Pili i ke Kanaka with Finley Ngarangi Johnson

October 31, 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Mānoa Campus, Dean Hall 6/7 Access Lounge

The colonisation, marginalisation, and illegal occupation of Indigenous peoples, our ways of being and doing, worldviews, and lands is perpetuated through racist policies and settler-institutions. Universities contribute to these colonial harms by institutionalising Whiteness and reproducing colonial power imbalances. Indigenous peoples around the world continue to resist and struggle for decolonisation and land back despite these forces. Different to our established superstar Indigenous scholars, Indigenous doctoral researchers play a unique 鈥榰nderdog鈥 role in the struggle to decolonize and Indigenize these spaces, often operating from 鈥榯he margins of the margins鈥. In this presentation, research from six M膩ori and one P膩keh膩 (non-M膩ori New Zealander) ally, who are current or recently completed doctoral candidates in psychology, describe barriers and facilitators to conducting decolonising doctoral research within universities of Aotearoa New Zealand. We use collaborative autoethnography and Kaupapa M膩ori methods such as w膩nanga and p奴r膩kau to collect and analyse our data, then present advice for current and future doctoral researchers to navigate these turbulent waters. We then present four personifications of the themes from our collective analysis to describe some of the roles that doctoral candidates often take when conducting decolonising research. They are illustrated as: M膩ia 鈥 the activist; Tohu 鈥 the indigeniser; Kura 鈥 the subtle influencer, and Tui 鈥 the connector. We hope to inspire other doctoral students to do decolonising research, even if they are not decolonial theorists or scholars. These are some of the things we wish we knew when embarking on our own doctoral research journeys. Register here: https://go.hawaii.edu/Mea


Event Sponsor
College of Social Sciences, Mānoa Campus

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