Never Forget: October 15th Solidarity Tour

 

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On Monday, October 15th 2007, more than 300 police carried out dawn raids on dozens of houses all over Aotearoa / New Zealand as part of ‘Operation 8′. Police claimed the raids were in response to ‘concrete terrorist threats’ from Māori activists. What initially started with 20 defendants resulted in the trial of four – Taame, Emily, Rangi and Urs – which concluded on 20 March 2012.
Six years later, most of the charges have been dropped, Rangi and Taame are out on parole, Emily and Urs have almost finished serving their home detention, but the impact of these raids on those arrested, raided, their whānau and communities continues.

Kaupapa

Never Forget is about:

• Commemorating the raids and acknowledging the pain they caused.
• Understanding that these raids were part of a long history of colonisation and dispossession in Aotearoa.
• Building solidarity with Indigenous people struggling against colonization globally.
• Creating dialogue and alliances between tangata when and tauiwi ethnic minorities.
• Discussing how tauiwi ethnic minorities can actively support Māori in the struggle for tino rangatiratanga.

More info: http://neverforgetoct15.wordpress.com/

Tau iwi People of Colour Supporting Tino Rangatiratanga

Talk at the “Against Racism: Tino Rangatiratanga, The University, Our Future?” forum

For a while now, some of us part of Young Asian Feminists Aotearoa have been having discussions about decolonization what it means for us as Asians and tau iwi people of colour to be living on stolen land. If you’ve seen that banner “Asians Supporting Tino Rangatiratanga” at protests, that’s us!

Before I start, I just want to say that I’ve been feeling a bit conflicted speaking at this forum after experiences that made me think long and hard about the barriers for tau iwi people of colour to engage with issues of colonization in Aotearoa especially when the conversation is controlled and mediated by Pākehā and the normative discourse is framed by biculturalism. I really want to challenge the view that this is just about Māori and Pākehā. In that framework, tau iwi people of colour are either treated as honorary Pākehā or non-existent in this country. By tau iwi people of colour, I mean settlers and migrants who are racialised, generally of non-European descent. We also exist in this country, and particularly this city. In many ways, we are also complicit in the colonial relationships and structures set up before, during and after our arrival. I want to explore what it means for us to support Tino Rangatiratanga and how they might be similar or different to the role of Pākehā.

I want to start off with answering the question of “Nō hea au?” Where am I from? Although that’s usually quite a loaded question white people ask me all the time for being visibly Asian, where I’m from is significant for this discussion. Unlike tau iwi who are Pākehā, my ancestry is not in Europe… but this land known to English-speakers as China, a massive country now imagined as a superpower or a source of cheap labour. Specifically, I was born in Tianjin a port city not far from Beijing. This city, my hometown has a colonial history of occupation by 8 different nation-states from the 19^th to 20^th century, but western cultural imperialism is still happening today through the importation of dairy products for example. My grandparents still remember the days of Japanese invasion and occupation characterized by torture, mass murder, pillaging and burning villages to the ground as well as vivisection - that is - medical experimentation, on Chinese people. But people in my ethnic group, known as the Han Chinese, have been both colonized and colonisers in different times and places. Taiwan, Tibet, Urumqi and Singapura are some places currently under Han Chinese occupation and rule. I support the tino rangatiratanga of the indigenous people of those lands as well, although I can’t say I understand the context that well having never been to any of those places. I’ve grown up most of my life in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa where racism and xenophobia against Asians in the 90s was pretty visible and as in your face as an egg in your face walking home from school and your parents working low wage jobs because they can’t speak English. I didn’t start really understanding the history of this land until my later teen years, which I didn’t learn through the school system but through education on the streets, at hui and protests. So I’m supporting tino rangatiratanga with this history.  

So with this history in front of me, I think the distinction between tau iwi people of colour and Pākehā becomes important in the ways we support tino rangatiratanga and the role we might play in the movement to decolonise. This category extends to other migrants and settlers who are not Pākehā, including those who are indigenous to other lands, migrants or refugees who have been dispossessed by war, occupation or rampant capitalism as well as those who were privileged enough to migrate as a skilled migrant. So this is quite a broad category of people with a lot of internal inequalities based on class, religion, gender and ethnicity. I don’t claim to speak for all tau iwi people of colour, but I do think it’s a useful category to name non-Pākehā groups that are also racialised and experience racism in this colonial settler society but are not Māori. Whatever the case of how and why we’re here, our visa status or citizenship has been granted to us by a colonial settler state that stole the land and established power to make decisions of who does and doesn’t have the right to be here. We weren’t invited here by tangata whenua but allowed/tolerated/permitted to be here by the thieves of their land, so immediately the relationship is fairly fraught because we’re part of a settler population that further entrenches the dispossession of tangata whenua.

