What did poverty teach you?
To cook from nothing. To sew, to mend, to make it last. To stretch a meal so everyone got some.
It also taught me what I was for. The means test that decided which children went into classes. Cooking, sewing, typing at school. They were called opportunities.
Looking back, they were a sorting. Māori kids were measured, and the measure pointed us toward the kitchen and the typing pool.
What did poverty teach you to hide?
Being on a diet when there was no lunch. The shoes glued and seams handstitched to hold them together. Where we lived, the parts of town people looked down on. Whose house we couldn’t invite friends back to.
Whakamā. Nobody named it as something done to us, so it felt like something wrong with us. That’s how it works. The wound gets turned into a personal failing, and then you carry it as yours.
And something was hidden from me too. Nobody told me how we became poor. Nobody taught us that Māori land had been taken by law. So, I grew up believing that’s just how Māori were supposed to be. The first lesson was taught out loud. The second was taught through silence. I’ve written more about that one in What did colonisation teach you?
What did poverty teach you to carry?
What my parents carried, they handed on. Not because they wanted to. You can only give what you were given.
The older ones carried the younger ones too. I remember my first pay from a holiday job going on a sibling’s high school uniform. It didn’t feel like a choice. It was just what you did.
What did poverty teach you to become?
Someone who could get through. Someone fluent in a world that had shut my whānau out.
But every step into that world was a step away from the one that held me. That’s the double exile. Not fully welcome in the new place. Not quite at home in the old one.
What did poverty teach you to want?
This is the one I didn’t see coming.
Look at my cupboards. The crockery goes back to a melamine picnic set and jam jars we drank out of. The kitchenware goes back to baking in biscuit tins. The clothes go back to Barwick’s (Op-shop) specials. The stationery goes back to fifth-form schoolbook turned inside out so they could be used again.
I buy two of everything. I struggle to throw things away, even when they no longer serve me.
I have enough now. My body hasn’t caught up. That’s what I call the wound in abundance: the poverty doesn’t leave when the money comes. Sometimes it gets louder.
And it shows up differently in each of us:
-
One keeps too many blankets, because we were cold.
-
One keeps creams and products unopened, because care was scarce.
-
One can’t stop mowing lawns, because that work was forced on us and loved at the same time.
-
And all of us work past the point of health, because stopping always costs something. Our job was to work, even when we were unwell.
I call it the Stain of Impoverished Living.
What would you not give back, even if you could?
-
The ingenuity. The way I can’t stand waste.
-
Knowing what enough actually is.
-
The cave. The world we made inside, around and despite all of it.
Poverty shaped the conditions. Colonisation made the poverty. But neither of them could take that.
Name the teacher
None of this was failing. It was learning. Poverty was the teacher, and colonisation built the classroom. When we see that, the shame has somewhere else to go.
So, I’ll leave the questions with you. Take one at a time. Don’t rush the hard ones. And always finish with the last one.
What did poverty teach you? To hide? To carry? To become? To want?
And what would you not give back, even if you could?
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.