20 Horizons Vol 5 2020 pp 2025 Copyright 2020 by the Univer

What a Name Stands For: Stanley Porteus Kaylee Miki

Honors 101 (Introduction to Research and Creative Work at Mānoa) Mentor: ‘Ilima Long

Social views on the relationship between psychology and race have evolved worldwide and in Hawai‘i, since the time of Stanley Porteus, who researched during the height of the eugenics movement. In 1974, the University of Hawai‘i named a building after Dr. Porteus to honor his achievements in the field of psychology. Research through the Uni- versity’s archives and original copies of his works will be analyzed. Using these original works and documents, this paper will first evaluate why his contributions to the field of psychology were significant enough to justify the decision of the Board of Regents to name a building after him. The paper will then analyze how changing views in the 1990s on psychology and race fueled the backlash against the naming of Porteus Hall. Newspaper clippings from the period and the original documents outlining the naming and renaming of Porteus Hall will be evaluated. The unique setting of the University as an academic institution that has a culturally diverse student and faculty body in Hawai‘i will be considered to evaluate why the building was renamed in 1998. The con- clusion demonstrates that while Dr. Porteus made impactful academic contributions to the field of psychology, ultimately, the views he expressed, though in line with his time, were derogatory and critical of the ethnic minorities that make up a large portion of the University’s population, and a building at the University should not be named after him.

Introduction

The field of psychology has often been plagued with research that is now considered false and derogatory but was once viewed as significant and even ground-breaking. As society develops, accepted societal views and perspectives change. When reflecting on history and the impacts of those who researched in a different time, it is necessary to evaluate it

with the lens of the time along with the perspective of society today.

The building now known as Saunders Hall at the Univer- sity of Hawai‘i at Manoa initially held the name Porteus Hall in honor of Dr. Stanley Porteus, a former professor at the Uni- versity of Hawai‘i famous for his work in psychology. By the ethical standards set today, his work outlining the qualities of minority races that earned him fame and recognition in the 1930s through the 1950s is now considered demeaning toward

I am a freshman majoring in Finance and International Business at the University of Hawai‘i with the aim of going to law school and working in the realm of public policy. This research paper was written for my HON 101 class instructed by ‘Ilima Long. While not a typical topic for a business ma- jor, my passion for it grew as I dove deeper into the research. As a researcher, I learned how to use the University Archives and how to manage researching, analyzing, and writing, solely using primary sources, something I never did before. Through the process, I discovered that learning at a uni- versity level is not about being boxed into your chosen area of study, but rather, exploring different avenues and allowing your curiosity to thrive.

Miki What a Name Stands For: Stanley Porteus 21

those races. Extensive research was conducted in the Universi- ty of Hawai‘i’s archives to complete this evaluation of Dr. Porte- us and the University’s decision to name a building after him.

While Dr. Porteus significantly contributed to the field of psychology during his career, the University of Hawai‘i Board of Regent’s decision to name the social science building after him was inappropriate because as a university that is home to an ethnically diverse student body, and as an institution that is situated in indigenous lands, it has a responsibility to first, and foremost, uphold a model that represents and respects its students and community. The lack of awareness the University had for the larger community it impacts through whom they name buildings after raises the question of how institutions and organizations across the country choose to commemorate people who, although not recognized because of their beliefs, still held and supported racist positions.

Recommendations to Name New Building Porteus Hall 1969–1974

When naming a building at the University, there is a set of pol- icies that the Board of Regents must follow. In naming Porteus Hall, there were sections of Section 19-13 of the policy that were relevant: Section (a) and Section (c). Section (a) of the policy outlines the qualifications of a person who campus facilities can be named after. It states that “facilities of the University may be named for a person: (1) who was actively connected with the University after a period of five years have elapsed after his retirement, severance of active connection with the University, or death, or (2) who had made a significant finan- cial contribution to the University.”1 In Section (c) it sets ad- ditional guidelines that a professor whom a building is to be named after must be “distinguished” or “have made significant contributions to the [University’s] academic and cultural life.”2 The Social Science building was named after Dr. Porteus in 1974, and although Dr. Porteus died in 1972, the five year wait- ing period in Section (a) was met because he retired in 1948.3 However, whether or not Dr. Porteus met the requirements for Section (c) could be debated, hence the controversy surround- ing the naming of Porteus Hall.

1 Typescript of “Amendment to Policy Statement on Naming of Campus Improvements,” 1972, A1998:002, Committee on the Renaming of Porteus Hall, University Archives at the University of Hawai‘i, Hamilton Library, Honolulu, Hawai‘i. 2 Correspondence from Sylvia Yuen to Dean O. Smith “Re- port of the Ad Hoc Committee on Porteus Hall,” 25 May 1998, A1998:002, Committee on the Renaming of Porteus Hall, Uni- versity Archives at the University of Hawai‘i, Hamilton Library, Honolulu, Hawai‘i. 3 Elizabeth Dole Porteus, Let’s Go Exploring: The Life of Stanley D. Porteus. (Honolulu: Ku Pa’a Inc., 1991), 97.

George Chaplin, then editor of the Honolulu Advertiser, was the first person to suggest that the Board name the then new Social Science building after Dr. Porteus to honor his con- tributions to the field of psychology. On February 28, 1969, Chaplin sent a letter to the Chairman of the Board, Robert Cushing, outlining his reasons for the suggestion. He wrote about the “international fame” Dr. Porteus achieved for his Maze Tests that got him an invitation to “direct research at the Vineland (N.J.) Training School, then a world leader in the field of mental testing and the study of the mentally retarded.”4 In terms of his contribution to the University of Hawai‘i, Chap- lin spoke of how the University at the time had a faculty of only 60 men of professorial rank with a “few outstanding men caught, like Dr. Porteus.”5 To emphasize his national reputa- tion, Chaplin went on to say how Dr. Porteus was “one of 23 experts on the subject [of lobotomy] from all over U.S.A. sum- moned to Columbia University in 1951 for consultation and conference.”6 In addition, over his entire career, Dr. Porteus had published 20 books, several important monographs, and 80 scientific articles making him a well-published researcher.7 Due to Dr. Porteus’s local, national, and international accom- plishments, Chaplin claimed he was a man deserving of the high honor of having a building named after him.