At the same time, while many of us have certain privileges as settlers here, racism and xenophobia can make it hard to access appropriate housing, employment and allows the mainstream to treat us as secondary citizens or residents or otherwise as ‘illegal aliens’. Or we might be economically included but socially excluded in the imagination of the nation-state. There are different kinds of racisms that are specific to each of our different ethnicities, but being tau iwi here means that we’ve come into a system of colonial relationships and a country where the wealth is based on colonisation and domination of tangata whenua.  

With this fraught relationship in mind, I think it’s important to recognize the divide and rule tactics used and circulated that shapes relationships between tau iwi people of colour and Māori and our perceptions of each other. Biculturalism and multiculturalism often get talked about as opposing visions of cultural politics, but neither of which really question the centrality and dominance of Pākehā culture. Biculturalism tends to shut non-Pākehā tau iwi out and meanwhile multiculturalism gets used to undermine tino rangatiratanga (see Brash’s Orewa speech). Token knowledge of Maori culture or reo sometimes gets used by Pākehā to indigenize themselves and further exclude tau iwi people of colour, to ‘one-up new migrants’. I see this as a form of cultural appropriation for other racist agendas.

Migrants of colour and Māori get pitted against each other in this way as if anti-racist liberation is a zero-sum game. Often migrant knowledge of these issues or of Māori culture have been mediated by racist stereotypes in the Pākehā media then translated and filtered through in our languages. We’ve rarely had opportunities to build links and alliances with each other without Pākehā people mediating those spaces. So we’ve had to build and organize those spaces ourselves and want to continue building those links and sorting through the tensions that might exist between the goals of tino rangatiratanga and migrant justice. In YAFA, we’ve have looked at how immigrants of colour in Turtle Island or what’s known as Canada have bridged those tensions and it seemed like the conversations there have been happening on a wider scale and stronger links have been forged between migrant justice and indigenous struggles. I’m really interested in how that can be done here.

Many of us want to make sense of our place in this and want to stop participating in ongoing injustices.

My main message today is that there are tau iwi people of colour supporting tino rangatiratanga despite the barriers. And it’s not necessarily a new thing. We were there on the hikoi against the Foreshore and Seabed bill, we were there in solidarity when the anti-terror raids happened on October 15^th 2007 and throughout the court process, supported the protests against the deletion of Māori seats in the creation of the supercity, marched against asset sales despite the xenophobia and fears of foreign (i.e. Chinese) ownership as if land in this country isn’t already in non-Māori ownership.

More tau iwi people of colour need to play a part in supporting tino rangatiratanga otherwise by default we’re playing a role that is complicit and maintains the racist structures of this colonial settler society. Beyond having a common oppressor, I think it’s important for tau iwi people of colour to build meaningful relationships with tangata whenua to tautoko the movement for tino rangatiratanga and mana motuhake from our own cultural frameworks. By questioning our own complicities and seeing through the divide and rule tactics of the colonial settler system, as tau iwi people of colour, we can seek strategies to disrupt and resist settler colonialism, because there can be no justice for anyone on stolen land including migrants without achieving tino rangatiratanga and mana motuhake for tangata whenua. I imagine and hope that in the not too distant future, we can have these conversations and discussion on the terms of tangata whenua and in te reo Māori rather than te reo Pākehā where mātauranga Māori is centred rather than marginalised or tokenised. 

We’re still figuring out our role in the struggle for tino rangatiratanga and have a lot more to learn but we want tangata whenua to know that we are here in solidarity and other tau iwi people of colour to know that it’s important for us to also engage.

Some of us have some projects planned as well: one is a zine about people of colour settlers and complicities in colonialism, which is aiming for transnational conversations between and within colonial settler societies including Aotearoa, Australia and Turtle Island. Shasha Ali, who is also part of YAFA is also planning a commemoration for the October 15^th raids to involve performance artists and musicians for shows in Poneke and Tamaki-Makaurau. Get in touch if you want to be involved.

