Bringing Home The Body: Bi/multi Racial Maori Women's Hybridity in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Tess Moeke-Maxwell (PhD) Ngati Pukeko. Ngai Tai (Umupuia) PO Box 15240, Tauranga Aotearoa/New Zealand E-mail: soulonearth@wave.co.nz This paper emerged from my PhD thesis 'Bringing Home The Body: Bi/multi Racial Maori Women's Hybridity in Aotearoa/New Zealand (2003). Presented at the NZARE/ARRE Conference held at the University of Auckland, New Zealand 30 November - 2 December 2003. DRAFT ONLY: Permission required from the author before quoting.

Introduction
... (T)he landscape functions as a scribe recording the passage of history of the nation and its people. The emotion attached to the landscape relates to its ability to release memory, allowing the past to exist simultaneously with the present. Thus a metonymic link between bodies, landscape and nation, in that they are all contiguous... function to temporarily replace one another... The landscape which initially unites bodies and creates an identity through place becomes repressed in the formation of the nation. Landscape features or geographical contours always underpin the meaning of a nation and the formation of national boundaries. But in this repression the term 'landscape' becomes meaningless without the mediation of the political construct of the nation. The thews and sinews of the body shaped by our relationship to our specific environment are covered over by the forging of a national identity. In other words, the discourses of nationalism subscribe to a different form of embodiment (as in race/ethnicity) which requires the foregoing of an embodiment mediated through nature: our bodily relationship to our landscape is repressed so that we may come into coherency via the nation. Notions of race are a part of nationalist discourse (Radhika Mohanram, 1999, pp. 5-7).

My interest in the bi/racial Maori woman is located against the backdrop of New Zealand nationalism and its relationship to the discursive formation of the female Maori subject. As Radhika Mohanram (1999) suggests in the opening quote, any discussion about Maori women's subjectivity must necessarily engage with the relationship between nationalism, landscape/geography and the metonymic link to the corporeal bodies which come to inhabit space and time already loaded and prescripted with narratives about the New Zealand nation (and national identity), as well as the bodies that dwell within and without its borders. My interest is with the bi/multi racial woman's bodily 'thews and sinews' which find themselves rooted deep within Maori, as well as Pakeha/Other body/landscapes. This paper provides an overview of my PhD research which looks at bi/multi racial Maori women's identity in Aotearoa/New Zealand. The thesis was written in two parts; the first section looks at the discourse of New Zealand nationalism and its interest in producing pure Maori and Pakeha subjects while the second introduces the voices of twenty women who

generously highlighted their experiences of bi/multi raciality. Essentially, I wanted to look at the social construction of bi/multi racial Maori women's identity in order to understand the discursive influences which inform a sense of what it means to be Maori and woman today. I wanted to discern the ongoing forms of colonialism (which I argue contribute to new constructions of authentic Maori identities) that exist to mark, name and place Maori women in the nation in culturally specific ways. My purpose in doing so is to expose the complexities of identity formation (and mediation of identity) for women positioned across bi/multi racial and cultural landscapes. For example, I wanted to understand how Maori women (who also identify and maintain Pakeha, Jewish, African, Indian, Irish, Scottish and other identities), are marginalised by nationalist discourses which contribute to defining and producing an essentialist Maori women's identity to the exclusion of bi/multi racial Maori women's experiences of difference. In essence, I wanted to examine the landscape of bicultural nationalism and the relationship this has to both the symbolic and corporeal reality of bi/multi racial women's lives. In order to speak to the complexities of their difference and multiply located marginal positionings it was desirable to interrogate the relationships and the interconnections between race, gender and class within a bicultural framework. This paper provides a brief overview of this piece of research. New Zealand Nationalism: Inventing The Maori/Pakeha Binary A discourse analysis was employed to discern the social construction of Maori women's identity which I rooted in the soil and fabric of colonisation, New Zealand nationalism, colonialism and assimilation. As such, I looked at the dominant narratives of the formation and maintenance of the New Zealand nation, national identity and Maori and Pakeha race relations. I argue that the New Zealand nation, and a sense of an imagined national 'homogenous' community emerged to exclude Maori. Up until the 1970s a white mono cultural nationalism, prevailed hence the saying 'We are one people'. As with other imagined communities difference had to be forfeited in order to come into sameness/unity with the dominant majority (Anderson, 1983). It has been argued that nationalism, and a specific New Zealand national identity, became solidified after the First World war (Sinclair, 1986). Keith Sinclair (1986) suggests that the Maori Battalion fought alongside Pakeha men which cemented an emotional connection and mutual respect between Pakeha and tangata whenua. This acceptance of Maori by the dominant majority accelerated their desire for Maori assimilation. It would appear that Maori and Pakeha bonded through a common enemy and a common suffering. But according to Donna Awatere (1984) Maori were also meant to sink into the white potato (assimilate to the dominate majority culture) and die. However Maori flourished and managed to find ways to maintain their communities and cultural identities as tangata whenua (Walker, 1990). By the 1970s Maori became disillusioned with white monocultural nationalism and with the emergence of the first born urban Maori intelligentsia, an articulate and eloquent anti-colonial voice emerged to argue for a shift in nationalism to biculturalism (Walker 1990). Maori counter nationalists' efforts centred on arguments to implement Maori sovereignty which rested on the resurrection of the Treaty of Waitangi. They argued that the disadvantaged social position of Maori, in relation to Pakeha, was rooted in the discursive practices of colonialism. For example, loss of lands was argued as central to Maori alienation and disenfranshisement in the nation (Awatere, 1984) . In arguing for Maori sovereignty, via the resurrection of the forgotten Treaty, Maori strategically invoked their identity as unchanged