The Maze Test that garnered Dr. Porteus so much atten- tion is a mostly non-verbal intelligence test. Dr. Porteus de- veloped this test to assess the planning capacity of a person in a restricted situation and based it on the idea that planning is a key element of intelligent behavior. He conducted several studies where the Maze Test served to differentiate between individuals with higher and lower intellect.8 There are three versions of the Maze Test: the Vineland revision, the Exten- sion, and the Supplement. The Vineland revision, the original test, consists of twelve unique maze designs of increasing diffi- culty. Administers instruct participants to complete the mazes by using a pencil to draw a line from the starting point to the endpoint of the maze without lifting the pencil, crossing or bumping into lines, or entering dead ends or blocked alleys. Participants are evaluated using the Test Age (TA) and Quanti- tative Score (Q-Score). TA is calculated by looking at the high- est level of maze completed and the number of trials taken to complete each level. The Q-Score takes into account the errors

4 George Chaplin, “Letter to Robert Cushing,” The Honolulu Advertiser (Honolulu, HI), 28 February 1969, A1998:002, Com- mittee on the Renaming of Porteus Hall, University Archives at the University of Hawai‘i, Hamilton Library, Honolulu, Hawai‘i (hereafter cited as Chaplin, University Archives). 5 Chaplin, University Archives. 6 Chaplin, University Archives. 7 Chaplin, University Archives. 8 Catherine Tuvblad et al. “Heritability and Longitudinal Stabili- ty of Planning and Behavioral Disinhibition Based on the Porteus Maze Test.” Behavior Genetics 47, no. 2 (March 2017), 164.

22 Horizons Vol. 5, Fall 2020

in style and strategy, including crossing lines, cutting corners, going in the wrong direction, drawing a wavy line, and lifting the pencil; the higher the Q-Score, the lower the quality of per- formance the participant had.9 While during this time other intelligence tests existed, like the Stanford-Binet intelligence test, the Porteus Maze Test gave psychologist a simple way to evaluate motor intelligence.

The accomplishments and honors included in Chaplin’s letter only touched the surface of the recognition Dr. Porteus received locally, nationally, and internationally. In 1939, Dr. Porteus received the honor of a nomination as a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts of England to award “the distinguished work” he had done with “racial psychology and mental tests.”10 Years later in 1955, he was named among the “most important contributors in the field of clinical psychology” by the Amer- ican Psychological Association. Only 14 people were chosen from around the world, and Dr. Porteus was the only Austra- lian selected.11 The Maze Test that he is so famous for was de- clared by the former president of the American Psychological Association and editor of the Journal of Consulting Psychology in 1950 as being “one of the great original contributions to psy- chometry of the first half of the century.”12

Although Chaplin sent his letter in 1969, the recom- mendation did not receive serious attention until 1972, when Professor William Lebra, then the Director of the Social Sci- ences Research Institution and a Professor of Anthropology, recommended the building be named after Dr. Porteus.13 Dr. Lebra chaired a faculty committee given the responsibility to suggest names for new buildings. In late 1972, the recommen- dation reached the Manoa Campus Naming Policy Committee, a campus-wide committee composed of faculty and adminis- tration. This committee unanimously endorsed Dr. Lebra’s rec- ommendation and it went to the Manoa Chancellor at the time, Dr. Wytze Gorter. After construction began in 1973, Dr. Gorter asked the committee to review their decision.14 On April 19, 1974, the Chairman of the Campus Naming Policy Committee, Frederick Y. Smith, sent a response to the Chancellor saying “the committee so recommends” the building be named after

9 Tuvblad et al., 165. 10 “Porteus Is Honored by British Society,” Star Bulletin, 23 Jan- uary 1939, A1998:002, Committee on the Renaming of Porteus Hall, University Archives at the University of Hawai‘i, Hamilton Library, Honolulu, Hawai‘i. 11 “Dr. Porteus Rated Among Leaders in Special Field,” Star Bul- letin, 4 February 1955, A1998:002, Committee on the Renaming of Porteus Hall, University Archives at the University of Hawai‘i, Hamilton Library, Honolulu, Hawai‘i 12 “New Science Discovery to List S. D. Porteus,” Star Bulletin, 20 November 1964, A1998:002, Committee on the Renaming of Porteus Hall, University Archives at the University of Hawai‘i, Hamilton Library, Honolulu, Hawai‘i. 13 Correspondence from Sylvia Yuen to Dean O. Smith, 8. 14 Correspondence from Sylvia Yuen to Dean O. Smith, 8.

Dr. Porteus who “as a distinguished faculty member” of the University “made significant contributions to the academic life of the University.”15 After this memo was received, the Chan- cellor approved the recommendation, and it went to the Acting President, Fujio Matsuda, who then submitted it to the Board of Regents. In July of 1974, the Board of Regents approved the rec- ommendation.16 The recommendation passed through the dif- ferent levels of the University’s authority with little opposition.

Opposition to Naming Porteus Hall 1974

It was only when the information became public that the de- cision to name a building after Dr. Porteus received obvious opposition. In the Fall of 1974, after the decision to name the building Porteus Hall was released, the “Coalition to Rename Porteus Hall” was formed by students and faculty who believed he “promoted racist views which were detrimental to society, and that, therefore, the name of Porteus ought not to be given to the building.”17 Members of this coalition included Robert S. Cahill of the Department of Political Science and Danny Stein- berg of the Department of English as a Second Language who were both vocal opponents. In December 1974, a subcommit- tee of the Board met with 60 members of the Coalition to Re- name Porteus Hall. At its conclusion, the students “requested that the Committee hold a public hearing to enable ‘full and open discussions on the issue.’ ”18 The Regents agreed to it and held a public hearing on April 23, 1975.19

At this hearing, Professor Cahill provided testimony against the naming of the building. He started by introduc- ing the issue of racism. He claimed it was relevant because, he said, “much of the published work of Dr. Porteus seems to many of us—certainly to me—to represent little more than the political ideology of white supremacy dressed up in the legiti-

15 Letter from Frederick Y. Smith to Chancellor Wytze Gorter, April 19, 1974, A1998:002, Committee on the Renaming of Por- teus Hall, University Archives at the University of Hawai‘i, Ham- ilton Library, Honolulu, Hawai‘i. 16 Correspondence from Sylvia Yuen to Dean O. Smith, 10. 17 Jane Takahashi, “Building a Rainbow: A History of the Build- ings and Grounds of the University of Hawai‘i-Manoa Campus,” Hui O Students, 1983, A1998:002, Committee on the Renaming of Porteus Hall, University Archives at the University of Hawai‘i, Hamilton Library, Honolulu, Hawai‘i. 18 Minutes of the Regents’ Subcommittee on Physical Facilities and Planning, 11 December 1974, A1998:002, Committee on the Renaming of Porteus Hall, University Archives at the University of Hawai‘i, Hamilton Library, Honolulu, Hawai‘i. 19 President’s Memorandum, Section Labeled: Porteus Hall, 15 May 1975, A1998:002, Committee on the Renaming of Porteus Hall, University Archives at the University of Hawai‘i, Hamilton Library, Honolulu, Hawai‘i, 13.