Conflicting loyalties: challenging white orientalism and homophobia in diasporic communities

For a long time now, I've thought a lot about the issues with talking about the oppressive stuff in my family and culture in a white-dominated context that constructs non-western cultures as more oppressive, inferior and generally more backward or authoritarian. Having worked with young women from Asian, Middle Eastern and African backgrounds coming out of family violence situations, there's quite common response of internalised racism. In these cases, resulting from trauma. This dilemma between challenging orientalist and racist ideas that present non-western cultures as more oppressive and challenging the very real oppressions that affect me directly in my own family is a really hard one to straddle and difficult to know how to talk about it publicly without painting my family or all Chinese people as sexist or homophobic, or more so than the dominant Pakeha culture.

I recently came out to my parents as queer, not directly using that term but indicating that I'm not heterosexual. My parents are also Christians, my mum doesn't just think it's sinful to be sleeping with women but that I have a mental illness and I need 'treatment'. She claims that according to the internet that 70% of homosexuals are fake and can be cured from such disease. She also keeps repeatedly asking me whether I think of myself as male and pressures me to grow my hair long and dress more feminine. After I came out, I went home the next weekend and she had taken out all these old photos of me from intermediate school where I had long hair and wore dresses just to remind me that I am a GIRL. I don't think I can even begin to try to explain what genderqueer means. I asked, so what if I do think of myself as male and she said that's also a mental illness and that I'll need to be cured from it. It's not normal. Apparently if we didn't leave China, I would not be queer, it's a white people thing.

On the other side, if I'm having issues in my queer relationship with my white partner the discourse my mum uses is that same-gender relationships just don't work and aren't supposed to work. Find a (Chinese) man, get married and have babies like she did. You don't have to love him to begin with but you will grow to love him. Like my mum did, apparently. It's like if you're queer and there's problems in your relationship it's because you're queer and the solution is to be heterosexual. If you're Chinese and there's problems with your family it's because Chinese culture is just more conservative or backward and the solution is to distance yourself away from it or try to assimilate into Pakeha culture. It shouldn't have to be like this.

I think there's a lot of issues involved and I don't really know where to start to begin articulating them. There are tensions between ethnic loyalty under conditions of racism and eurocentrism where your culture/people is considered more homophobic or sexist if you talk about those kinds of oppressions in among people of your ethnicity. They then become marked as "cultural" oppression. When this oppression is talked about in Pakeha culture they're considered "structural" oppression, because Pakeha apparently don't have culture (but have structures, lot of them, hierarchical ones). I don't know how many times Pakeha people have expressed this "I don't have a culture" sentiment. As Marilyn Strathern said, "the nice thing about culture is that everyone has it". It's just fucking invisible to you because you're part of the dominant culture. Then also with diasporic experiences, your family is usually your first point of understanding of your cultural background and however your family operates becomes a characteristic you might attribute to 'your' culture. I can see that slippery slope towards internalised racism when violence is added in there in the context of wider societal racism that makes your culture seem more backward anyway. But that distinction between "cultural" and "structural" oppression is interesting, with "cultural" oppression as a problem with this thing called "culture" and for that oppression to stop, the culture must change. With "structural" oppression, it's the structure that has to change. Maybe we need to talk about "structural" oppression within all cultures or use "cultural" oppression universally including the dominant one because oppression justified and exercised through cultural hegemony especially in the dominant culture.

I hate that super annoying framing of having to choose between anti-racism and queer feminism. In a dominant white context it just makes it fucking hard to talk about. How do you address these forms of oppression that may be culturally specific in a diasporic context without adding fuel to racism and colonial feminism? How do you unlearn internalised racism when that's been a response to trauma? How do you explain this shit to white people without feeling like you're providing evidence that their culture less problematic and being a 'victim' that needs them to save and protect?

At the axes of multiple structural yuckness, we gotta figure out a way of combating oppression intersectionally without undermining other shit that's important to us. That context of Pakeha cultural supremacy that adds a dense fog to the rough terrain that's already hard to walk and navigate. But we can't let it get in the way of where we need to go. We have to figure this out together.

CONVERSATION ON COLOUR SHAME (AS AN ASIAN FEMME)