over time (Awatere, 1984). By positioning themselves with an essentialist identity (via Maori cultural capital such as whakapapa/genealogy, whenua/land, Te reo Maori/ Maori language, wairuatanga/spirituality) Maori nationalists (who were also often representatives of their own iwi) demanded distributive justice. Maori, acting in favour of iwi corporate initiatives sought no less than to equalise the social and economic position of Maori by competing in the market place alongside Pakeha. By representing themselves as primordial, traditional and authentic they were able to reinvoke the Treaty of Waitangi as the nation's founding document. Hence the shift to biculturalism during the 1980s (Mohanram, 1999). Despite the formation of the Waitangi Tribunal and the successful claims of some iwi to achieve compensation for raupatu/land confiscation and other indiscretions the Crown committed against tangata whenua, biculturalism is still a largely arbitrary and insoluble concept and practice. Maori counter nationalists of the 1970s invoked an identity narrative which reflected the homogeneous identity conferred upon them by the British in the interpolating act of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi . In this move Maori were homogenised as one cultural people complete with cultural stereotypes informed by the popular epistemologies and ideologies which emanated from the discursive influences of Social Darwinism. Maori counter nationalists rearticulated the notion of a homogenous tangata whenua to mobilise politically in the name of redistributive justice (Mohanram, 1999). Counter nationalists reconstructed Maori and Pakeha in binary opposition to each other and re conceptualised Maori and Pakeha as two separate and discrete cultural groups. By extension, Pakeha were also instated as Treaty partners (Mohanram, 1999). Maori were conceptualised in essentialist terms to support decolonisation initiatives. Drawing from Anthias and Yuval-Davis (1989) work on women and nationalism, I suggest that Maori women bear the responsibility of reproducing the nation through their reproductive and maternal positioning. Maori women carry the responsibility for upholding the cultural reproduction and cultural authenticity of the Maori nation. Functioning as the spiritual cornerstone of Maoridom, the Maori woman is called upon to reproduce the Maori nation, its peoples, values and cultural traditions. Partha Chatterjee's (1989) ideas enabled me to recognise that a gendered material/spiritual dichotomy exists between Maori men and women and ensures that the political and economic developmental objectives of iwi are at the centre of mobilising initiatives. Maori men are free to vacillate between the landscapes of iwi corporate initiatives and the Western market place while the traditional, unchanged, authentic Maori woman is needed to uphold and perpetuate the notion of a timeless/traditional Maori nation. Simply put, if Maori are obliged to compete alongside Pakeha in the market place, someone is required to uphold the unchanged status of tangata whenua. Symbolically, the Maori woman becomes metonymic of the landscape and all that is traditional. She acts as the skeletal frame upon which a Maori national community becomes conceptualised as authentic and unchanged over time thus permitting a newly reconfigured patriarchal alliance between Maori and Pakeha to emerge. The strategic positioning of Maori women as traditional in the early 2000s is exclusive in that it excludes the reality of bi/multi racial women. Many bi/multi racial Maori women today live with more than one cultural identity and access various degrees of diverse cultural social capital. Some live without whakapapa (adoptees), and some are estranged from whanau, landscapes of origin, or have little cultural contact with Maori people and culture. Many

have little or no Maori language skills and yet still claim a Maori identity as a primary identity. For some, this identity sits uncomfortably alongside Others. I argue that New Zealand feminism, although recognising that there were difficulties over notions of Maori authenticity within our own academic conversations, has failed to create a language to understand the discursive positioning and unique subjectivity of bi/multi racial women. The split in the women's movement into Maori and Pakeha feminisms has meant that by and large, Maori feminists have authority to name and represent Maori women's concerns. However, this is problematic because these concerns generally reflect the ideologies and sentiments of Maori nationalists' objectives and exclude the specificities of bi/multi racial women's lived experiences. Bi/multi racial Maori women's unique cultural subjectivity, discursive positioning and the new forms of racism that are grappled with and resisted remain untheorised. Kathy Irwin (1992) calls for the development of multiple theories to speak to the increasing needs and complexities of Maori women when she states:
With the right theory as a tool we can take the right to our tino rangatiratanga, our sovereignty as Maori women, to be in control of making sense of our world and our future, ourselves. We can and must design new tools - Maori feminist theories, to ensure that we have control over making sense of our world and our future. This is a feminist position in which the artificial creation, inflation, and maintenance of male power over women is unacceptable (p. 5).

My articulation of the bi/multi racial women is in part, a response to Irwin's request. In order to understand more clearly the reality of being positioned as bi/multi racial, I wanted to understand why some women of Maori descent identify as bi/multi racial Maori Pakeha/Other when other Maori who have mixed racial and cultural ancestry identify only as Maori. I also wanted to understand how bi/multi racial Maori women make sense of their dual/multiple cultural subjectivities and positionings. I wanted to discern what form these dual/multiple cultural subjectivities took conceptually and how they were performed. Judith Butler (1993) elaborates the call to identity and highlights what this rests upon. She describes how the process of naming the subject and calling the subject into existence occurs within a process of power that inscribes the subject in specific ways. According to Butler, the Law (both real and symbolic) functions as the authority that interpellates the subject into particular subject positions, holding implications for the social construction of gender. Within the 'naming' process the subject turns to answer the call and in this moment is 'subjectivated' and becomes the 'subject'. For example, in the New Zealand context the discursive processes associated with biculturalism (for example, the Waitangi Tribunal) employ 'whakapapa' to subjectivate the Maori subject/iwi with a 'traditional' Maori identity (Te Whanau, 2001). In practical terms the call to authenticity (through identification with whakapapa) functions to subjectivate the subject with the accompanying ideologies and cultural obligations that give this identity its current meaning and value. This process occurs within the gendered subject and is reliant upon the repudiation of corporeal gendered difference. Butler (1993) states that gender is subsumed beneath the requirement of the erasure of difference as specific discourses call the subject into being. She claims, when the subject answers the call an excess of difference operates which functions outside the Law, "(i)interpellation thus loses its status as a simple performative, an act of discourse with the power to create that which it refers, and creates more than it ever meant to, signifying in excess of any intended referent" (p. 122). The Law emanates from the disinterested