Miki What a Name Stands For: Stanley Porteus 23

mating garments of science.”20 As mentioned in the previous section, Dr. Porteus was known for publishing an impressive number of works. Here Professor Cahill emphasized the con- tent of these works, not just the sheer number. For example, Temperament and Race was one of Dr. Porteus’s most well- known works. In his testimony, Cahill pointed out how this book was “written to and for a white audience, even though it was written primarily about the non-white population of Ha- wai‘i.”21 The University of Hawai‘i is meant to be for the people of Hawai‘i, and, as Cahill pointed out, naming a building after a man who stood for white supremacy and held racial views against the people of Hawai‘i would be in complete disregard to the University’s place in its surrounding community.

People in support of Dr. Porteus have argued that his views expressed in Temperament and Race changed over time, but Pro- fessor Cahill provided evidence in his testimony that this was cer- tainly not the case. Looking at Porteus’s autobiography published in 1969, Professor Cahill noted the contradictions Dr. Porteus made when evaluating his previous work. He misrepresented his earlier position on racial inheritance and environmental and cultural determinants of racial differences in test performance when writing about it in his autobiography and told the reader little about his position at the time of the autobiography.22 In this section of his testimony, Cahill asserted his stance that Porteus’s views on the differences in mental ability according to race had not changed as drastically as others claimed.

Danny Steinberg was another person who actively opposed the naming of Porteus Hall. He wrote a paper in February 1975 outlining Dr. Porteus’s views on different racial groups using quotes from Dr. Porteus’s own works. Steinberg broke down Dr. Porteus’s views according to the different ethnic groups to reveal to people the derogatory remarks he made about the majority of Hawai‘i’s population. When writing about the indigenous peo- ple of his home country, Australia, Dr. Porteus said “the mem- ory span of the aborigines for numbers was less than that of a six year old white child” and that this “deficiency of role memory indicates an inability on the part of the aborigine to assimilate more than the rudiments of white education.”23 He called the Hawaiians “interesting people” whose “worst defects” include “deficiency of planning capacity, extreme suggestibility, and instability of interest.”24 In addition, he wrote that the crimes Hawaiians commit “are liable to be committed by a people not

20 Robert S. Cahill, “Testimony to the Board of Regents,” 23 April 1975, A1998:002, Committee on the Renaming of Porteus Hall, University Archives at the University of Hawai‘i, Hamilton Library, Honolulu, Hawai‘i (hereafter cited as Cahill, University Archives). 21 Cahill, University Archives, 2. 22 Cahill, University Archives, 9. 23 Danny Steinberg, Stanley Porteus’ Views on Race. (Honolulu, Hawai‘i, 1975), 5. 24 Steinberg, 10.

wholly mature.”25 He admired the Japanese in academia who were “industrious” and “frequently [made] excellent grades,” but condemned the Japanese culture, describing the people as “ag- gressive” and “unscrupulous.”26 Steinberg used examples like these to show that the quality and quantity of Dr. Porteus’s data had little scientific basis. The degrading language Dr. Porteus used to evaluate the minority ethnicities in his studies indicated just how strongly he believed in his racist views.

Support for Naming Porteus Hall 1975

While many people protested the naming of Porteus Hall, during this conflict several people also voiced their support for naming the hall in honor of Dr. Porteus. One of these people was Ronald C. Johnson from the University’s Department of Psychology. After reading Dr. Steinberg’s critique of Dr. Porte- us, Dr. Johnson felt he needed to respond to defend the profes- sor in question.

In the response he submitted to President Fujio Matsuda, Dr. Johnson wrote not to reject the falsities in research that Dr. Steinberg pointed out in his paper, but rather, let it bring a level of understanding as to why Dr. Porteus interpreted the data the way he did and put into context Porteus’s viewpoint. Through- out the response, Dr. Johnson emphasized that studies on race differences in test scores exist[ed].27 The views on race that Dr. Porteus held were not out of line with other researchers during his time. In response to Dr. Steinberg’s use of quotations from Dr. Porteus’s old publications, Dr. Johnson pointed out how it “is the nature of science” to have former publications “proven substantially incorrect” and that the man should not be judged for positions he took in the past that have since changed.28 In addition, Dr. Johnson claimed that Dr. Steinberg took these quotes from Dr. Porteus’s work out of context.29 Dr. Johnson explicitly said in this response multiple times that he “think[s] [Porteus] wrong on a variety of issues” and that he “disagree[s] with Porteus.”30 While this response was in support of naming the building after Dr. Porteus, Dr. Johnson made clear he did not support Dr. Porteus’s work and beliefs in racial psychology. Those who stood in support of Dr. Porteus realized the views he held and the associations he made between behavior and race were wrong, but they valued the work he did. Many viewed

25 Steinberg, 10. 26 Steinberg, 11. 27 Correspondence from Ronald Johnson to Dr. Fujio Matsuda, President of the University of Hawai‘i, 1 April 1975, A1998:002, Committee on the Renaming of Porteus Hall, University Archives at the University of Hawai‘i, Hamilton Library, Honolulu, Ha- wai‘i, 10. 28 Correspondence from Ronald Johnson to Dr. Fujio Matsuda, 13. 29 Correspondence from Ronald Johnson to Dr. Fujio Matsuda, 14. 30 Correspondence from Ronald Johnson to Dr. Fujio Matsuda, 14.

24 Horizons Vol. 5, Fall 2020

naming the building after him as not honoring the beliefs he held, but what he accomplished as a man and as a researcher.