Hey all, I wrote the below in response to someone asking me to write about an aspect of my journey to anti-racist work... hope there is some value to you in reading this. Thanks heaps :-)

 ~~~

So. Yesterday I was explaining to a white person about my choice to stay as tanned as possible. How it is a conscious decision on my part in response to the status given to pale Asian women. In Asia, there are heavily marketed whitening creams, lotions and operations, as there is a belief that paleness (or "whiteness") is connected to status and conventional ideals of beauty. Many advertising campaigns and films and other media will feature pale Asian women, or purposefully employ part-Anglo/Saxon/Celtic Asian women to feature in said media.

Darkness of skintone still plays into preconceived notions of savagery, primitivism, animalistic tendencies, and other exoticisms. Lightness of skin still suggests purity, pristine beauty, innocence, and thus, being appropriately feminine.

These are generalisations, from conversations with my educated, informed radical queer friends. These are associations people make, despite their reluctance to. In the last few years I have been called "Pocahontas", "Warrior queen", "Amazon woman", and "Tribal Priestess" from these friends. People have also guessed my nationality as Pacific Islander, South or Central American in initial interactions. I am 100% Vietnamese. I don't mean this to take away any burden of history from black or brown people in my community or reading this, and I am not expressing these anecdotes as complaints, merely observation for analysis. I also apologise if I come across as if I am appropriating any other struggles that are not my own.

In my conversation yesterday I explained to my white friend that my choice now to be as dark as possible was one choice of many that I have made over the last 20 or so years, of thinking about race, and in particular, my own journey with my racial identity. I am 31 years old. I explained that up until my early 20s I made a conscious effort to stay as pale as possible, I was a teenage goth, I stayed indoors in Summer, only went to the beach at night... and how that was a conscious denial of my Asianness. I was aware that I was disassociating or attempting to detach from my brownness, my other-ness - these conditions that brought me emotional and physical pain as a teenager growing up in the white oceanside suburbs of Sydney. I was ashamed to be Asian, and I tried to hide it in many ways. I am now trying to dismantle that shame.

My choice now, besides to get healthy doses of Vitamin D, to stay sunlit and brown, are a reply to the conversation I started as an 11 year old. I am now here and proud and fierce.

I have recently started to accept my skin and body as part of who I am, as I realised that I disconnected from these states as a child and teenager as both these physical attributes attracted physical, sexual and verbal abuse from those around me. I am attempting to reclaim my self.

I write this, aware that this is still the beginning of my epiphanies, processing, acceptance.

This is one example of many, many decisions I have made around my intentional anti-racist politics, decisions made from the age of 11. I could write about those decisions, but feel there are too many to recount. The main aspects is that I alternate between empowering People Of Colour in POC-only spaces (workshops, lectures, shows, activism, direct action, community work, refugee work, work in developing countries, journalism) and educating White People and White Spaces (social work, youth work, Critical Whiteness workshops, Privilege workshops, talks on Gentrification and Displacement, talks on Responsible Methodology for NGO refugee services, etc). I have spent years in POC-only countries doing work, and then return to Anglo-Saxon countries to do other work (and usually to save money to fund the other experiences and travel). There has been (exhausting, draining, alienating) years of serving a predominantly white community, and then making a conscious decision to take a break from that and serve intentional POC spaces. This is a continual ellipse, however the older I get, the more focussed I am on giving time to POC-only communities, to asylum-seekers, to immigration and workers' rights.

At this point I am writing a book for Asian-Australian teenagers, will go on another Race Riot zine tour later this year through the south of the States, and hope to seek more work supporting immigrant communities in some way.  I am living in a predominantly white country at the moment, with an almost entirely white radical queer and punk scene around me, which is an aspect I wrestle with daily.

*** I hope this has not offended anyone, as I understand talking about skin colour and shades as an Asian person expresses ALOT of the choice and privilege I have in society. I mostly hope that I have been able to contribute something to the reader. ***

Please contact me if you would like to discuss anything further - annavo@riseup.net

A Slice of Waitangi

One of the reasons Leeland moved away was because of the ghosts. Pakeha ghosts to be precise. Less pakeha, less ghosts – went the plan.

White seduction, golden maps and hemisphere migration had sacrificed his ancestral tongue. He got an English one instead – complete with Kiwi twang and mumble. It had served him well. It also meant pakeha ghosts took a liking to him. Leeland often wondered if he had known his mother tongue, would Chinese ghosts speak to him too. 

 

Leeland felt the Maori spirits stirring. That wasn't a special thing about him, everyone could feel them, coudn't they?

Especially today. Waitangi Day. Day where the pakeha got prickly, and the 'others' were confused and vulnerable to pakeha angst in the media. Day where Papatuanuku tugged at her children up through the soles of their feet and gripped the crowns on their heads.