unmarked universal subject. It is the Law that desires, and within this desire, subsumes Maori in its quest to satisfy its desire. Whatever the universal subject desires and deems desirable is intimately tied to capitalism, progress and development. As a totalising operation of power, it must subsume all difference in pursuit of its desire. Within this, the colonised subject also becomes the desiring subject. In answering the interpellation, and being subjectivated into the subject position and subjectivity prescribed by the Law, Maori become inscribed with the ideological desires encoded in the subjectivity provided. The desired feminine Maori subject is one that complies with the interpellation as she meets the needs of the normative aesthetic embedded within colonialist discourses (biculturalism) to reproduce itself and its normative white subject. She is desired only so long as she fulfils the nation's desire of her as primordial and traditional. Exactly how does the call to a 'traditional' Maori identity impact on the bi/multi racial female subject? How is the bi/multi racial woman positioned in the nation and more specifically are there consequences to this? I also questioned what the presence/absence of whiteness has to do with the new forms of racism and the new subjugations bi/multi racial women engage within the bicultural nation. Bi/multi Racial Maori Methodology In order to rectify the occlusion of bi/multi racial women from feminist discussions on Maori women's identity (and dominant academic articulations as well as Maori articulations of identity) I decided to add a qualitative component to the research. I used a life history methodological approach (Middleton 1993) sensitised to Kaupapa Maori Research objectives (Bishop, 1998; Smith, 1998) to interview twenty women who acknowledged their Maori and Pakeha/Other racial and cultural histories. I argued that a kaupapa Maori research paradigm was inappropriate to deal with the specificities of women who are positioned across dual and multiple cultures. I suggested that a feminist oriented life-history methodology, coupled with an awareness of Maori values and cultural practices could accommodate the huge range of 'Maoriness' I would encounter. It also addressed concerns of safety for women who indicated that they would not comfortable with a Kaupapa Maori research process. As a researcher, I had to be adaptable and flexible enough to accommodate a research process which involved interviewing women who possessed a broad range of Maori cultural knowledge. For example, some women were fluent speakers of te reo Maori while others had little or no language skills, or cultural awareness and practice. In utilising a Bi/multi Racial Kaupapa Maori Research Methodology, attention was paid to the spirit of the Treaty of Waitangi (Maori values, beliefs and practices), while being sensitised to the needs of bi/multi racial women and their respective cultural historiographies. Traditional, Assimilated, Pathologised and Hybrid Identity Narratives I argued that a traditional Maori women's subjectivity is promoted as the only desirable and authentic Maori identity available to Maori women. A traditional identity is viewed as primordial, unchanged by time or contact with Westernism. Conceptually speaking, this identity can also withstand inter-racial genetic pooling and cross-cultural influences. By extension, I argued that an assimilated Maori identity is one that is subsumed beneath an imposed colonial identity. Hence, Maori who are viewed as assimilated are seen to be contaminated with Westernism. An assimilated identity is a colonised identity but it narrowly escapes being viewed as pathological because assimilated individuals are perceived to be

privileged with Pakeha beliefs, values, practices and norms and are therefore aligned with whiteness/racial superiority. Maori who do not fit a traditional articulation of identity, nor an assimilated articulation of a Pakeha identity are pathologised as identityless/rootless (Awatere, 1984). This epitomises Maori who are clustered with negative statistics in the areas of health, poverty, crime, domestic violence and so forth. These individuals are seen as 'colonised' Maori; disenfranchised and alienated from their past they are separated from their traditional roots. Another Maori identity narrative to emerge in the late 1990s was that of cultural hybridity when Paul Meridith (1999, 1999a, 1999b) explored his experience of being a cultural hybrid. His work reflected his masculine half-caste positionality which was situated within his gendered experiences as a Maori Pakeha half-caste/cultural vacillator which ultimately precluded a bi/multi racial female perspective. Using the concept of cultural hybridity as articulated by Homi Bhabha (1994) I was able to theorise bi/multi racial woman as different to Maori men, Pakeha men, bi/multi racial Maori men and Pakeha/Other women. Meridith (1999) states that the bi/multi racial subject is situated within the "broader context of a politics of cultural difference, and within this Maori Pakeha/Other hybridity and the third space". He cites Bhabha's (1994) ideas on cultural hybridity as:
... the process by which the colonial governing authority undertakes to translate the identity of the colonised (the Other) within a singular universal framework, but then fails producing something familiar but new... a new hybrid identity or subject-position emerges from the interweaving of elements of the coloniser and colonised challenging the validity and authenticity of any essentialist cultural identity.

Meridith insists that hybridity is positioned as the "antidote to essentialism", or "the belief in invariable and fixed properties which define 'whatness' of a given entity". In drawing from Bhabha (1994) he suggests: (t)his new mutation replaces the established pattern with a 'mutual and mutable'...
representation of cultural difference that is positioned in between the coloniser and colonised. As such, hybridity is a highly specific albeit heterogenous articulation of difference, one which transgresses spatial areas reserved for particular unmarked bodies.

Hybridity then, as a theory which is capable of explaining the unique social construction and position of bi/multi racial women in New Zealand, holds some appeal. Bhabha (1990) explains hybridity this way:
... (T)he importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original movements from which the third emerges, rather hybridity... is the 'third space' which enables other positions to emerge. This third space displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives, which are inadequately understood through received wisdom... The process of cultural hybridity gives rise to a something different, something new and unrecognisable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation (p. 211).

