irawhiti

[irawhiti]

U r not alone in these feelings tonight

i wish i was, this fucking sucks. i'm so sorry we're both in this. i wish there was an easy way out for all of us haha.

thank you, i appreciate it though. knowing i'm not entirely alone. it's very painful but at least it's not... idk... total isolation.

to everyone who relates to my situation, i hope we all make it through it. i hope we'll all be alright. even if we're all tired.

[irawhiti]

i'm just so tired. i don't think there's a way out of this.

[irawhiti]

like i genuinely don't know why i keep going at this point. it's just tiring.

[irawhiti]

hi, it was just my birthday so i'm gonna ask straight up if i can get some money to make up for the fact that apparently cancer tests are not covered by medicare. i don't wanna get into too much detail but i might have cancer and i would kind of really appreciate some money to get some food as well.

if it means anything i'm a homeless trans person of colour and i'm currently living with someone who tried to kill me a few months back. i wish i was joking but i'm scared for my life right now. i lost 20 kilos since i moved in with them which has made me dangerously underweight. my bmi is 17 which like i hate bmi, this just gives you a basic idea of my situation and malnourishment right now.

i just don't want to have cancer haha and if i do (which it looks like i do.) i just would like some money to eat or at least buy like, hospital grade nutrient powder like hospital sustagen so i don't actually die from malnourishment which is a legitimate concern right now as a homeless person. my laptop has also finally fully bricked itself so i am going to have to take out almost my entire fucking savings just to remain hireable and stable.

pāypāl.me/hoodypet please specify it's for irawhiti as this is a friend's paypal.

thank you so much.

#i hate this haha.

[irawhiti]

my birthday is tomorrow also lmfao. i've never celebrated it but i think this year is probably the worst year i could have tbh

#like hoooly fuck #the potential cancer thing is just one thing in this whole situation so i'm just like #jesus christtttttt thank god i don't try and celebrate this shit lmfao. fuck. #fuck this entire thing etc

[irawhiti]

It wasn't announced with the greatest of news, but I'm glad you're still alive lmao. I know you said you wouldn't be online much, but the month long absence & your generally poor luck still had me a little worried.

I hope things start looking up for you soon man, you deserve it

thanks, i won't lie i'm pretty exhausted after all this shit. it's pretty tiring lol.

the only thing i can really joke about is it looks like i might get free top surgery lol. not exactly on my own terms but hey. not the worst thing am i right.

#sorry i worried so many people haha. i'm a bit uh. i'm a bit fried after the past month or two. #thank you for being genuinely concerned #i've had a bit of a weird past month or two

[irawhiti]

man. life really wants me dead, huh.

#cancer scare moment i am living through haha. #i'm so tired.

[irawhiti]

#good to know the deviantart nekoi tradition lives on in toyhouse

[irawhiti]

the feral cat thing in my last reblog is too fucking real lmao. the roadhouse down the road here bred a colony of at least 40 cats they let roam freely and before most of them were captured and euthanised, they completely wiped out the critically endangered dunnart population we were desperately keeping alive. several of the cats escaped capture and we've been trying to trap and cull them since they tend to hang out around our caravan but they're completely feral and extremely aggressive and skittish. until i get a gun license, they're essentially free to roam since they're the ones that were too smart for the cat traps.

the punchline? the real fucking funny part? the roadhouse got more cats and they now have two new litters of kittens.

#(screaming into a fucking pillow) Haha yeah cute kittens!

[irawhiti]

in the same vein as that last post about cottagecore and American colonialism, there's this incredibly pervasive attitude in Australia that "everyone (settlers) live on the coast and noone (important) lives in the interior", so you get genius ideas like "let's divert a river and flood central Australia for farmland!" and "lets sell of huge swathes of land to mining companies" like people haven't been living there about longer than anywhere else on earth. it ties into the colonial view of deserts and lack of care for ecosystems but it's genuinely such a mainstream idea that noone lives there and it's just going to waste, terra nullius still alive and well unfortunately.

diversity win this gay coloniser wants to "move into the bush" with their fifteen cats they let run wild and will go straight to the governor general if someone shoots them for being invasive. this sure doesn't look like the frontier wars! it's cottagecore!

