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Session MM2.1: Urban Migration: disconnections, continuity and change

1. Aroha Harris: 'Sharing Our Differences Together': whakapapa of experience in post-war Auckland

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Abstract

This paper uses the idea of ‘whakapapa (genealogy) of experience’ to consider the interconnectedness of Māori urban lives and experiences in post-war Auckland City. It discusses the cultural and ideological connections between those who migrated to Auckland City and the rural tribal homelands from which they invariably originated. While remaining influenced by their tribal homes, Māori migrants simultaneously connected inter-tribally with other Māori who shared the experience of living Māori lives in urban circumstances. They developed new social and cultural sites for interactions that were underpinned by established tribal thinking and practice. Whether gathering at Māori sports clubs, churches or community centres, the Māori people who are the subject of this paper sought to share their differences together in Auckland’s often hostile urban environment. Thus they established a relatedness that drew not only from the descent lines of blood and bones, but also from the shared lines of urban experience. That relatedness, that whakapapa of experience, further influences how this history is told when the historian herself is a descendant of the very experiences examined.

2. Erin Keenan: Stories of continuity, time of change? Māori oral histories of urbanisation, 1945-1970

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Abstract

My paper will discuss Māori memories of urban migration, stressing memories of cultural continuity within stories of significant material and community change. Documentary and historiographical sources emphasise Māori urban migration as an important factor in evolving Māori-State relations during the twentieth century. However, Māori accounts of urban migration provide narratives of continuity within the context of that change. By examining Māori accounts of urbanising change, oral histories provide an insight into continuous Māori structures of the past. Once called the most rapid urbanisation of a national or sub-population group in known History, Māori migrations into urban centres from the late 1930s spurred the emergence of generations of Māori who were no longer tribally-geographically located or culturally specific. Despite the enormity of change wrought by urbanisation, Māori oral histories speak consistently of cultural continuities which are firmly embedded within ‘urbanised’ communities of Maori. Ongoing connections with iwi (tribe) and whānau (family) mean the historically defined ‘urbanised Māori’ now speak of their experiences beyond the geographic definitions provided by the historiography. By employing customary narrative devices like whakapapa (genealogy) and connections with the land, Māori oral histories of urbanisation stress they are not city people; they are but a link in a chain of their descent. As a doctoral student in History, I use oral histories to discuss the experiences of Māori who moved into the capital city of New Zealand, Wellington. For my presentation I will discuss how Māori oral histories of urbanisation, as narratives of continuity, compare with mainstream histories of Maori urbanisation and change; and how these competing narratives provide an important window into Māori understandings of the past.

Author Bio:

Erin Keenan (Te Atiawa, Ngati te Whiti) undertook her undergraduate and Honours degrees in History at Victoria University of Wellington. In early 2008 Erin began a Vice Chancellors Strategic Doctoral Scholarship in History and she is currently undertaking oral history research with Māori men and women who moved into Wellington as a part of mass Māori urban migrations after World War Two.

3. Roy Barker: The resettlement of people from the mission at Brewarrina, New South Wales

Full paper | Audio | Video | Slideshow pdf 922KB

Abstract

My name is Roy Barker. I was born on the old  Aboriginal Mission Station at Brewarrina , New South Wales on the 26th March 1928. I grew up there in the 1930s and very early 1940s. My knowledge of the movement of our people at that period of time is very vivid in my memory. The awesome power the police had over our people, the memories of not being a citizen of the land of our birth, the health of our young people today, employment and a platform to step onto to show how our people survived before contact and after, which is very important. There is a host of things that can be done to lift our young people out of the doldrums and to get them into the system and most important of all is to retain our Aboriginal identity. June, my wife and I,  do a lot of family genealogy with our people. We get people from all over the North West of our state wanting to know where they come from.