On one level, the concept of hybridity is liberating because it opens up a space to think about the way New Zealand colonial culture creates unequal subjects. The concept of hybridity is emancipatory in that its existence (construction and performance) liberates the subject from a sense of unbelonging, dislocation and alienation, and a partial participation/location within the culture/s of origin. It provides an explanation for the bi/multi racial women's ability to straddle two different and opposing cultures, providing some

understanding of the chameleon-like changes necessary for a hybrid. The 'third space' afforded the subject, who straddles the Maori/Pakeha/Other divide, allows herself insight and wisdom. Without being too utopian, she has an advantage integral to reading/making sense of her cultural differences and ambiguities within the post colonial nation, and the challenges she faces. In short, the hybrid opens up a new category of cultural location. Bhabha (1994) contends that hybridity is inclusive in that it "initiates new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration and contestation." Meridith (1999) asserts:
The hybrid identity is positioned within this third space, as 'lubricant'.... in the conjunction of cultures. The hybrid's potential is with their innate knowledge of 'transculturation'..., their ability to transverse both cultures and to translate, negotiate and mediate affinity and difference within a dynamic of exchange and inclusion. They have encoded within them a counter-hegemonic agency. At the point at which the coloniser presents a normalising, hegemonic practice, the hybrid strategically opens up a third space of/for rearticulation of negotiation and meaning.

Through utilising the concept of the Third Space which Bhabha (1990) claims is cultural hybridity, I began the task of deconstructing an essentialist Maori women's identity. The narratives of the women participants enabled me to show how bi/multi racial women consciously and unconsciously engage with their respective cultures to participate in and honour their plurality of racial and cultural difference. This is quite different from Gloria Anzaldua's (1987) definition of cultural hybridity in that she rejects the either/or dichotomy of hybridity, arguing for something that exceeds dualistic thinking. For Anzaldua the metiza (Spanish, Mexican, American woman) has a consciousness which occurs through "being on both shores at once"; she suggests that the metiza consciousness is the "... massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness [which] is the beginning of the long struggle, but one that could, in our best hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, or war" (p. 80). Unlike Anzaluda I argue that the bi/multi racial woman lives with the ambiguity created in her dual cultural positioning in a way which exceeds the Maori Pakeha/Other divide, thus producing not a 'superior' identity but, rather, an identity that constantly negotiates itself in relation to the bi/multi racial woman's unique historical circumstances as native/colonial, colonised/coloniser and Maori/Pakeha-Other. The Maori Pakeha/Other hybrid lives the daily contradiction of being positioned as indigenous as well as a variant of the Pakeha/Other. The research showed how these women actively vacillate across cultures to effect positive life opportunities for themselves and their families. Employment opportunities for example are often sought in Pakeha landscapes. The heterogeneity between the women was also recorded as well as the various degrees of social 'cultural' capital the women identified. Often the women occupied positions of importance within Maori and non-Maori communities. In order to try and create a visual image of the multiple positioning bi/multi racial women engage in I elaborated on Rangimarie Rose Pere's (1991) model Te Wheke. I did so to highlight the merging, contradictions, disjunctures as well as complementarities that occur when two or more cultures intersect and overlap each other. I suggest the relationship of power between each of these axis requires further investigation. The hybrid woman merely acknowledges the dual/multiple narratives of cultural/family values and practices available to her. She is not simply located in either one or the other but is a containment of both. These narratives point to her resiliency when it comes to making sense of her differences in relation to a traditional Maori or Pakeha/Other identity. The bi/multi

racial woman has an ability to think beyond the dichotomous cultural identities imposed upon her and to create a third space that serves her interests within her whanau, family, community and nation/s. Hybrid women exhibit an ability to speak about the parts of themselves (different cultural subjectivities) that make up a sense of wholeness described by Rangimarie Pere's (1991) concept of Maori holistic well-being Te Wheke: A Celebration of Infinite Wisdom. Pere defines Maori health via a holistic model based on the ancient teachings of her people which she symbolises in the form of Te Wheke (the octopus). She uses a metaphorical description and analysis of Te Wheke and the relationship each tentacle has to a holistic dimension of Maori. Pere (1991) states:
The head represents the child/family. Each tentacle represents a dimension that requires and needs certain things to help give sustenance to the whole. The suckers on each tentacle represent the many facets that exist within each dimension. The tentacles move out in an infinite direction for sustenance when the octopus moves laterally. The tentacles can also be intertwined so that there is a mergence, with no clear boundaries. The dimensions need to be understood in relation to each other, and within the context of the whole (p. 3)..