#colonialism

[irawhiti]

kia ora! i would like to suggest the coining of a term that would hopefully help a large demographic of mostly-forgotten-about māori to connect with each other and share our experiences to feel less alone, congregate around a concept regardless of country of origin and upbringing, and organise as activists.

i politely ask as many people to spread this as possible to help indigenous people organise with each other and to get the largest amount of interactions possible.

anyway, with all that being said,

i would like to coin the term "ngāti rangiātea" for māori who do not know their iwi to use.

this is based on the well known whakataukī/proverb, "i will never be lost, for i am a seed which was sown from rangiātea." i chose this whakataukī due to the spiritual significance of rangiātea as a place in māori culture, as well as to emphasise that no matter how it feels, we are not lost, we can find ourselves in each other, we can experience strength and self-realisation, and that we will exist with mana and without whakamā as rightful tangata whenua.

i've put my reasoning, personal experiences shaping my viewpoints on the matter, and various statistics under the cut to make this post reblog-friendly and i would suggest fellow māori read it regardless of whether or not they know their iwi. i also ask for the opinions of other māori, ESPECIALLY AND SPECIFICALLY other māori who do not know their iwi. in fact, i politely ask māori to share this with their whānau and people in general to share this with māori they know, especially any they know who do not know their iwi. a wide reach is what i am going for to get the largest amount of voices, critiques, and opinions on the topic and to avoid this from just becoming a very small thing that stays in an online echo-chamber.

to begin, the 2018 aotearoan census shows that, of the 775,836 people identifying as māori in aotearoa, roughly 17% are unable to identify their iwi in the census. this has gone up by 1% since 2006, showing that we are a considerably stable percentage of people. along with this, there are more than 170,000 māori living in australia and, while there are no solid statistics, there are an estimated 8,000 māori living in the UK, 3,500 in the US, 2,500 in canada, and 8,000 in other countries where there's no option for māori or any polynesians on the census.

this number adds up to 967,816 total māori and while there's no census in these countries asking for your iwi, i would go as far as to assume that there's a larger number of diaspora māori who are no longer able to identify their iwi than there are in aotearoa. of course, this is just speculation based on my lived experiences and conversations with other diaspora māori, however even assuming that it's the exact same amount globally, 17%, this is roughly 164,532 māori worldwide who do not know their iwi. nearly one in five māori do not know their iwi.

regardless of the specific statistics, the hard fact here is that there is a large percentage of māori who are unsure of their iwi for whatever reason. it's extremely easy to feel unsure of yourself, lost, disconnected, and uncomfortable speaking on issues regarding te ao māori when you're unsure of your iwi (or your hapū, whānau, waka, or anything else, but there is heavy emphasis on the iwi) and it's very easy for whakamā to take hold, especially when many māori who can recite their whakapapa aren't very polite or understanding about your situation to say the least.

and there are a lot of those people.

unfortunately, i've spoken to many māori who are of the opinion that not knowing your iwi due to colonialism, assimilation, forced disconnection, etc. means that you should not, cannot, call yourself māori. this is a disgusting viewpoint to have and in my opinion it spits on the fundamental concepts of māori culture and worldviews. thankfully this is a small yet vocal group of people, but even so, they add to the collective experience that makes it extremely difficult to navigate a world while full of whakamā and internalised racism. it can feel like there's no space for you, no term you can use, nobody you can relate to, no mana you can claim, nothing. when you cannot recite your whakapapa, it can feel like there's a part of you that's fundamentally missing.

as well as this, even when people mean well, when you are in this situation, you're usually told to just do some genealogy work, do some research, ask your family what they know. sometimes, these steps are simply not possible. other times, we've already done everything suggested over and over and over again. we're generally told "oh, that sucks, but one day you'll find out, keep looking!" in response to our lack of iwi. sure, they mean well, but i have never once been told anything along the lines of "that's okay, some things are lost to time through no fault of your own. don't beat yourself up over something your whānau had to hide to survive, what you do now to uphold your family's mana, what you do know about your whānau, and who you ultimately become is more important than what you no longer know."

and why? why is it seen as shameful to say matter-of-factly that i don't know my iwi? i'm not looking for comfort, i'm not looking to be told that, aww, there there, i'll find it eventually. i'm stating a fact. i do not need pity, i need my mana and voice to be respected.

this concept is what i want to emphasise by coining ngāti rangiātea. some things are lost to time, but we aren't. our loss of knowledge does not mean that we are unworthy of being māori, that we are unworthy of basic human respect. it does not mean that we have lost everything that our whānau knows. it is a scar, a reminder of what colonisation took from us, yes, but we cannot allow it to continue to be an open bleeding wound. we will not be lost to time and we should not bow our heads and act like we do not exist, that we're inconvenient, that we damage the "image" that māori have. in fact, we are an important aspect of māori culture and ignoring our existence does harm to everybody.

and of course we can't speak on some topics regarding te ao māori. this seems to be a topic that comes up frequently as a strawman. yes, there are some topics that would be irresponsible to speak on when we have no experience with them. this doesn't mean we can't speak on anything. having a collective identity, an "iwi" to congregate around even just politically, would help us speak on topics that we are more qualified to speak on than māori with knowledge of their iwi (yes, those topics exist, shockingly.)

we will never be lost, for we are a seed sown in rangiātea.