In May 1975, the Board of Regents supported President Matsuda in his decision that Porteus Hall did not need to be renamed. Despite holding a public hearing in April, in the President’s statement concerning Porteus Hall, he said that the decision not to rename the Hall was already approved. The hearing was “for the purpose of listening to [the Coalition’s] concerns regarding the issues of racism and not for the pur- pose of reconsidering the naming of Porteus Hall.”31 The Ad- ministration did not feel the need to take into consideration the voices of the community, but rather held the hearing only as a courtesy to them. In this same statement, the President said, “the Board feels that when it approved the naming of the so- cial science building, ‘Stanley David Porteus Hall,’[it] received positive recommendations from the Manoa Campus Naming Policy Committee and the Manoa Chancellor.”32

Renaming Porteus Hall 1997

The fight to rename Porteus Hall restarted in November 1997 when a student association staged mock hangings at the Hall to demand its renaming. This was the first public demonstra- tion by the new coalition dubbed “Hana Hou Coalition.” At the rally held on this same day, Associated Student of UH-Manoa (ASUH) President Mamo Kim said that it was time for Presi- dent Kenneth Mortimer to hear the University community out on this issue. 33 She was not the only student or community member to speak out. Haunani-Kay Trask, then Director of Hawaiian Studies, addressed the crowd at the rally and pointed out how “astounding” it was that the University had a building “named after someone who supported a hierarchy of races, es- pecially given the university’s motto.”34 The University’s motto is Maluna a‘e o nā lāhui a pau ke ola ke kanaka meaning “above all nations is humanity.”35 Every person that steps onto campus is human. Despite the outward differences in eye color, skin color, age, and language, it is our humanness that connects us at the core, and that is what matters. While Dr. Porteus may have been a great scientist during his time, the importance of what the University stands for is reflected through the symbol- ic representations that the University associates itself with, like

31 President’s Memorandum, Section Labeled: Porteus Hall, 13. 32 President’s Memorandum, Section Labeled: Porteus Hall, 14. 33 Susan Miller, “What’s in a Name,” Honolulu Weekly, 2 Decem- ber 1997, A1998:002, Committee on the Renaming of Porteus Hall, University Archives at the University of Hawai‘i, Hamilton Library, Honolulu, Hawai‘i. 34 Steve Murray, “Students want hall renamed,” Ka Leo O Ha- wai‘i XCII Edition, 20 November 1997, A1998:002, Committee on the Renaming of Porteus Hall, University Archives at the Uni- versity of Hawai‘i, Hamilton Library, Honolulu, Hawai‘i. 35 “About UH Mānoa,” University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, accessed April 19, 2020, https://manoa.hawaii.edu/about/.

the buildings on campus, the art it displays, and the organiza- tions it receives support from. In naming a building after Dr. Porteus, the University was not condoning the racist thoughts Dr. Porteus expressed and the racial psychology he believed in.

The concerns surrounding the renaming of the build- ing went beyond the University’s walls and out into the com- munity. Local newspapers published articles on the subject in addition to receiving and publishing a plethora of “Letters to the Editor” from people around the island and even from mainland America, both in support of the renaming and in op- position. The Honolulu Star Bulletin published a piece about how the University needed to rename Porteus Hall because the thinking Dr. Porteus represented was “inappropriate for modern-day commemoration” especially at a University that “strives to promote diversity and enlightenment.”36

The Star Bulletin published two contrasting pieces writ- ten by two people with different interests in this issue, Betty Porteus and David Stannard. Porteus spoke in defense of her father-in-law Dr. Porteus. She recounted the “compassionate way he treated his patients of all races” and how his work “rep- resented significant first steps in the field.”37 While his reputa- tion and name were falling under harsh scrutiny and criticism, Porteus aimed to humanize Dr. Porteus and portray him in a different light. In response to this piece, Stannard, a professor of American Studies at the University of Hawai‘i, bluntly laid out Dr. Porteus’s views on different races, his white suprema- cist opinion, and his work with eugenics, the ideology of “race improvement.”38 He argued that regardless of what the family of Dr. Porteus feels, the building must be renamed because those people the University honors in that way serve “as a pub- lic symbol of what the University stands for.”39 While Porteus focused on the interpersonal aspects of her father-in-law, Pro- fessor Stannard expressed his opinions on the matter based on the evidence found in Dr. Porteus’s published work.

In 1997, the ASUH submitted a resolution to President Kenneth Mortimer requesting that Porteus Hall be renamed. To handle this case, the Vice President and Interim Executive Vice Chancellor Dean Smith set up an Ad Hoc committee. On this committee was a variety of different people from different com- munities in the University including two undergraduate stu-

36 John M. Flanagan, “Rename Porteus Hall,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 27 November 1997, A1998:002, Committee on the Renaming of Porteus Hall, University Archives at the University of Hawai‘i, Hamilton Library, Honolulu, Hawai‘i. 37 Betty Porteus, “Renaming Porteus Hall would insult a great scientist,” Star Bulletin, 6 December 1997, A1998:002, Commit- tee on the Renaming of Porteus Hall, University Archives at the University of Hawai‘i, Hamilton Library, Honolulu, Hawai‘i. 38 David Stannard, “Why Porteus Hall must be renamed,” Star Bulletin, 12 December 1997, A1998:002, Committee on the Re- naming of Porteus Hall, University Archives at the University of Hawai‘i, Hamilton Library, Honolulu, Hawai‘i. 39 Stannard, University Archives.

Miki What a Name Stands For: Stanley Porteus 25

dents, Malia Gibson and Tom (Pohaku) Stone.40 Professor Sylvia Yuan was the Chairperson for this Committee.41 This committee was tasked with the responsibility to “analyze all aspects of the renaming proposition and to recommend appropriate action.” 42 The Committee analyzed the legal issues, costs to the Universi- ty, precedent that would be set if the committee so chose to rec- ommend renaming Porteus Hall, the value of higher education outlined in the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) Handbook of Accreditation, and most importantly they looked at the Mission of the University of Hawai‘i and what it meant. Along with fact finding, the Ad Hoc committee accepted testimonies from people around the island both in favor of re- naming and in opposition. One of the many testimonies they re- ceived was from the ASUH President C. Mamo Kim who argued that the Board of Regents and Ad Hoc Committee needed to first and foremost “consider the welfare of the University” and “the feelings of the campus community: the students and the faculty” before “the feelings of Porteus’ family.”43