Te Wheke represents the totality of the Maori individual encapsulated within the well-being of the individual which is connected to whanau, community and environment. For example, among some of the dimensions Pere identifies as central for Maori wholeness and well-being includes the care of the hinengaro, tinana and wairua in relation to whanau, community and environment. To extend Pere's metaphor, the Bi/multi Racial Te Wheke consists of a number of bodies and tentacles which include Maori cultural symbolic structures and Pakeha/Other symbolic structures as well. Imagine that these (cultural) octopuses overlay each other. The Bi/multi Racial Te Wheke is made up of separate octopuses representing themselves with different colours and names. Imagine 'Maori Te Wheke' is coloured red and a Pakeha equivalent of Te Wheke is overlaid in blue. Now imagine what happens when the cultural contradictions and inter-play of power between the two are invoked and these cultural-coloured tentacles begin to agitate and turn against each other. Imagine how they interconnect and speak to each other in their kaleidoscope of pink, crimson, fuchsia, magenta, mauve, lavender, violet and purplish hues. The coloured tentacles of cultural difference come into play in the bi/multi racial's life, touching, merging, sharing, overlapping, seeping, bleeding, spilling, covering, concealing, hiding, revealing, sliding, cris-crossing, weaving and spreading into and out of each other's Other. In this plethora of difference, dislocation and inter-connectedness a wholeness exists. Although fractured and disrupted by the disjuncture caused through the movement of its parts, Bi/multi Racial Te Wheke compensates for its lack of cultural depth in some areas by substituting and supporting itself in other areas. As some cultural tentacles are in movement, others lie dormant, waiting to come back into performance. The tentacles are always in play despite some being temporarily hidden from sight. Others are visibly more dominant at particular moments in time. Now, imagine a Jewish cultural coloured Te Wheke overlays the red Maori Te Wheke which is lain over the blue Bi/multi racial Te Wheke. If the Jewish Te Wheke's culturally symbolic ways of knowing and being well/whole in the world are metaphorically represented as golden, what a beautiful and confusing merging of inside and outside will occur in the subject. How do flashes of fiery red tentacle tinged with a golden hue speak to a brilliant purple tentacle whose edge is dipped in an amber light fading into a colour unrecognisable to the human eye? Imagine a colour-culture that is an excess of all three, that defies description, is beyond naming, and exists beyond an identifiable border. The point I make is

that the bi/multi racial subject's unique cultural difference shows a sense of resiliency in her ability to honour her dual/multiple cultural identities and the roles and obligations that these bring with them. This woman resists the pedagogical call to either a Maori, Pakeha or Other ethnicity, preferring to live with the complexities that her cultural and other differences (age, class, sexual orientation, occupation, family role) bring to bear. Her meaning is constructed through her difference. Her identity is honoured and valued in its multiplicity of ambiguity. The bi/multi racial subject's cultural boundaries merge and blur and come into focus time and time again in a way which enables the subject to maintain her unique cultural difference. De/Facing Racism My PhD research also looked at the new forms of colonialism which impact on bi/multi racial women. To understand how power works at the interface of the Maori/Pakeha patriarchal borderlands I looked at bicultural hot-spots. Simply, these are the places were corporate iwi meets Pakeha elite - an inter-face space. I showed how these places often utilise the skills of the bi/multi racial Maori (hybrid) woman. Her job is to facilitate the smooth cultural vacillation between the developmental, social or political objectives of both iwi and Pakeha elite. The participants' stories highlight how bi/multi racial women are often caught in the centre of bicultural struggles as newly formed patriarchal entities often rely on her corporeal presence to mediate difference. Her raced and gendered body gets twisted to accommodate the requirements of the interfacing cultures. Because these bi/multi racial subjects have mastered the ability to work and live in non-Maori landscapes, as well as Maori ones, they are often positioned in places of employment advocacy roles. Awatere (1984) recognised that 'assimilated' Maori are useful to Maori nationalist causes. Bi/multi racial women function as cultural interlocutors in the communication and exchange between the newly emergent Maori and Pakeha/Other patriarchal alliances within the bicultural nation. But these spaces may be filled with conflict and danger. As the bi/multi racial woman shifts across physical (and psychic space), she is at risk of being caught in the cross-fire between Maori and Pakeha cultural clashes. She may be used as a corporeal conduit for the cultural exchanges/altercations between Maori and Pakeha men within the newly formed economic arenas symbolised in the phrase bicultural hot spots. Inclusions and exclusions are reward and punishment based. The bi/multi racial woman can be feared and hated. Her real and imagined potential to vacillate between Maori and Pakeha cultural landscapes and subjectivity at will can produce anxiety in others. This cultural vacillating ability can have both negative and positive consequences for the subject and their whanau. One participant (Hine) exemplifies the new forms of subjugation levied against Maori hybrid women. She states she was employed to work in a prestigious "white male environment" that also had significant links to iwi involvement This position carried with it a great responsibility, and represented Maori at a national level. Hine states:
I always had a feeling when I got the job that I was sent there for a purpose and it got really rough. I was a Maori woman in a white male environment and I hung on and hung on because I knew that I wasn't allowed to leave."

Hine was caught in the cross fire of a newly formed patriarchal alliance between the white males who worked in the institution and the brown males who represented the various iwi involved in the project. Essentially, Hine had been selected for the job because her hybridity allowed her flexibility and greater movement between the Maori and Pakeha cultures. Her cultural knowledge, coupled with her Western education and professionalism, afforded her

the skills to mediate between the respective cultural groups and their various representatives. But she was unable to be a passive interlocutor in these patriarchal exchanges when she witnessed cultural transgressions. When she challenged those responsible for certain oversights and cultural indiscretions Hine was subjected to verbal and metaphysical attacks. Essentially, her body carried the burden of trying to fulfill her work commitment while she was absorbing the abuse from two opposing, yet related, patriarchal cultural groups. Eventually, the violence levied against her became intolerable and her tupuna cleared a way for her to leave her position. Hine's narrative is introduced to show her experience of being situated at the cultural borderlands between Maori and Pakeha. She states:
Once I had an extreme pain in my back. I have dreams; this is a legacy from my mother. It was when things were getting really rough and I wasn't quite sure who was directing a lot of what was happening to me. And I had this dream; from the dream I was able to identify the two people fairly clearly who were determined to remove me from [place of work] and two who were hurting me. And in my dream, the older of the two Pakeha men struck a needle in my back and I woke up in the morning and I could hardly move my back, and it [pain] was where in the dream the needle had struck. But I dragged myself out of bed in the morning because I had some work to do for the [iwi at place of work]. And I heard later that these two men, the two men who were both of the top of the tree in terms of [place of work] were very angry because I did not attend a meeting that they had called and at which they expected the senior staff of the [place of work] to attend. When I woke up I did something my mother had told me to do because I realised that the pain was metaphysical; it was coming because of these two Pakeha men so I dealt with it. And the funny thing was, within a week the elder of the Pakeha men, the next day, he was doing something at his house, something fairly simple, a building type thing, and a piece of timber that he was working on broke and fell on him. He ended up with a black eye and he lost a tooth. And the other man, who in all the time I had been at the [place of work] had never been ill, he ended up with a very very bad case of the flu that just dragged on and on for months. He was very ill you know... I can't really say that it was what my mother had told me to do but...

