#i'm not making this rebloggable because i would rather not have my whakapapa on random people's blogs lol

[irawhiti]

to be clear with regards to my post attempting to coin ngāti rangiātea, i say a few times in vague terms that people will expect you to go to drastic lengths to find your iwi that are not reasonable nor moral. i'm not remotely exaggerating, especially about the moral part.

the final straw that prompted drafting the post and term for me was when, after mapping out my entire family line to pinpoint the person who came from aotearoa to australia over multiple years only to find VERY solid evidence that they were born on the ship to australia and their mother deliberately obfuscated their identities + there is literally no tribal record due to them fleeing aotearoa during the musket wars, i was told to send a physical letter to a person who married into my family who i found out by chance currently lives in aotearoa. this was only possible because i found she is semi-popular in certain circles and has a p.o box at her work address.

despite this being a pretty extreme invasion of privacy, i sent a hopeful letter asking for any information she may have had. obviously i never got a response. this was met with people telling me that i need to send more letters to this complete stranger. when i said "yeah i don't want to do this, there is a 99.9% chance she doesn't even know we're māori due to my specific situation, she clearly isn't interested in speaking to me, i've just found out she was a truly awful person towards my immediate family, and this is a gross invasion of privacy" i was criticised for giving up.

and forgive me for saying that i just don't think that this should be the state of things. to put the concept of Maybe Potentially finding one more crumb of info to put towards Maybe Potentially discovering a piece of your family history above basic human decency and respect.

and it's like... alright. theoretically: what if this did lead to the discovery of my iwi? what exactly does this do for me? like, functionally? i'm not from aotearoa. my family have been diaspora māori for almost 200 years now. my fires have been put out, i have no access to a marae, my entire family (alive and dead) has had a fundamentally different life experience than the other māori from the iwi we came from. hell, entire iwi have come and gone in 200 years, absorbed into other iwi through marriage or wiped out through conquest.

apart from being a brief nod to my whakapapa in a pepeha (followed by the harsh reality that i still wouldn't know my hapū to recite immediately after my iwi), what would this mean for me? for my whānau? why am i expected to run around in circles, ripping myself and everyone around me who may have a single fucking crumb of information apart? who does this validate? because it sure as hell doesn't validate me. i've decided that i'm much more interested in representing and learning about my whānau than the people i was separated from nearly two centuries ago at this point and hey, if that makes strangers feel a bit pissy for some reason, that's really not my problem.

so, i'm ngāti kangaru, a tongue-in-cheek label, and i'm ngāti rangiātea, a call to action.

and above all, i'm done doing morally objectionable shit and begging like a kurī for a scrap of fucking respect.