The students who protested for the renaming of Porteus Hall were not aiming to “besmirch the memory of Professor Porteus” as a man from Waipahu suggested in his letter to the editor published by the Star Bulletin, but rather, they were pri- oritizing the needs of the University community over the indi- vidual family which is what the Board of Regents should have done in 1974.44 The culture of the University should be the top priority for any one working there who has the power to set it. Buildings and the names they hold are symbols of what the University represents. Regardless of how outstanding a per- son’s achievements, it was the Boards responsibility to pick a person who properly represented the values of the University and its community. After hearing and reading through many other testimonies from groups like the Japanese American Cit- izens League, the Office for Women’s Research, and the Afro American Lawyers Association of Hawai‘i and thoroughly eval- uating their fact-finding phase, the Ad Hoc Committee con- cluded that Porteus Hall should be renamed.45

Conclusion

Institutions of higher learning represent their students, facul- ty, and surrounding community. Even though Stanley Porteus

40 Correspondence from Sylvia Yuen to Dean O. Smith, 2. 41 Correspondence from Sylvia Yuen to Dean O. Smith, 1. 42 Correspondence from Sylvia Yuen to Dean O. Smith, 2. 43 Correspondence from C. Mamo Kim to Board of Regents and the Porteus Ad Hoc Committee, 4 March 1998, A1998:002, Com- mittee on the Renaming of Porteus Hall, University Archives at the University of Hawai‘i, Hamilton Library, Honolulu, Hawai‘i. 44 John Kingsley, “Porteus is besmirched by hate-filled stu- dents,” Star Bulletin, 13 December 1997, A1998:002, Committee on the Renaming of Porteus Hall, University Archives at the Uni- versity of Hawai‘i, Hamilton Library, Honolulu, Hawai‘i. 45 Correspondence from Sylvia Yuen to Dean O. Smith, 5.

made significant contributions to the field of psychology, the principles he stood for and his perspective of minority ethnic groups do not align with the University of Hawai‘i’s Mission as an institution and no longer align with socially and scien- tifically accepted values. His racist views against indigenous people undermine the goal of the University to be a place of higher education for people of all ethnicities and backgrounds, especially Hawaiians.

As insignificant as it may seem to some, the improper naming of the Social Science building at the University of Ha- wai‘i raises the question of how institutions, academic or not, honor people who they deemed to have made significant con- tributions to society and the community. For example, while Thomas Jefferson was one of the Founding Fathers who estab- lished the United States of America and served as President, he also owned hundreds of slaves in his lifetime, upholding the idea of white superiority. Across America there exist hun- dreds of schools and buildings named in his honor. At the University of Hawai‘i, there is Jefferson Hall. Should Jefferson Hall be renamed next? Yes, he played a critical role in establish- ing the United States, but he also owned slaves and held racist beliefs. While it was once a social norm, the practice of slavery is heavily condemned now.

As social norms shift and perspectives evolve, how are we reflecting these changes in the names plastered across build- ing, streets, parks, airports, and more? What makes a person an important symbol? While it may seem silly and trivial to even think about renaming these places, names have pow- er, and those people that institutions honor through naming buildings after them should stand for the principles and values that not only the institution holds and promotes, but also the greater community who is affected, directly or indirectly, by these seemingly small choices.

References

“About UH Mānoa.” University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Accessed April 19, 2020. https://manoa.hawaii.edu/about/.

Committee on the Renaming of Porteus Hall, A1998:002. University Archives at the University of Hawai‘i, Hamil- ton Library, Honolulu, Hawai‘i.

Porteus, Elizabeth Dole. Let’s Go Exploring: The Life of Stanley D. Porteus. Honolulu: Ku Pa’a Inc, 1991.

Steinberg, Danny. Stanley Porteus’ Views on Race. Honolulu, Hawai‘i, 1975.

Tuvblad, Catherine, Marcella May, Nicholas Jackson, Adrian Raine, and Laura Baker. “Heritability and Longitudinal Stability of Planning and Behavioral Disinhibition Based on the Porteus Maze Test.” Behavior Genetics 47, no. 2 (March 2017): 164–74. doi:10.1007/s10519-016-9827-x.

What a Name Stands For: Stanley Porteus

Recommended Citation

_heading=h.gjdgxs

hapterC 1

IMPERIALISM, HISTORY, WRITING AND THEORY

!e master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house Audre Lorde1

Imperialism frames the Indigenous experience. It is part of our story, our version of modernity. Writing about our experiences under imperialism and its more speci!c expression of colonialism has become a signi!cant project of the Indigenous world. In a literary sense this has been de!ned by writers like Salman Rushdie, Ngugi wa "iong’o and many others whose literary origins are grounded in the landscapes, languages, cultures and imaginative worlds of peoples and nations whose own histories were interrupted and radically reformulated by European imperialism. While the project of creating this literature is important, what Indigenous activists would argue is that imperialism cannot be struggled over only at the level of text and literature. Imperialism still hurts, still destroys and is reforming itself constantly. Indigenous peoples as an international group have had to challenge, understand and have a shared language for talking about the history, the sociology, the psychology and the politics of imperialism and colonialism as an epic story telling of huge devastation, painful struggle and persistent survival. We have become quite good at talking that kind of talk, most o#en amongst ourselves, for ourselves and to ourselves. ‘"e talk’ about the colonial past is embedded in our political discourses, our humour, poetry, music, storytelling and other common sense ways of passing on both a narrative of history and an attitude about history. "e lived experiences of imperialism and colonialism contribute another dimension to the ways in which terms like ‘imperialism’ can be understood. "is is a dimension that Indigenous peoples know and understand well.

In this chapter the intention is to discuss and contextualize four concepts which are o#en present (though not necessarily clearly visible) in the ways in which the ideas of Indigenous peoples are articulated: imperialism, history, writing, and theory. "ese terms may seem to make

Decolonizing Methodologies

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies : Research and Indigenous Peoples, Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uhm/detail.action?docID=6605401. Created from uhm on 2022-08-20 10:20:19.

