When I see Pākehā families with their land, security, and success, I feel cheated. I know I can’t change it. For a while, I didn’t know how to move forward.

One idea from Belich stayed with me. He distinguishes nominal alienation from substantive alienation. Land was nominally lost the day the deed was signed. It was substantively lost only when Māori stopped living on it and using it—and the gap between the two could be decades long.

I think loss works like that in families too. Ours was signed away long before I was born. It arrived in our house later.

This is where that feeling took me.

The bottom of the hill

We lived at the bottom of Kaiti Hill in Gisborne, surrounded by cousins and relations. My friends were Pākehā, and they lived up the hill in the settlement we called Snobs Hill. Our house was really poor. Their homes were amazing.

When I was seven or eight, a girl from a wealthy, influential family up the coast became my friend. I remember thinking how beautiful she was — the way she dressed, her manners. I also remember being grateful she chose me.

That gratitude stays with me now. Not that I admired her; children notice beauty. At seven, I already felt I needed to be chosen. I was already measuring myself against what I saw up the hill, and coming up short.

I don’t know how her family came by their land, and that isn’t really the point. The point is that I compared two childhoods without knowing how differently their foundations were laid.

The rule

My friends used to ask why they couldn’t come to my house. I had to tell them I wasn’t allowed to bring friends home.

That rule followed me through my whole upbringing. As a teenager, I still didn’t go out, and my friends still didn’t come over. I avoided talking about home at school. My sister and brothers had friends over. I didn’t. It wasn’t that they had no shame. I think they carried it differently: we were all in the same boat, so to them it didn’t matter who saw.

To me it mattered enormously. Somewhere along the way the rule stopped needing anyone to enforce it. I enforced it myself.

The instruction was about visitors. The lesson I learned was bigger: some parts of my life other people must not see.

The name

Mum was strapped at school for speaking Māori. Grandad banned te reo in the home, so she grew up without it. By the time I came along, we were taught a simple message: being Māori was bad, and the good people were Pākehā. We were poor, and that carried shame too.

When I read the James timeline, I found us in it. From 1886, English was the only language allowed in Native and general schools, and the policy encouraged children to speak English on the playground. In a 1970s survey, more than half the adults interviewed said they were punished at school for speaking Māori. And many Māori parents supported the policy, believing it was essential for their children’s future.

I don’t know exactly what my grandfather believed. But I no longer think he was alone in it, and I no longer think Mum’s strapping was just one teacher’s cruelty. It was policy.

Of the first three children, I was the only one with a Māori name. My sister and brother had English names. They told me our surname, Te Momo, meant waste.

I know now how wrong that was. But as children, we had no way to check it or ask anyone, so we couldn’t question it. We believed it. At seven, at ten, at fifteen, I learned to be ashamed of my own name.

Three generations, three shapes of the same silence: a girl punished at school for her language, a home where the language was banned, and a daughter who learned to hide her name. In The Vibration Underneath, I wrote about how silencing settles in the throat. This is where it settled in mine.

The quiet one

I grew up when discipline meant being hit. Spare the rod and spoil the child. Parents hit their children, teachers did the same, and no one thought it remarkable. So I made it my job to be the good child — obedient, quiet, no trouble — to avoid it.

But it was more than avoiding pain. I wanted my parents to be proud of me. Being hit meant I was a bad child. A sinner. So being good wasn’t only about staying safe. It was the only proof I had that I wasn’t bad.

As a teenager, I overheard a neighbour describe me as the quiet one, the one who did what was expected. I felt vindicated: someone had seen how hard I was trying. And I felt sad and alone, because the thing that kept me safe had also become a cage. I was trapped in that identity.

That girl kept her voice small because using it cost too much. She is the reason I can write about the throat.

Ten or twelve

Somewhere around ten or twelve, I worked out that the poverty we lived in came from decisions that weren’t mine, and that I was powerless to change them. When we talked about how poor we were, people teased us about what our own homes would be like one day.

I became determined to do differently.

In The Closed Circle, I wrote about a declaration: that violence and poverty would stop with me. I made it as an adult. But it began here, with a girl at the bottom of the hill who decided her life would be different.

Not mine, but I lived them

Reading the history now, I can see the wider forces that shaped my parents’ circumstances. I can also see that my parents made their own choices. I don’t have to choose between blaming them and blaming colonisation. Both were real. More than one thing shaped my life.

Belich notes that until the 1980s New Zealanders weren’t much interested in their own wars. Children didn’t play Māori and Colonists; they played Cowboys and Indians. I grew up inside that silence. No one taught me this history. I’m learning it now, in my sixties, and finding myself in it.

What has helped is separating three things.

What was taken: whenua, reo, rangatiratanga — the foundation earlier generations couldn’t pass forward.

What I lived: the poverty, the shame, the hidden house, the name.

What I am building: the life, the home, and the inheritance that I still get to shape.

The first I cannot undo. The second I can understand. The third is still open.

And out of all of this came one sentence: the choices and the shame I carried because of what was absent — they were not mine. But I lived them.

Both halves matter. They were not mine, so I can put them down. I lived them, so I don’t have to pretend they didn’t shape me.

Home

Belich ends his chapter with empire marching, flooding or creeping “into even the innermost sanctums of independent Aotearoa.” For a while I think it crept into ours: into the house no one could visit, and into the name I was taught to be ashamed of.

My home now is my sanctuary. It is packed with love and beautiful things — love first. My life is centuries away from that little girl’s. And we are paying off the mortgage on this land so it can pass to my children. I will do that.

This whole kōrero began with grief for lost land. And here I am, securing whenua for the next generation. I cannot restore everything my tūpuna lost. But I can decide what I pass forward.

My solitude is essential to me. Some of it grew out of years when being alone was safer than being seen. Now it is simply mine, in a home where I decide who comes in, and where the door is no longer closed out of shame.

For the little girl

I was never less worthy because our house was poor, or because my name was Māori, or because I was hit. I didn’t become worthy when I succeeded. I was worthy before I began. Elsewhere I’ve called it Imago Dei: I always was.

Which leaves me with the question I keep coming back to: how do I tell that little girl she can put down the burden?

Maybe like this.

You can put it down now. You don’t have to hide anymore. There is no more shame, and no more poverty. You are safe. You made it out.

 

For further information or to view published articles related to Te Poutama Ora, please see https://www.iantemo.com/publications

This post is part of the Whakapapa of Colonisation series, a companion body of work to Te Poutama Ora (TPO), and follows The Vibration Underneath and The Closed Circle. The academic companion article is They Were Not Mine, But I Lived Them.