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I was just thinking about @ColeyTangerina tweets about Pakeha and our whakapapa. Dad did a whole bunch of research, and what really stands out to me is how much our ancestors wanted to forget and get away from their pasts.
Dad's parents, especially his father's side, never wanted to talk about their family or heritage, and when pressed, claimed to not remember.
What I know now is, they were so poor, and honestly I think so ashamed, that they wanted to put all that behind them. For context, my great uncle and his brothers were raised by distant relatives, and had been placed in "training hulks" on the Thames ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/waleshistory/2010/04/welsh_training_ships.html)
My great-grandparents' marriage certificates, three out of four witnesses signed with an X because they couldn't write their names. The censuses record them as bootmakers, washer women. Think Mayhew and London Labour London Poor. They were trash. That's why they left.
The McNairs, who came to NZ first in 1842, well Peter McNair was a remittance man. That means your family paid you to go away and not come back.
My ancestor Archibald McNair you can look up in Papers Past. He was a drunk and a thief.
My ancestor Archibald McNair you can look up in Papers Past. He was a drunk and a thief.
On Mum's side, the Jews came here immediately post-war, looking for a new life from 1940s Yorkshire, and very simply, their parents had got out of the Russian empire as refugees from pogroms. My great-grandfather fought for Britain in 1914 from a simple pride in VOLUNTEERING.
(what a novelty to choose to fight for your King after Tsarist 20-year conscription).
Anyway none of them wanted to talk about that stuff either.
My point, and I do have one, is this: very many of us are descended from people who consciously, deliberately, wanted to wipe out the past and declare a brand new day. I'm not saying that was good or bad -- I understand why they felt that way.
This does have huge consequences when we engage with another people for whom the past and descent is everything, and it has huge consequences for us descendants where the past is a curiosity and not a horror. And that's where so much hunger to lock on to heritage comes from.
We should recognise we weren't told stuff because people were trying to protect us from shame or protect themselves. And we should try to deal with that sensibly and honourably, resurrecting what we can find of our own, and building out anew, and not nicking other's people's.
We also can't ignore that our parents' or grandparents' brand new day came at tremendous cost to Māori people, whether they knew that or not. And figure out how to deal with that without pretending that by absorbing some reo and tikanga we did our bit and can carry on.
Addendum: I'm slow on putting two and two together this evening, but deliberate forgetting is part of colonisation. As is taking on the indigenous people's customs as though they legitimised you.
