A version of this paper was originally presented at the inaugural Te One Kakara research symposium at Aotearoa marae (Taranaki) in 2021.
Becoming no more than
A likeness to a faded photo
The bearer of another’s name
The end of a line
On a whakapapa
A mark on a page
A notch on a stick
A mere speck
Of historical dust.
- ‘At the museum at Puke-ahu’ JC Sturm
There is a difference between useless and use-less research. One way that research can be useless is in the sense that something useless is stink or hopeless or a waste of time. Useless research has been – and continues to be - very damaging for us all in this whare. It might be useless because it’s asking the wrong questions, because it’s exploiting or stereotyping people, because it isn’t rigorous, because the benefit doesn’t contribute to anyone but someone’s career, because it’s racist or sexist or otherwise limited... the list goes on. Surely none of us wants to do useless research.
But by use-less research I mean research that has not been designed for a particular use; that hasn’t been undertaken with specific use value in mind. It won’t solve diabetes or the housing crisis, it won’t save our reo rangatira, it won’t enable us to either get a tighter grasp on capitalism or to burn capitalism to the ground (depending on how you roll). Well – maybe we could suggest it might do one or some of these things – who can tell – but that’s not the primary purpose. The kaupapa. The research question has not been on a bullet-point list supplied by a community – most people in ‘the community’ (whatever that means) might not even know the research is being carried out or might think it’s wierd or a waste of time if they did.
I am wholly in support of research with utility – research that emerges from community demand – researchers who seek to engage people and knowledges in ways that create changed outcomes in a context of two hundred years (and counting) of either attempted genocide or benevolent ignoring of the astronomically disastrous statistics about us. Useful research is amazing and I am so thankful there are people who are doing it. I am not talking about use-less research in order to argue that it’s purer or harder or better than any other kind (that would be elitist, and actually kind of useless in the first sense of the word). But I wanted to share that I am a researcher whose research is quite use-less. (Hopefully only in the second sense of the word.)
I am currently based at the University of British Columbia where 75% of me is in English and 25% of me is in Indigenous Studies. Before this I was at Waikato in the Faculty of Māori and Indigenous Studies – before that I was in Indigenous Studies at a uni in Sydney – before that I was in the Dept of English at the University of Hawai’i-Mānoa – and before that I was technically in the English Programme at Victoria University of Wellington but in reality I spent most of my time either hanging out at, or later based in, Te Kawa a Maui School of Māori Studies. My PhD is in English with a graduate minor in American Indian Studies, which was the equivalent of Indigenous Studies at the university where I studied in upstate New York. My undergraduate and masters degrees were in English. I share these things not because my CV is very interesting or special, but to clarify that I am a literary scholar who works at the intersections of Indigenous Studies, Pacific Studies and English.
Yes, English. Novels and poetry and short stories. Metaphors and alliteration. All that stuff. My disciplinary training – and most of my writing and research – is focused on things that may feel, in the midst of the predicaments of our time, like the research version of lying on the beach while there are chores to be done. Of course this is true. I regularly fret about the limits of my work, and wonder if the time and resources would be better spent on something with more use. Less use-less. (I do want to be clear, that this is not a stunt where I am begging for people to respond by saying ‘there there Alice it’s okay we know what you do has use.’ I am not seeking attention or likes or follows or retweets by standing up and undermining my own research, my writing or my teaching or institutional work – I don’t think calling it use-less undermines it. But it does describe it.)
All of my research starts with the creative production or writing of Indigenous people. I am not interested in representations of Indigenous people by non-Indigenous people, or even really in Indigenous connections with non-Indigenous people – that’s all good work and some fabulous people do research in those areas, and I know enough about them to be able to teach them and even write about them, but it’s not what primarily interests or motivates me as a researcher. I’m interested in how what Indigenous people write can expand our understanding of the diversity and amazingness of Indigenous peoples, and I’m interested in connections between different Indigenous peoples that can be harder to see when we obssess on our relationship with the state. As well as being interested in Māori connections with the Indigenous people of other English-speaking settler nations (Australia, US, Canada) I’m also really interested in our connections with Indigenous people from around the Pacific region.
