[ANU Pacific.Institute] FW: PhD Seminar: Terra in our Mist: A Tūhoe Narrative of Indigenous Sovereignty and State Violence, Tuesday 23 April @ 10am

[Yanhong Ouyang]

Dear Pacific Institute subscribers,

This PhD seminar by Pounamu Jade Aikman maybe of interest to you.

Kind regards,
Yanhong
Yanhong Ouyang
Project Officer, Strategic Partnerships
ANU College of Asia and the Pacific
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200 Australia
T: (+61) 2 6125 1169
E: yanhong.ouyang at anu.edu.au<mailto:yanhong.ouyang at anu.edu.au>
http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/
CRICOS Provider #00120C

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Name: Pounamu Jade Aikman

Thesis title: Terra in our Mist: A Tūhoe Narrative of Indigenous Sovereignty and State Violence

Venue: Level 3 Conference room, National Centre of Indigenous Studies, John Yencken building, 45 Sullivans Creek Road

Date/time: 23 April, 10am



Thesis abstract:

This thesis examines the relationship between Indigenous sovereignty and state violence in the Aotearoa New Zealand context. To do so, I explore the following argument. The settler colonial state is founded upon the perpetual negation of Indigenous sovereignties, their peoples, and ways of life. This process is necessarily on-going: despite significant efforts at extermination, Indigenous peoples have survived – albeit on terms dictated by the state. Ngāi Tūhoe, the illustrious ‘people of the mist’ of Te Urewera, in New Zealand’s Eastern Bay of Plenty, are bearers of a superior, adamantine sovereign claim over their homelands. As I demonstrate, however, this prerogative is irreconcilable with settler sovereignty. Unable to completely eradicate Tūhoe in the initial stages of British colonisation, the contemporary New Zealand settler colonial state periodically reasserts its existential legitimacy, predominantly through repeated shows of force upon Tūhoe communities. In the last ten years, this has manifested in four major paramilitary Police operations targeting Ngāi Tūhoe, violently raiding whānau (family) homes with reckless abandon. The overwhelming force used by the Police in instances such as these demonstrates that Tūhoe exist within what Giorgio Agamben has described as the ‘state of exception’ (2005). Drawing on the thinking of Michel Foucault (2003), I suggest that Tūhoe are rendered biopolitical ‘contaminants’ that threaten the health and wellbeing of the social body, and must be expelled by any means necessary. This distinctly colonial project is most ardently manifest upon the frontier – the threshold between ‘civilisation’ and ‘savagery’ – to which the state deploys its most violent machines of war in the circumscription of Indigenous existence. Central to this has been the colonial depiction of Tūhoe as savage, primitive, inferior, and simple beings, a system of representation that continues to inform the manner in which the state interacts with Tūhoe today. In this matrix, Tūhoe are ‘known’ by the state through an exclusively violent and hostile lens, but in this thesis I urge that manifold alternative portrayals of Tūhoe exist, untethered to these colonial convictions. To this end, I use ethnography and photographs of the everydayness of Tūhoe life to rupture such colonial stereotypes, in giving voice and sight to alternate ways of ‘knowing’ – and hopefully, interacting with – Ngāi Tūhoe.

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