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academic institutions imperialism colonialsim

Decolonizing Methodologies 22

Imperialism, History, Writing and !eory

up a strange selection, particularly as there are more obvious concepts such as self-determination or sovereignty which are used commonly in Indigenous discourses. I have selected these words because from an Indigenous perspective they are problematic. "ey are words which tend to provoke a whole array of feelings, attitudes and values. "ey are words of emotion which draw attention to the thousands of ways in which Indigenous languages, knowledges and cultures have been silenced or misrepresented, ridiculed or condemned in academic and popular discourses. "ey are also words which are used in particular sorts of ways or avoided altogether. In thinking about knowledge and research, however, these are important terms which underpin the practices and styles of research with Indigenous peoples. Decolonization is a process which engages with imperialism and colonialism at multiple levels. For researchers, one of those levels is concerned with having a more critical understanding of the underlying assumptions, motivations and values which inform research practices.

Before moving forward let me refer to the words of Audre Lorde that open this chapter. It is easy to think of the tools that the master created being generic and unbiased tools such as education, government, democracy and so forth. Not only are these terms not innocent but it is important to recognize that imperialism and colonialism enabled the design of speci!c tools tailored especially to deal with Indigenous Peoples. "e Doctrine of Discovery was a speci!c tool designed by the Catholic Church that ultimately became and still exists as a principle of discovery enshrined in law that will probably apply if humans choose to colonize a new planet. As Steve Newcomb argues, the Doctrine of Discovery was ‘premised on the idea that any Christian people, nation or state had a right of domination over the “discovered” lands and lives of non-Christians’. "e colonizer did not simply design an education system. "ey designed an education especially to destroy Indigenous cultures, value systems and appearance. "ose systems were called Indian boarding schools, residential schools, village day schools. "ey designed social policies designed especially to break down Indigenous families. "ese systems resulted in the stolen children in Australia, the removal of thousands of Indigenous children from their parents and communities, who were then placed in the homes of white families. "e master’s tools of colonization will not work to decolonize what the master built. Our challenge is to fashion new tools for the purpose of decolonizing and Indigenous tools that can revitalize Indigenous knowledge.2

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1. Imperialism, History, Writing and !eory 23

Imperialism

"ere is one particular !gure whose name looms large, and whose spectre lingers, in Indigenous discussions of encounters with the West: Christopher Columbus. It is not simply that Columbus is identi!ed as the one who started it all, but rather that he has come to represent a huge legacy of su$ering and destruction. Columbus ‘names’ that legacy more than any other individual.3 He sets its modern time frame (500- plus years) and de!nes the outer limits of that legacy, that is, total destruction.4 But there are other signi!cant !gures who symbolize and frame Indigenous experiences in other places. In the imperial literature, these are the ‘heroes’, the discoverers and adventurers, the ‘fathers’ of colonialism. In the Indigenous literature these !gures are not so admired; their deeds are de!nitely not the deeds of wonderful discoverers and conquering heroes. In the South Paci!c, for example, it is the British explorer James Cook, whose expeditions had a very clear scienti!c purpose and whose !rst encounters with Indigenous peoples were fastidiously recorded. Hawai’ian academic Haunani Kay Trask’s list of what Cook brought to the Paci!c includes: ‘capitalism, Western political ideas (such as predatory individualism) and Christianity. Most destructive of all he brought diseases that ravaged my people until we were but a remnant of what we had been on contact with his pestilent crew’.5 "e French are remembered by Tasmanian Aborigine Greg Lehman, ‘not [for] the intellectual hubbub of an emerging anthrologie or even with the swish of their travel-weary frocks. It is with an arrogant death that they presaged their appearance….’6 For many communities, there were waves of di$erent sorts of Europeans: Dutch, Portuguese, British, French, whoever had political ascendancy over a region. And, in each place, a#er !gures such as Columbus and Cook had long departed, there came a vast array of military personnel, imperial administrators, priests, explorers, missionaries, colonial o%cials, artists, entrepreneurs and settlers, who cut a devastating swathe, and le# a permanent wound, on the societies and communities who occupied the lands named and claimed under imperialism.

"e concepts of imperialism and colonialism are crucial ones which are used across a range of disciplines, o#en with meanings which are taken for granted. "e two terms are interconnected and what is generally agreed upon is that colonialism is but one expression of imperialism. Imperialism tends to be used in at least four di$erent ways when describing the form of European imperialism which ‘started’

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Decolonizing Methodologies 24

in the !#eenth century: (1) imperialism as economic expansion; (2) imperialism as the subjugation of ‘others’; (3) imperialism as an idea or spirit with many forms of realization; and (4) imperialism as a discursive !eld of knowledge. "ese usages do not necessarily contradict each other; rather, they need to be seen as analyses which focus on di$erent layers of imperialism. Initially, the term was used by historians to explain a series of developments leading to the economic expansion of Europe. Imperialism in this sense could be tied to a chronology of events related to ‘discovery’, conquest, exploitation, distribution and appropriation.

Economic explanations of imperialism were !rst advanced by English historian J. A. Hobson in 1902 and by Lenin in 1917.7 Hobson saw imperialism as being an integral part of Europe’s economic expansion. He attributed the later stages of nineteenth-century imperialism to the inability of Europeans to purchase what was being produced and the need for Europe’s industrialists to shi# their capital to new markets which were secure. Imperialism was the system of control which secured the markets and capital investments. Colonialism facilitated this expansion by ensuring that there was European control, which necessarily meant securing and subjugating the Indigenous populations. Like Hobson, Lenin was concerned with the ways in which economic expansion was linked to imperialism, although he argued that the export of capital to new markets was an attempt to rescue capitalism because Europe’s workers could not a$ord what was being produced.

A second use of the concept of imperialism focuses more upon the exploitation and subjugation of Indigenous peoples. Although economic explanations might account for why people like Columbus were funded to explore and discover new sources of wealth, they do not account for the devastating impact on the Indigenous peoples whose lands were invaded.

By the time contact was made in the South Paci!c, Europeans, and more particularly the British, had learned from their previous encounters with Indigenous peoples and had developed much more sophisticated ‘rules of practice’.8 While these practices ultimately lead to forms of subjugation, they also lead to subtle nuances which give an unevenness to the story of imperialism, even within the story of one Indigenous society. While in New Zealand all M&ori tribes, for example, lost the majority of their lands, not all tribes had their lands con!scated, were invaded militarily or were declared to be in rebellion. Similarly, while many Indigenous nations signed treaties, other Indigenous communities have no treaties. Furthermore, legislated identities which

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1. Imperialism, History, Writing and !eory 25

regulated who was an Indian and who was not, who was a metis, who had lost all status as an Indigenous person, who had the correct fraction of blood quantum, who lived in the regulated spaces of reserves and communities, were all worked out arbitrarily (but systematically), to serve the interests of the colonizing society. "e speci!cities of imperialism help to explain the di$erent ways in which Indigenous peoples have struggled to recover histories, lands, languages and basic human dignity. "e way arguments are framed, the way dissent is controlled, the way settlements are made, while certainly drawing from international precedents, are also situated within a more localized discursive !eld.

