granted into parochialism such that these oft-unmarked (settler) differences are no longer the presumed frameworks for encounter but rather a community of difference in relation to others, alongside rather than overarching. As Eva Mackey and others write, this is essential to “finding a way to genuinely share contested geographical, conceptual, and legal spaces between Indigenous and settler peoples and governments.” ⁶¹

Gathering our people is different, too, from efforts to come to know Indigenous peoples and ways, as if the task were to attend only more carefully, more fully to others’ difference. This merely reproduces the twin presumptions of an unmarked settler people that nothing is required of us, in turn, in order to be ready to meet, and that focus is always turned to “others” that we—still unmarked —may acknowledge, include, adjudicate, or celebrate. Perhaps more problematically, it can prove another “move to innocence” that allows settlers to slip out of the implications of our own particular inheritance. ⁶² The call of waharoa—to learn to hear one’s own markedness as the ground from which we meet—is to learn to discern how these very presumptions are the particular inheritance of a historically unmarked people, a worldview that believes it may come to see clearly and wholly without itself being in view. Coming toward difference is, therefore, not so much learning to “get it right,” to “see better,” but rather to discern and claim the situatedness of how we see as part of that vantage, thus chastening the very drive to know and claim to know across lines of difference. If universality and certainty characterize distinctly settler structures of feeling, “gathering our people” at once entails becoming clearer in our own difference and is necessary to becoming less certain of our vision and claims across these differences. It is to turn settled territories into sensed “contact zones” and asks us to reimagine ourselves, as Taiaiake Alfred incites us, “not as citizens with the privileges conferred by [settler-colonialism], but as human beings in equal and respectful relation” to human and nonhuman others. ⁶³ Because, as Aman Sium, Chandni Desai, and Eric Ritskes among others note, to decolonize is to “live in understanding that not everything is known or knowable”—and because interrupting the settler dream of seeing everything from nowhere, learning to listen for oneself in another’s terms, “intersubjective and relational,” is integral to any chance of “real encounter and exchange.” ⁶⁴

In this way, answering the call of waharoa is also distinct from the politics of recognition critiqued by scholars like Coulthard and Audra Simpson, in at least three ways: first, it does not obscure or displace material questions of land by reducing decolonization to a matter of settler recognition but rather signals a practical dimension of settlers learning to come more justly into relationship from which to address these material concerns; second, it highlights the requirements for such meeting that have never, to date, been acknowledged or developed within predominant settler approaches to meeting across Indigenous-settler lines; and finally, in doing so it challenges “the profoundly asymmetrical and nonreciprocal forms of recognition either imposed on or granted to [Indigenous peoples] by the settler state and society.” ⁶⁵

Perhaps most importantly, as this last distinction highlights, a focus on “gathering ourselves at the gate” contributes to a decolonial politics by ceding control over the terms of meeting. This means that it is pointedly not the place of this article, with its focus on the precursors to meeting, to project what such meeting will entail or what—whether in terms of relationships or material redistribution—may come of it. Refusal to cede control over the terms of meeting—to presume and desire to be the “house” in which we meet, even on unceded Indigenous land, to seek to be “settled” or “reconciled” as mean to “rescue settler normalcy . . . [and] a settler future” ⁶⁶ —has long stood in the way of finding right relationships between settler and Indigenous communities. Indeed, as Ani Mikaere notes in the context of tikanga Māori, ceding control marks the first step toward restoring lost mana and relations—not only because the “house” in which we meet is not our house, however long we have stayed, but also because the honor of both wrong-doer and wronged is restored through muru, wherein the wrong-doer trusts the judgment of the wronged party to mete out justice. As settlers here, the work of waharoa is to at once acknowledge the tikanga of tangata whenua as well as the practical need to become ready to meet as a people. And in focusing on this readiness, it does not presume we will be met or what might occur within such meeting—a settler future is and must be uncertain. Nor, as the work settlers must do among themselves prior to meeting, should it be confused for a merely “ideational” response akin to recognition that is not connected to material transformation. Rather, it is to at once cede control over the terms, protocols, or outcomes of meeting as settler peoples, to “accept that it is for tangata whenua to determine their status in this land, and to do so in accordance with tikanga Māori” as a path “for Pākehā to gain legitimacy here” and to do the necessary labor of preparing to meet as a settler community, as this tikanga requires of us. ⁶⁷

On my last weekend as part of Ruku Pō, I asked what would prompt someone to speak in the context of wānanga, a particular form of dialogue characterized by deep listening across difference that can occur at the back of the meeting house after earlier stages of the tikanga have been met. Teina replied that you speak not because of what you know but because of what you notice—by virtue of the particular way you see, by virtue of your particular inheritance and experience. These sound so closely related—to know and to notice—and yet Teina cautioned that presumption of expertise can in fact prove an obstruction to what is possible in wānanga. And for the very reason one should speak—the particularity of one’s vantage—the voices of every person in wānanga are all valuable, as no one notices quite what and how they do. What invites or incites voice is also what chastens any proclivity to presume total and transparent vision; it is also what highlights our epistemic limitations and indebtedness to different vantages and necessitates our listening.