Another form of racism focused on the place of whiteness in the social construction of Maori women's subjectivity. I argued that bi/multi racial women become linked to Maori and Pakeha cultural landscapes through their corporeality. The presence or absence of whiteness act as cultural markers which accompany strong images of place. Stereotyped thus, the bi/multi racial woman suffers particular forms of racism because brownness/skin colour functions metonymically to mark bi/multi racial women to particular spaces and places. Judith Butler (1990: 59) states:
The culturally dominated undergo a paradoxical oppression, in that they are both marked out by stereotypes and at the same time rendered invisible. As remarkable, deviant beings, the culturally imperialized are stamped with an essence. The stereotypes confine them to a nature which is often attached in some way to their bodies, and which cannot easily be denied. These stereotypes so permeate the society that they are not noticed as contestable. Just as everyone knows the earth goes around the sun, so everyone knows that gay people are promiscuous, that Indians are alcoholics, and that women are good with children. White males, on the other hand, insofar as they escape group marking, can be individuals.

Colourism is alive and well in New Zealand and presents many challenges for bi/multi racial women as colour does not always equate neatly with culture. For example, white bi/multi racial Maori are stereotyped as belonging to Pakeha culture and landscapes and are often mistaken as Pakeha by non-Maori and Maori alike. Similarly browness is attached to landscapes reserved for brown bodies. This comes with its own insidious forms of racism (Mohanram, 1999).

To elaborate, I expand with a story about Josh. Helena is a participant in my PhD research and shared with me a story about her son Josh. Helena was attending a hui at her marae while Josh was playing in the park next to the marae. She states, "I was in our wharenui ... a mother knows her child's cry. I heard a loud wailing and knew it was Josh instantly." She ran to his aid and was shocked to see him lying on the ground, injured. A small group of local Maori youth had mistaken Josh (their cousin) for a Pakeha . They chased and beat him with a stick because he was a "Pakeha" and should not have been in their playground. They were alarmed by his Pakeha/white presence. This event is just one of the violent occurrences which happen with some regularity in Helena's and other white bi/multi racial women's lives. Helena is olive skinned, blue eyed and has long blond hair. In another case of mistaken Pakeha identity, she was physically assaulted by a male member of her own iwi while on a work related home visit. The man in question had no idea that the new kai awhina for his whanau was a blond, blue eyed Maori. He became enraged at this 'Pakeha' woman interfering with his family. His verbal abuse indicated that he thought Helena was personally responsible for colonisation, colonialism and the break down of his whanau relationships. His verbal violence was directed towards her Pakeha subjectivity but found its conclusion in the physical abuse he dealt her corporeal white body. Before Helena could qualify her whakapapa in a bid to save herself from his attack, he physically and verbally assaulted her. She struggled with him and eventually escaped to get medical and legal help. This man used his male body to dominate her female body. Her tinana was beaten for being white, for being in the wrong landscape and for being the sole cause of every single problem Maori has had to contend with post colonisation. Clearly, white bodies in brown spaces threaten the boundaries which demarcate Pakeha and Maori sanctioned landscapes. Clearly, white bi/multi racial women problematise the borders as they criss-cross the marginal space between white and brown. Another form of racism bi/multi racial women experience involves their objectification. Positioned with two or more racial genetic streams, some bi/multi racial women become singled out and exoticised/eroticised. One participant (Roberta) stated that her whanau perceived her to have 'exotic' physical characteristics. She was well loved as a child and was considered beautiful by her Maori family. However, because she was considered beautiful she was inappropriately singled out and objectified by her beauty and potential sexuality.
As I grew older and got into my teenage years, the [family] were always saying "how are we going to keep the boys away?"... what amazed me was this beauty was always commented on and valued. Yet there was always that cry, "What about me?" There was always that feeling in me, "But what about me?" ... because they were really very much talking about my exterior which to me didn't have any value (Roberta).

Roberta felt as though her family/community missed seeing her essential inner beauty because they were so intent on seeing her aesthetic physical /sexual potential as they prepared her for inevitable occupation as the desired feminine body. Roberta states:
I was supposed to be something that I wasn't capable of... I was supposed to be something that I wasn't capable of being... and it set me up for my teenage years. I expected all these men to come, because that's what people had always said, you know; there'd always been these comments [about] my appearance in my presence - "They're going to have a hard job keeping the boys away from her, you know." I just expected it was going to happen. I just thought it was actually going to happen (Roberta).

But in reality, Roberta was a quiet person who did not have a sense of herself as 'beautiful' or 'erotic' in the way her whanau/community and others viewed her. For example, she states:
I remember going to hospital when I was about nine with suspected appendicitis; well I never spoke to anybody for four days! I just refused to speak. I can remember being in hospital quite clearly and being too shy. I just would not speak to anybody because I was too shy (Roberta).