Leeland, like many men, excepting his father, didn't cry much. Not because he refused to, but because feelings that rode with tears, didn't make it up far enough from his chest to his eyelids.

The karanga was like a magnet that made all his tears feel like they would spill not just out his eyes, but out of his skin. He could feel all the passed before, running their fingers and breath all over the tiny hairs on his body as they were called onto the marae by the haunting, realm-crossing call.

Maori ghosts didn't talk to him, they didn't need to. Their stories were ready on the lips of their descendents, written in tears on so many parchments, and all online now too. It was in the soil, and chanted by trees, rivers, lakes and mountains if you knew how to listen. 

 

It was the pakeha ghosts that had so much to say. Their descendents that had silenced their song, sought to erase it. The tales, ordeals, sacrifices and crimes of their migration journeys and new settlements barely six generations back. Time doesn't mean much for ghosts. And they found Leeland's tongue. Made him sing their mournful ballads, and listen to their stories.

At first it terrified Leeland. Then he was angry. 

 

Leeland couldn't speak to his own living grandmothers as they had different languages in their mouths and ears. Yet these pakehas ghosts, demanding in passing, as in life, followed him around until they'd spoken and sung enough to move on. Everyone needs an audience.

So he watched. Used this ghostly gleaned knowledge to supplement in living conversations. Ghosts spoke with their bodies, or the shapes and whisps of their bodies. Spoke emotion like that. Leeland tried to stitch the holes in the living pakehas with his words. The pakehas were hurting, dead and alive. So like school yard bullies, played it out on the backs of Maori. And Maori, dead and alive, continued to struggle. 

Against the battering rams of Westminster Law, privatised prisons, poisonous health care and lobotomising, heart-dehydrating curriculum, the people of the land continued. And the earth sung to them quietly in caress, balm to wounded souls. Leeland knew the land would never stop singing to her children. And those songs made him weep.

You had to pick a side.

You couldn't live with your eyes and ears open, and not realise what's going on. But once you picked that side, you realised it wasn't about sides. It was about remembering. The memories that live through bodies, and words, and actions, and refuse to be erased or re-written.

And the bully stomped on and threw its toys.

There aren't really sides to understanding. Being quite short seemed to help Leeland. Easier to not get caught in tall poppies heads being chopped off.

Standing underneath the rhetoric, propoganda, denial and hot-air, to see where it's all leading. 

For wounds to heal, the thorn must be removed; not ignored and 'moved on from'. Common sense really. Unfortunately commonsense was not so common these days.

In time Leeland realised it was merely a price for living on this contested lands. Though he wasn't a pakeha, to Maori maybe they were all colonial settlers. White, yellow, red, black, rainbow, off-white. So he tried to pay his part, taxes and rent perhaps. Someone had too. The price was too great and could never be repaid, but maybe the act of trying spoke in volumes.

So he hoped.

#J11 Migrants in solidarity with Idle No More

On this global day of action in solidarity with Idle No More, members of Young Asian Feminist Aotearoa (YAFA) went inside the Canadian Consulate and Trade Office in Tamaki-Makau-rau (Auckland) to demonstrate our support for indigenous rights everywhere. 

RISE AGAINST RAPE CULTURE: A Silent Protest in Solidarity with Women's Struggle in India

A woman in Delhi was brutally raped and beaten ON A BUS. The woman has just died as a result of her injuries. There is a lot to this story so do check out the links below.

Today the world finally learns of her name - RIP Jyoti Singh Pandey.

In light of her story as well as the many unnamed unsung women victims there, here and worldwide, a group of young Asian women with the support of Shakti, are organising a silent protest to mourn in solidarity and extend aroha and support to those still in grief and disbelief over this injustice.

Why a silent protest? Because words cannot express the pain and rage we have been carrying in our hearts since the loss of our sisters.
Our mana has been broken!

Immigrant women of colour and young people in Aotearoa New Zealand seek the tautoko of all members of New Zealand society, from all walks of life, to join us for a silent protest in honour of the women victims and their families. Join us as we rise against rape culture and collectively build hope and strength.

In respect of Indian custom, wear something white as a colour for mourning. Black scarves will be distributed at the event for people to wear as masks symbolising our "silence". You may bring posters and placards to "speak". Silent protest will go for 30 minutes, after which speakers from the community will be invited to share a few words.

When: Saturday 12 January 2012
Where: Aotea Square
What: Gather from 1pm
ALL WELCOMED

This event is graciously supported by SHAKTI (http://shakti.org.nz/)

Informative links:

http://www.3news.co.nz/Group-protests-violence-after-India-rape/tabid/423/articleID/282139/Default.aspx

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/indian-rape-victim-has-brain-damage-lung-infection-doctors-struggle-to-save-her-life/2012/12/28/cf4ad07c-50b4-11e2-835b-02f92c0daa43_story.html

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Delhi-gang-rape-victims-answers-to-police-could-be-a-crucial-dying-declaration/articleshow/17821132.cms