by identifying as ngāti rangiātea, i wish to emphasise that it's important to accept that sometimes, someone just won't be able to find every piece of information. loss of family knowledge is literally one of the primary goals of forced assimilation! we all went through it as colonised peoples, why must we continue to attach shame to those of us who were forced to obfuscate our history to keep our children alive? it's not a personal flaw, it's not a dirty secret, it's a fact of life that must not continue to be kept quiet out of shame, and the sooner we can focus on healing this subsection of our community, the stronger māori as a whole will become.

so, this is why i'd like to coin a term for māori who are unsure of their iwi. this is what i intend to achieve by giving us a name, our own "iwi" to congregate around, to identify ourselves as. instead of hanging my head and saying "i'm not sure what my iwi is, i'm sorry", instead of feeling inclined to beg like a dog to be treated with respect, i would like to look people in the eye and tell them that i am ngāti rangiātea. i would like this label to be synonymous with strength and not shame, that i refuse to let my whakamā swallow me, that i am just as worthy of calling myself māori as anyone else, that there are many others in my iwi (or lack thereof). i would like other people to have that as well and i would like those like me to feel less lost when all they've been told is "well, you'll learn your iwi eventually!" as if that's going to help someone feel better if they can't find their iwi.

and even if a person finds their iwi eventually, it's absolutely disgraceful that people are treated that they're not allowed to access many basic parts of te ao māori until they discover something they are not even 100% destined to find. i think that this view contributes to a lot of people who eventually find their iwi becoming unnecessarily arrogant towards those who truly cannot find this information, that they're just not putting enough effort in. if a person finds their iwi after identifying as ngāti rangiātea, they are fully welcome to continue to identify as this political label along with the iwi they now know they belong to as i wish for it to be a term that describes your experiences, your upbringing, and your community. you don't suddenly lose your whānau or your lived experience when you discover your whakapapa.

finally, this hopefully goes without saying, but ngāti rangiātea is not meant to function as a real existing iwi does. the term will hopefully be used as a way to identify yourself and other people and organise but i don't expect nor do i want this to be treated like a coordinated iwi. i expect and hope for this to be a decentralised way of identifying and experiencing community to make it easier to organise as a people. think of this the way the terms ngāti kangaru, ngāti rānara, ngāti tūmatauenga etc. are used.

-----

so, the tl;dr is that i feel like coining a name for a phenomenon that nearly one in five of all māori experience in quiet shame, to make it easier for us to congregate and find each other, speak on our experiences, organise as activists, feel less lost, and ultimately give us the ability to regain our mana as a community with shared goals and experiences. i have spoken to many māori who feel this way and my suggestion for this term is ngāti rangiātea, to show homage to the well known whakataukī, "i will never be lost, for i am a seed sown from rangiātea", to give us a community to work with, and to give us an "iwi" to list when asked instead of fumbling for words and feeling whakamā.

i would like to take the emphasis off of constantly looking to the future for what you may or may not even find with this identity. we are not broken, we are not lost, for we are seeds sown in ngāti rangiātea.

tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā tatou katoa, and if you got this far, thank you for reading.

#srb

[irawhiti]

man i should not have said anything

it's actually impressive at this point how it manages to keep getting worse

#idk which god i pissed off in the past few years but holy fuck #probably will delete this later but i have an emergency screening apptment friday for something. let's fucking gooooooo

[irawhiti]

love love love my knife but i REALLY need to change her handle because while the blade is perfect the handle is um. bad. it's a plastic handle with a synthetic rope wrapping it and it's got a bunch of decorative nooks and crannies that make it annoying as all fuck to clean. i'm gonna make a new one out of roadkill bone probably but i might use something else. like a chunk of quartz i've got packed away. idk -_-

#bladeposting rn because i'm currently sharpening her lol #i'm like 99% set on the bone being the material i use but i'll look around before i decide and start carving it

[irawhiti]

sidenote antipsychotics are so funny. like yes i'm still extremely delusional about (REDACTED) but i'm normal about it now

[irawhiti]

any nesians have any resources on their motu if they're willing to share? specifically i was trying to learn about kūki 'āirani māori history since we have so much shared history together and i found like. a single paragraph about the rough (white) estimate of when rarotonga was settled, followed by an entire essay on the post european contact history lmao.

#polynesia #māori #pasifika #cook islands #i was trying to find stuff about sāmoa/tonga/tahiti as well to absolutely no avail

[irawhiti]

please dont "reality check" strangers. it can be helpful and grounding if its a close friend and youve discussed it beforehand, but you could seriously hurt someone trying to "snap them out of it". psychosis doesnt work like a tv show.

#i liked a majorly unreality inducing post in an episode as a 15 yr old once #a complete stranger dm'd me three years later saying Sorry im so late to this but YOU ARE ALIVE AND REAL you are NOT (xyz) #and it sent me into probably the worst episode i'd had in years lol.

[irawhiti]