In this narrative, the aesthetic principle was so strong that it created in Roberta's family a concern over her sexual desirability/vulnerability. How would they be able to keep the boys away?' This perception of her ignored other attributes that Roberta felt she had, positioning her solely within the landscape of the eroticised corporeal body. The value placed upon her physical appearance is evidenced in the following incident::
I had a really bad car accident and I had about fifty stitches in my face... I rang to tell my mother and she abused me. She abused me on the phone and it was, you know, "What have you done about [fixing] your face?" I just remember crying, holding the phone and she was going on and on about this accident, "What about your face" and "Have you been to a plastic surgeon?" I was crying, "What about me, What about me... who cares about my face... who cares a shit about my face!! My face will heal but this heart won't." You know... that was such an acknowledgment of my childhood, the external thing and not the me, nobody cared about me (Roberta).

Roberta felt objectified, reduced to a face, a body. Ironically, after all the warnings and surveillance that were carried out in the name of her 'protection' during her adolescence she recalls that the control and regulation of her body was all for nothing while the unacknowledged sense of her self/identity searched for its own meaning and expression:
But I never got to go to the ball. I never got to kiss Prince Charming or whatever Cinderella did to meet Prince Charming... there was definitely that feeling of yeah, there was another me somewhere in there that wasn't being acknowledged or recognised.

Roberta recalls that the confusion and unhappiness during her early life which played an important role in her conscious cultivation of other non Maori subjectivities. Despite Roberta's father enculturating her with Maori values, and despite the contact she had with her iwi, marae and the cultural experiences these brought, Roberta relinquished a claim to a homogeneous Maori cultural identity. She associates her experiences as Maori with her child/adolescent experiences of having her 'inner' identity neglected while her aesthetically pleasing corporeal exterior received a disproportionate amount of unwanted attention. As a form of resistance to the dominant exotic/erotic discourses which sought to call Roberta into being as the epitome of Maori beauty, Roberta escaped the 'exotic' construction of her corporeal Maori feminine subjectivication by reconstructing herself as an Italian. Positioned through her marriage to an Italian, Roberta identified with an Italian subjectivity; she re/positioned herself within Italian cultural spaces/enclaves where she lived as an Italian both in New Zealand and internationally. Reconfiguring the self through the deployment of Other cultural subjectivities can be strategically undertaken in an attempt to avoid being exoticised and sexualised in New Zealand as the exotic Maori woman. Bi/multi racial women may cultivate non-Maori cultural subjectivities as a refusal of their brown/pathological or white/exoticised difference, despite the fact that their upbringing reflects a Maori cultural and genealogical worldview. Changing cultural identity presents some metaphorical possibilities. For example, positioning oneself

with an Italian identity escapes the over determined status of being subjectivated with an exotic/sexualised identity. Bi/multi Racial Maori Women's Agency Bi/multi racial women are not merely passive victims of their dual/multi cultural positioning. The research showed that the participants creatively utilised a variety of strategies to effect their own, albeit partial, emancipation. Despite the absence of a singular (Maori) ethnicity the participants had one unifying narrative which re-essentialised and unified them along an axis of sameness (ie. a quintessential Maoriness). Being culturally diasporic, in perpetual transition enroute to her multiple roots or homespaces, brought about a sense of ambivalence and dislocation. The women struggled to mediate their binary differences and disjunctures in their capacity as the boundary between Maori/Pakeha, brown/white, subject/other, feminine/masculine. A healing and enabling spiritual narrative (albeit hybridised) was strikingly obvious in each woman's story. I concluded that this was the ingredient which bound hybrid Maori women to Aotearoa, their real and imagined whanau, their real and imagined landscapes, their real and imagined whakapapa, their real and imagined tupuna, their real and imagined corporeality, their real and imagined possibilities. Through utilising a narrative of wairuatanga bi/multi racial women, found a way to be resilient which enabled them to retain a strong sense of Maoriness despite their dual/multiple racial genealogies and plural cultural positionings. For example, in the absence of whakapapa adopted Jill talks about her spiritual home as a place which provides refuge from the diasporic difficulties she faces as a marginalised woman. She identifies her own turangawaewae as a space which enables her to reconnect and ground the disparate parts of herself. She states:
Religion is the Church. Spirituality is my connection with this space, like the space I currently occupy. But it's also my connection, within that space, with other spaces. It's about my purpose for being, my reason for being, my connection with the rest of the world, with the sea, with the bush and in the hills, on the beach, with the animals and with everything that's in [the world]. Whangamata is my turangawaewae, that's my place I go home to. I stand on that beach and I look at the river and I look at the sea and the surf and the islands and I look up at the sky and I look at the hills that are covered in native bush and I look at the pine forests and I look at the jagged mountains. And that's my place there. I am one there and I am met.

Jill's emphasis on being one and being met refers to a sense of unity, peacefulness and coherence of self that occurs through the conduit of spirituality. In her connection with Papatuanuku she touches the divine and knows she is home. Re-connected and remembered to the other parts of her selves/world/universe she gains respite from the internal noise and conflict of being multiply located. Pere (1991) states:
The natural place of worship/communion with Io Matua is Papatuanuku - Mother Earth where one can relate to the hills, spaces of water, the heavens, everything that is a part of us. The communication is at any time, with any one, anywhere, and any place (p. 17).