A third major use of the term is much broader. It links imperialism to the spirit which characterized Europe’s global activities. MacKenzie de!nes imperialism as being ‘more than a set of economic, political and military phenomena. It is also a complex ideology which had wide- spread cultural, intellectual and technical expressions.’9 "is view of imperialism locates it within the Enlightenment spirit which signalled the transformation of economic, political and cultural life in Europe. In this wider Enlightenment context, imperialism becomes an integral part of the development of the modern state, of science, of ideas and of the ‘modern’ human person. In complex ways imperialism was also a mode through which the new states of Europe could expand their economies, through which new ideas and discoveries could be made and harnessed, and through which Europeans could develop their sense of European-ness. "e imperial imagination enabled European nations to imagine the possibility that new worlds, new wealth and new possessions existed that could be discovered and controlled. "is imagination was realized through the promotion of science, economic expansion and political practice.

"ese three interpretations of imperialism have re'ected a view from the imperial centre of Europe. In contrast, a fourth use of the term has been generated by writers whose understandings of imperialism and colonialism have been based either on their membership of and experience within colonized societies, or on their interest in understanding imperialism from the perspective of local contexts. Although these views of imperialism take into account the other forms of analysis, there are some important distinctions. "ere is, for example, a greater and more immediate need to understand the complex ways in which people were brought within the imperial system, because its impact is still being felt, despite the apparent independence gained by former colonial territories. "e reach of imperialism into ‘our heads’

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Decolonizing Methodologies 26

challenges those who belong to colonized communities to understand how this occurred, partly because we perceive a need to decolonize our minds, to recover ourselves, to claim a space in which to develop a sense of authentic humanity. "is analysis of imperialism has been referred to more recently in terms such as ‘post-colonial discourse’, the ‘empire writes back’ and/or ‘writing from the margins’. "ere is a more political body of writing, however, which extends to the revolutionary, anti-colonial work of various activists (only some of whom, such as Frantz Fanon, actually wrote their ideas down) that draws also upon the work of black and African American writers and other minority writers whose work may have emerged out of a concern for human and civil rights, the rights of women and other forms of oppression.

Colonialism became imperialism’s outpost, the fort and the port of imperial outreach. Whilst colonies may have started as a means to secure ports, access to raw materials and e%cient transfer of commodities from point of origin to the imperial centre, they also served other functions. It was not just Indigenous populations who had to be subjugated. Europeans also needed to be kept under control, in service to the greater imperial enterprise. Colonial outposts were also cultural sites which preserved an image or represented an image of what the West or ‘civilization’ stood for. Colonies were not exact replicas of the imperial centre, culturally, economically or politically. Europeans resident in the colonies were not culturally homogeneous, so there were struggles within the colonizing community about its own identity. Wealth and class status created very powerful settler interests which came to dominate the politics of a colony. Colonialism was, in part, an image of imperialism, a particular realization of the imperial imagination. It was also, in part, an image of the future nation it would become. In this image lie images of the Other, stark contrasts and subtle nuances, of the ways in which the Indigenous communities were perceived and dealt with, which make the stories of colonialism part of a grander narrative and yet part also of a very local, very speci!c experience.

A constant reworking of our understandings of the impact of imperialism and colonialism is an important aspect of Indigenous cultural politics and forms the basis of an Indigenous language of critique. Within this critique there have been two major strands. One draws upon a notion of authenticity, of a time before colonization in which we were intact as Indigenous peoples. We had absolute authority over our lives; we were born into and lived in a universe which was entirely of our making. We did not ask, need or want to be ‘discovered’ by Europe. "e second strand of the language of critique demands that

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concerns of wealth and

class without lens on

sovrigty are settler

interests

about colonialism

1. Imperialism, History, Writing and !eory 27

we have an analysis of how we were colonized, of what that has meant in terms of our immediate past and what it means for our present and future. "e two strands intersect but what is particularly signi!cant in Indigenous discourses is that solutions are posed from a combination of the time before, colonized time, and the time before that, pre-colonized time. Decolonization encapsulates both sets of ideas.

"ere are, however, new challenges to the way Indigenous peoples think and talk about imperialism. When the word globalization is substituted for the word imperialism, or when the pre!x ‘post’ is attached to colonial, we are no longer talking simply about historical formations which are still lingering in our consciousness. Globalization and conceptions of a new world order represent di$erent sorts of challenges for Indigenous peoples. While being on the margins of the world has had dire consequences, being incorporated within the world’s marketplace has di$erent implications and in turn requires the mounting of new forms of resistance. Similarly, post-colonial discussions have also stirred some Indigenous resistance, not so much to the literary reimagining of culture as being centred in what were once conceived of as the colonial margins, but to the idea that colonialism is over, !nished business. "is is best articulated by Aborigine activist Bobbi Sykes, who asked at an academic conference on post-colonialism, ‘What? Post-colonialism? Have they le#?’ "ere is also, amongst Indigenous academics, the sneaking suspicion that the fashion of post-colonialism has become a strategy for reinscribing or reauthorizing the privileges of non-Indigenous academics because the !eld of ‘post-colonial’ discourse has been de!ned in ways which can still leave out Indigenous peoples, our ways of knowing and our current concerns.

Research within late-modern and late-colonial conditions continues relentlessly and brings with it a new wave of exploration, discovery, exploitation and appropriation. Researchers enter communities armed with goodwill in their front pockets and patents in their back pockets; they bring medicine into villages and extract blood for genetic analysis.