To be clear about my own position and commitments in my research: I often describe myself as an irridentist – not someone interested in fixing your teeth, as I joke with my students, but someone who advocates the return of land currently under the control of a foreign power. I also believe that something transformative can happen when we engage with the writing – the words, the thinking – of our own people. Perhaps the kind of transformation I’m talking about here is not useful in the sense of aligning to particular kinds of utility – but, and this really matters to me, our collective legacy of writing and creative expression certainly challenges the false idea that we as Māori are useless.
My main current project, which was supported by Marsden funding when I lived in New Zealand, and which has also been supported by the more invisible-yet-tangible resource of having permanent academic appointments, is called ‘Writing the new world: Indigenous texts 1900-1975.’ The project is focused on published writing by Indigenous people in four sites (New Zealand, Australia, Fiji and Hawai’i) with a focus on periodicals – magazines, newspapers, journals, newsletters – and on creative publications. My research seeks to challenge the idea that Indigenous people only started publishing in the 1970s, and it also seeks to trace the many connections (creative, activist, diplomatic, literary, interpersonal) between Indigenous people in different places. I brought a whole bunch of Māori and other Pacific researchers on the ‘Writing the new world’ journey, and we even produced a podcast called ‘Writing the new world’ available on all your usual podcasting apps. The two postgraduate researchers connected to the project are working on published Indigenous language writing: Wanda Ieremia-Allan’s doctoral focus is on a Samoan language publication, and in his masters Ammon Apiata looked at some really interesting Māori language publications from the early twentieth century.
It may be useful to explain that this project attempts to extend two really important strands of Indigenous literary studies. It might be useful to know that, although Māori literary scholars (at least those trained in English) are pretty rare, English has been one of the main disciplines where Indigenous people in North America have been working for decades. (This is why I did my PhD on Haudenosaunee territory in the USA – to get to learn from and about American Indian literary scholarship.) So, in the US and Canada, Indigenous people have been doing really interesting things with literary studies for a while.
One of the strands from there (now, here!) that my work draws on is often referred to as Literary Nationalism. A key text in this school of thought is Craig Womack’s Red on Red 1999 (yes the same year as LTS Decolonising Methodologies) in which Womack inverted the trunk/ branches of American Literature (rather than the trunk of the tree being ‘American Lit’ and ‘American Indian Lit’ being one of its branches, what if the trunk of the tree was the literatures of the Indigenous peoples of the place?) which opened up questions that reframe Indigenous literary texts and scholarship. If the trunk is Indigenous, how can we think about continuity of expression? What happens if this brings to the centre of the story a wider range of genres (and languages) than most English depts? Another key scholar in this whānau is Robert Warrior who has made longstanding and empowering arguments about Indigenous literature -including all kinds of writing like non-fiction - as intellectual history.
The other strand that has influenced my current work is that focused on Indigenous/ Indigenous connections. Often this is called global or comparative or relational Indigenous studies. Probably the key text for this strand is Chadwick Allen’s Trans-Indigenous but his earlier book Blood Narrative (that came out while I was a PhD student) read Māori and American Indian texts next to each other in ways that were convincing, compelling and fascinating. This strand looks at our relationships with other Indigenous people (and migrant/ enslaved/ refugee people) and delioberately sidesteps the idea that the state is the only frame that matters. Settler states like to keep us thinking we are restricted to their political borders, which can mean we forget about the 20% of the Māori community that lives outside New Zealand... but it can also mean that we don’t remember – or don’t remember to remember – the ways that we’re not all Indigenous to everywhere inside the borders of the NZ map.
This use-less project has helped me think more about the use of writing and research that may, on first read, feel use-less. One of the publications I’ve spent a lot of time with is Te Ao Hou, the NZ govt magazine published between 1952 and 1975. The magazine was set up so the govt could communicate messages about modernity and how to be modern (including helpful instructions on how to run a meeting or feed your baby – skills that one might presume we already had given that we had still managed to exist for more than one generation), but the first editor was the Swiss migrant Erik Schwimmer who somewhat rebeliously introduced the magazine in the first editorial in 1952 as “a marae on paper.” As soon as Māori people realised this was an opportunity to be published, this concept of Schwimmers became true – the magazine is full of amazing writing by a really wide range of people.