I also noted that bi/multi racial women used their spirituality and cultural hybridity to heal and advance Maori and Pakeha/Other alike. Their cultural hybridity positioned them as living bridges between disparate cultural groups. They illuminate areas previously shaded and they give expression to cultural differences and new ways of knowing and being in the world. Further, they expose alienating forms of racism and sexism in highly insightful and thoughtful ways. Because bi/multi racial women become strategically 're-essentialised' along a spiritual

axis and are repositioned as tangata whenua they are non threatening to Maori nationalists decolonisation objectives. This rearticulation of a traditional subjectivity is one which allows the bi/multi racial Maori women agency, autonomy and corporeal movement outside of the prescripted subjectivities provided for her under bicultural nationalism. Here she has the freedom to take up multiple subjectivities and traverse her diasporic landscapes at will on route to replenish, strengthen and maintain her multiple roots. These elements are brought together in the final chapter in my thesis which engages AshtonWarner's (1966) book Greenstone. The deployment of Greenstone's main character Huia, a bi/multi racial female child, proves useful in re-narrating the complexities of the bi/multi racial woman's raced and gendered subjectivity. Through Huia's narrative of crossing the river on route from ThisSide (place of her Pakeha family) and ThatSide (place of her Maori whanau), I re-narrate my thesis using her dual cultural positioning and biraciality. As such, I look at some of the complexities that inform the relationships bi/multi racial women experience with Maori and Pakeha/Other men and Pakeha/Other women. My aim is to show how bi/multi racial women are positioned as cultural vacillators at the interface between Maori and Pakeha landscapes/communities. However, I question whether she is rooted firmly in the Third Space and its accompanying prescripted subjectivities and hybrid performances by suggesting she has some agency over her bi/multi racial gendered and racial positioning and the obligations these subjectivities position her with. Through the character Huia, I show how the bi/multi racial female resists her cultural hybridity by invoking a space beyond the Third Space. I argue that this is a spiritual space, pregnant with meaning and form, devoid of colourism yet vibrant with colours symbolically resonating her ontological journey. It is here in this spiritual place that her agency reflects the meeting of her peoples in an ethereal landscape removed from the materialism of corporeal flesh and fantasy. However, Greenstone's conclusion sees Huia stripped of her vacillating privileges and multiple subjectivities as she is re-nativised and confined to the landscape reserved for the traditional Maori woman on ThatSide (the Maori side) of the river. This subjugation alerts the reader to the difficulty the author has in allowing a maturing Huia agency/cultural vacillation in the colonial nation. Huia's difference is threatening. Both desirable and repulsive she must be contained, must be confined to That[Other]Side of the river. To come into representation as a Maori woman she must take up a traditional subjectivity and forgo her biracial difference. But the realities of bi/racial women are quite different. Despite the pedagogical call to a traditional Maori women's identity, bi/multi racial women move in and between the material and symbolic landscapes which reflect their bi/multi racial and cultural historiographies. To conclude, the illuminating stories shared by the women in this research indicate that cultural hybridity does not foreclose the possibilities of decolonisation and Maori women's emancipation. Life on the cultural borderlands is a place of resistance as bi/multi racial women strategically negotiate subjectivating interpolations that are heavily laden with gendered and racial specificities that serve the needs of New Zealand nationalism and its patriarchal elite. After all, positioned as the nation's much desired referent of difference, the Maori woman is needed to anchor the land of the long white cloud thus ensuring the ability of Maori men and Pakeha/Other to engage in market driven initiatives. The interpolating call to difference is unmistakable. However, this research suggests that there may be times

when the bi/multi racial woman's response could quite possibly be "No Body Home. Gone Fishing!

References Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections of the Origin of Nationalism. London: Verso. Anthias, F. & Yuval-Davis, N. (1989) Woman-Nation-State. Yuval-Davis, N. and Anthias, F. Eds. London: Macmillan. pp. 1-17. Anzaldua, G. (1987) Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Fransisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute. Ashton-Warner, S. (1966) Greenstone. New York: Simon and Schuster Inc. Awatere, D. (1984) Maori Sovereignty. Broadsheet. Auckland: Broadsheet Collective. Bhabha, H. (1990) The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha. In J Rutherford. Ed. Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Bhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge Bishop, R. (1998) Freeing Ourselves From Neo-Colonial Domination in Research: a Maori approach to creating knowledge. In Qualitative Studies in Education, 112. pp 225-231. Butler, J. (1993) Bodies that Matter. On the Discursive Limits of "Sex". New York and London: Routledge. Chatterjee, P. (1989) The Nationalist Resolution of the Women's Question. In Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History. Sangari, K. and Vaid, S. Eds. New Delhi: Kali for Women. Irwin, K. (1992) Towards Theories of Maori Feminism. In Feminist Voices. Women's Studies Texts for Aotearoa/New Zealand. Rosemary Du Plessis Et. al. Auckland: Oxford University Press. pp 1-22. Meridith, P. (1999) Hybridity in the Third Space: Rethinking Bi-Cultural Politics in Aotearoa/New Zealand. In He Pukenga Korero. Ngahuru Autumn. Vol. 4. No. 2. pp 1216. Meridith, P. (1999a) Don't You Like Kina Bey? Et, You're Not a Real Maori! In, Tu Mai. June, 1999. pp 4-6. Meridith, P. (1999b) Being 'Half-Caste': Cultural Schizo or Cultural Lubricant? In Tu Mai. July, 1999. p 24. Middleton, S. (1993) Educating Feminists: Life Histories and Pedagogy. New York: Teachers College Press. Mohanram, R. (1999) Black Body: Women Colonialism and Space. Australia: Allen & Unwin. Pere, R. (1991) Te Wheke: A Celebration of Infinite Wisdom. Gisborne: Ao Ako Global Learning New Zealand Limited. Sinclair, K. (1986) A Destiny Apart: New Zealander's Search for National Identity. Wellington: Alan and Unwin: Port Nicholson Press. Smith, L. (1998) Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London & New York: Zed Books Ltd. Dunedin: University of Otago Press. Te Whanau O Waipareira. (2001) Te Whanau: A Celebration of Te Whanau O Waipareira. New Zealand. Te Whanau O Waipareira. Walker, R. (1990) Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou: Struggle Without End. New Zealand. Penguin Books.