If decolonizing settler-colonial relations requires bringing settler differences alongside those of others as difference rather than the frame for meeting, indeed reconceiving ourselves “at the gate” on sovereign Indigenous land, this essay has been an effort to begin to mark the particular accent of those differences and the histories of dominance and forgetting that make their distinctive unmarkedness possible. This is not a grand gesture; in tikanga Māori it is only the most preliminary and basic of steps in a far lengthier process entailed in meeting across difference. A relatively straightforward and familiar step for many Māori, it can render Westerners either utterly perplexed or undone and floundering. Yet as minor a gesture as it may be, it is nonetheless what enables the encounter and everything that may yet occur within it. Nor is this act of gathering a sense of collective identity and purpose any guarantee; as the emergence of white nationalist groups attest, it may be necessary but is certainly insufficient to ensure ethical and transformative encounter across Indigenous-settler lines—even as becoming marked opens dominant identities to risks of essentialization and policing of group boundaries experienced by historically marked groups.

Despite these risks, decolonization requires critical attention to settler logics and sensibilities that continue to go unmarked so as to “bring about the mind-shift required amongst Pākehā society as a whole,” as Mikaere urges settlers to do. ⁶⁸ This shift, taken alone, could so easily collapse into yet another “move to innocence” that “attempt[s] to relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility without giving up land or power or privilege, without having to change much at all.” ⁶⁹ Confusing precursor for process, mistaking this “gathering” to stand in for the difficult work ahead and material change that will come of it would reduce this crucial if partial work of waharoa to one more “settler fantas[y] of easier paths to reconciliation”; as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang caution, “decolonizing the mind is the first step, not the only step toward overthrowing colonial regimes.” ⁷⁰ My hope is that by developing a sense of the particular ground of my people, as well as the particular historical and structural inheritances that have formed it, we might learn to “gather ourselves” in order to be able to meet across Indigenous-settler lines of difference. We might be able to learn to see, speak, and act from a sense of the particular collectivities always-already behind what we see, speak, and do. We might become responsible for what we come to see and hence bring this as one among many vantages that constitute the site of encounter, the processes and outcomes of which remain uncertain and pointedly beyond settler control once we enter the gate.

A Settler’s Pepeha (a Work in Progress)

I am of British and French heritage. I come from Protestant Huguenots who fled Switzerland to Canada in the 1700s and settled in Como, Québec (the lands of the Mohawk Nation), and from Brits who moved in my mother’s lifetime to Toronto (Haudenosauneega Confederacy territory) and then British Columbia (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm [Musqueam], Songhees, Esquimalt, WSÁNEĆ, and Kómoks territory). I came, in this life, from Canada to Aotearoa New Zealand seven years ago to begin my own family. We now reside in Pōneke (Wellington), where Te Ātiawa/Taranaki Whānui are tangata whenua.

I inherit a worldview that claims to see everything from nowhere, that can be and insists on being unmarked, that presumes to speak without an accent. I inherit ideas that I am separate from those around me, that my desires and views are independent and unindebted to my context and history. I inherit ideas of freedom, reason, history, justice, and human nature borne of this standing ground—suspicious of bodies and emotions, anxious about indebtedness and unfamiliar with relation as ontology, dissociated from history and social context.

I speak in ways borne of this standing place. I seek to know the world around me in general rather than perspectival terms. I have a deep faith that I can perceive the world around me with relative transparency, that access to knowledge about a stable and given world is always possible and a matter of point-to-point transfer. I seek a sense of place and authority, as well as show respect and intimacy, through display of such knowledge.

I come from a migrating people. I come from those who are not tied to a specific location, except through willful forgetting that a location was not ours, is still the land of others. My ground might be, more accurately, traced through the air, placed by and in movement. I have accelerated this in my own life, calling five cities on two continents home as a child and eight cities in five continents as an adult.

I come from a dominant and dominating people. This means that my particularities have been embedded in the institutions, language, and practices of this place, and have saturated society such that they feel unremarkable—“normal,” “neutral,” “universal.” My people at once presume to speak about everything from nowhere, and have dominated worlds they have inhabited such that this particular view that seeks and believes in its universality has gone, largely, unshaken.

I carry this inheritance with me, in the cellular memory of my body and in the inflections and worn routes of my thinking, perceiving, speaking, in the legacy I live of that history in my current position today. I seek to become responsible for how and what I see, to learn about the particular ground on which I stand of which I have, by virtue of that ground, been oblivious. I step forward into the future through an acknowledgment of this inheritance, asking “what of this inheritance can I work on, in this life?”

In order to be ready to meet.