[ANU Pacific.Institute] Fw: TPR Seminar - Terra in our Mist: A Terra-torial Ethnography of the People of the Mist

[Jade William Emery Aikman]

Kia ora (greetings) everyone,


Hoping you are all well! I'll be delivering my pre-fieldwork seminar in a few weeks, and warmly extend an invitation to you all.


Terra in our Mist: A Terra-torial Ethnography of the Children of the Mist


Speaker: Pounamu Jade Aikman


Date and time: Tuesday 4 October, 10am-12pm


Venue: Seminar Room C, Coombs Building


Contact: Jade.Aikman at anu.edu.au


Abstract:


In October 2007 the paramilitary wing of the New Zealand Police conducted simultaneous 'anti-terror' raids throughout New Zealand, targeting Maori sovereignty activists. Codenamed 'Operation 8', the largest police presence was centralised in Ruatoki, Te Urewera (in the upper North Island), where over 300 armed paramilitary officers invaded the ancestral home of the Tuhoe nation located in the Eastern Bay of Plenty. Ngai Tuhoe, the 'People of the Mist', have long fought for their self-determination in the face of settler colonial violence, and for equally as long have been described in colonial encounters as the 'isolated' and 'savage' Other. Such representations were manifest in the 'anti-terror' raids, with now infamous images of paramilitary officers storming houses and searching vehicles in the small community of Te Urewera. The 2007 raids must be read in the broader context of the global 'War on Terror', a crusade of fear fuelled initially by the Reagan and Thatcher administrations. Indeed, the 'fear' of Communism during the Cold War is the same fear experienced around discourses of terror today, where those traditionally termed 'state dissidents' or '(legitimate) resistance fighters' have been repackaged and sold under the broad catch-all phrase of 'terrorist'. Operation 8 helps to illustrate that colonisation is a process, not an event, and that state-directed acts of indigenous suppression continue in this milieu. It is dangerous to see Operation 8 as an aberration of Police procedure, because this wholly ignores a violent lineage of state aggression against Tuhoe. The imagined notion of Tuhoe as the 'savage', 'wild', and 'untamed' Other - which extends back to the first contact with Europeans in Te Urewera in the early nineteenth century - is critically intertwined with such iterations of state violence. By presenting an ethnographic snapshot of life in Ruatoki, I hope to challenge these distorted representations in disrupting the discursive formations of Tuhoe as the savage, terrorist Other.


http://chl.anu.edu.au/news-events/events/751/terra-our-mist-terra-torial-ethnography-people-mist

[http://style.anu.edu.au/_anu/4/images/logos/anu_logo_fb_350.png]<http://chl.anu.edu.au/news-events/events/751/terra-our-mist-terra-torial-ethnography-people-mist>

Terra in our Mist: A Terra-torial Ethnography of the People of the Mist - CHL - ANU<http://chl.anu.edu.au/news-events/events/751/terra-our-mist-terra-torial-ethnography-people-mist>
chl.anu.edu.au




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.anu.edu.au/pipermail/pacific.institute/attachments/20160912/7c9600b8/attachment.html>