So - during the upheavals of the mid-twentieth century, Māori people wrote articles and poetry and short fiction in both languages. As I read through the magazine, I realised that while the government wanted to talk about the practicalities of life, our people wanted to write about whakatauki, pūrākau, whakapapa; our people wanted to create stories for children, to write poems and short stories, to know about art and sports and fashion. When you read Te Ao Hou from cover to cover you realise that after something was published, heaps of other people would write in letters to the editor to explain that the person was wrong, or had missed a bit, etc – in the magazine there was vigorous engagement with ideas. A marae on paper indeed. My use-less research about Te Ao Houdrew my attention to all of this amazing and totally use-less mid-twentieth century writing.
“A mark on a page.” The person who wrote the poem at the beginning of this kōrero is JC Sturm, the Taranaki iwi writer who was born in, and is buried in, Opunake. These are her words. I love how “a mark on a page” comes between “whakapapa” (names and namesakes) and “a notch on a stick” – for this poet, writing – a mark on a page – is a part of Te Ao Māori. When we are in a wharenui we might be comfortable thinking about likenesses and things that are said and notches on sticks – but writing and photographs are a part of our world too. By ‘our world’ of course I mean te Ao Māori. But also, more specifically, Te Ao Taranaki.
JC Sturm is one writer from Taranaki whose amazing words have been a part of my current project. (It will probably be no suprise that the other famous writer from here whose writing I’ve been reading quite a bit is Te Rangihiroa – although there are others – including Kara Puketapu who has great articles on sports in Te Ao Hou but also a poem published in Fiji about being in Hawai’i and reflecting on Te Rangihiroa’s legacy there.) JC Sturm was the first Māori writer included in a collection of NZ short stories back in 1966 and was a prolific correspondent who sent in many kinds of writing including some legendary book reviews – but she was also an incredible poet.
Actually, she has been part of my own research journey. Her book Dedications was the first book of Māori poetry I ever bought myself for me – the first one I bought for a reason other than being a required text for a uni paper. I bought it at Whitcoulls on Queen St after finishing my last undergraduate exam at Auckland. On my way to the end of that Bachelor of Arts I had dropped a law degree – much to the concern of lots of people who felt I was throwing something away – ‘an opportunity to contribute to my people’ was an argument I heard a lot, especially from people who weren’t in fact my people. For these people, something use-less could only be understood as useless.
It was my grandparents who supported me most strongly – I clearly remember them saying to me ‘we don’t know why we have someone interested in poetry in your generation – but if this is who you are, this is who you have to be. This is your contribution.’ So, JC Sturm’s poetry has been nudging and inspiring and shaping me for a long time but also, I want to acknowledge her poetry helped make something visible to myself that I didn’t even know at the time I purchased the book – which was that Māori writing in English would be at the centre of my research and even as one of the key centres of my life for decades to come.
It can be valuable to think about the range and focus and perhaps purpose – maybe even the kaupapa - of research we want to undertake and that we want someone (maybe us, maybe someone else) to do. When we do this, I want to humbly advocate for use-less research – research without explicit use. Not to champion myself or my own research (cos that would be awkward and embarassing) but to champion all the uri of Taranaki whose research questions, whose disciplinary training, whose passion is not what we think we ‘need’ as much as other (yes, useful) questions or training. But, if the research that is of use is the research that is demanded or required by the community, aren’t we all the community? Who knows what incredible range of questions Taranaki researchers are asking at this moment all around the world. Who knows what research our mokopuna’s mokopuna will wish to connect with through written and spoken archives.
I hope our thinking about Taranaki research has a strong grasp on the urgent and significant research needs of the present moment. But I hope it also includes in its scope the full range of useful, kind of useful, and use-less (but hopefully not useless) research that Taranaki people are carrying out now – and will carry out in the unknown marvellous Taranaki future. After all, as Taranaki researchers surely our strength is that we are:
A likeness to a faded photo
The bearer of another’s name
The end of a line
On a whakapapa
A mark on a page
A notch on a stick
A mere speck
Of historical dust.