No matter how appalling their behaviours, how insensitive and o$ensive their personal actions may be, their acts and intentions are always justi!ed as being for the ‘good of mankind’. Research of this nature on Indigenous peoples is still justi!ed by the ends rather than the means, particularly if the Indigenous peoples concerned can still be positioned as ignorant and undeveloped (savages). Other researchers gather traditional herbal and medicinal remedies and remove them for analysis in laboratories around the world. Still others collect the intangibles: the belief systems and ideas about healing, about the

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complexity of using “post-

colonial”

research and

exploitation

Decolonizing Methodologies 28

universe, about relationships and ways of organizing, and the practices and rituals which go alongside such beliefs, such as sweat lodges, massage techniques, chanting, hanging crystals and wearing certain colours. "e global hunt for new knowledges, new materials, new cures, supported by international agreements such as the General Agreement on Tari$s and Trade (GATT) brings new threats to Indigenous communities. "e ethics of research, the ways in which Indigenous communities can protect themselves and their knowledges, the understandings required not just of state legislation but of international agreements – these are the topics now on the agenda of many Indigenous meetings.

On Being Human

!e faculty of imagination is not strongly developed among them, although they permitted it to run wild in believing absurd superstitions.

A. S. "ompson, 185910

One of the supposed characteristics of primitive peoples was that we could not use our minds or intellects. We could not invent things, we could not create institutions or history, we could not imagine, we could not produce anything of value, we did not know how to use land and other resources from the natural world, we did not practice the ‘arts’ of civilization. By lacking such virtues we disquali!ed ourselves, not just from civilization but from humanity itself. In other words we were not ‘fully human’; some of us were not even considered partially human. Ideas about what counted as human in association with the power to de!ne people as human or not human were already encoded in imperial and colonial discourses prior to the period of imperialism covered here.11 Imperialism provided the means through which concepts of what counts as human could be applied systematically as forms of classi!cation, for example through hierarchies of race and typologies of di$erent societies. In conjunction with imperial power and with ‘science’, these classi!cation systems came to shape relations between imperial powers and Indigenous societies.

Said has argued that the ‘oriental’ was partially a creation of the West, based on a combination of images formed through scholarly and imaginative works. Fanon argued earlier that the colonized were brought into existence by the settler and the two, settler and colonized,

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1. Imperialism, History, Writing and !eory 29

are mutual constructions of colonialism. In Fanon’s words: ‘we know each other well’.12 "e European powers had by the nineteenth century already established systems of rule and forms of social relations which governed interaction with the Indigenous peoples being colonized. "ese relations were gendered, hierarchical and supported by rules, some explicit and others masked or hidden. "e principle of ‘humanity’ was one way in which the implicit or hidden rules could be shaped. To consider Indigenous peoples as not fully human, or not human at all, enabled distance to be maintained and justi!ed various policies of either extermination or domestication. Some Indigenous peoples (‘not human’) were hunted and killed like vermin, others (‘partially human’) were rounded up and put in reserves like creatures to be broken in, branded and put to work.

"e struggle to assert and claim humanity has been a consistent thread of anti-colonial discourses on colonialism and oppression. "is struggle for humanity has generally been framed within the wider discourse of humanism, the appeal to human ‘rights’, the notion of a universal human subject, and the connections between being human and being capable of creating history, knowledge and society. "e focus on asserting humanity has to be seen within the anti-colonial analysis of imperialism and what were seen as imperialism’s dehumanizing imperatives, which were structured into the language, economy, social relations and cultural life of colonial societies. Mignolo and Walsh link the invention of the idea of the ‘Human’ to the very heart of the colonial matrix of power and see the formation of the idea of the Human and the separate idea of Nature emerging in the European Renaissance.13

From the nineteenth century onwards the processes of dehumanization were o#en hidden behind justi!cations for imperialism and colonialism, which were clothed within an ideology of humanism and liberalism and the assertion of moral claims that related to a concept of civilized ‘man’. "e moral justi!cations did not necessarily stop the continued hunting of Aborigines in the early nineteenth century, nor the continued ill-treatment of di$erent Indigenous peoples even today.

Problems have arisen, however, within e$orts to struggle for humanity by overthrowing the ideologies relating to our supposed lack of humanity. "e arguments of Fanon, and many writers since Fanon, have been criticized for essentializing our ‘nature’, for taking for granted the binary categories of Western thought, for accepting arguments supporting cultural relativity, for claiming an authenticity which is overly idealistic and romantic, and for simply engaging in an inversion of the colonizer/colonized relationship without addressing the complex

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Decolonizing Methodologies 30

problems of power relations. Colonized peoples have been compelled to de!ne what it means to be human because there is a deep understanding of what it has meant to be considered not fully human, to be savage. "e di%culties of such a process, however, have been bound inextricably to constructions of colonial relations around the binary of colonizer and colonized. "ese two categories are not just a simple opposition but consist of several relations, some more clearly oppositional than others. Unlocking one set of relations most o#en requires unlocking and unsettling the di$erent constituent parts of other relations. "e binary of colonizer/colonized does not take into account, for example, the development of di$erent layerings which have occurred within each group and across the two groups. Millions of Indigenous peoples were ripped from their lands over several generations and shipped into slavery. "e lands they went to as slaves were lands already taken from another group of Indigenous peoples. Slavery was as much a system of imperialism as was the claiming of other peoples’ territories. Other Indigenous peoples were transported to various outposts in the same way as interesting plants and animals were reclimatized, in order to ful!l labour requirements. Hence there are large populations in some places of non-Indigenous groups, also victims of colonialism, whose primary relationship and allegiance is o#en to the imperial power rather than to the colonized people of the place to which they themselves have been brought. To put it simply, Indigenous peoples as commodities were transported to and fro across the empire. "ere were also sexual relations between colonizers and colonized which led to communities who were referred to as ‘half-castes’ or ‘half-breeds’, or stigmatized by some other speci!c term which o#en excluded them from belonging to either settler or Indigenous societies. Sometimes children from ‘mixed’ sexual relationships were considered at least half-way civilized; at other times they were considered worse than civilized. Legislation was frequently used to regulate both the categories to which people were entitled to belong and the sorts of relations which one category of people could have with another.

Since the Second World War wars of independence and struggles for decolonization by former parts of European empires have shown us that attempts to break free can involve enormous violence: physical, social, economic, cultural and psychological. "e struggle for freedom has been viewed by writers such as Fanon as a necessarily, inevitably violent process between ‘two forces opposed to each other by their very nature’.14 Fanon argues further that ‘Decolonization which sets out to change the order of the world is, obviously, a programme of complete

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binaries, same language as

Trask

1. Imperialism, History, Writing and !eory 31

disorder’.15 "is introduces another important principle embedded in imperialism, that of order. "e principle of order provides the underlying connection between such things as the nature of imperial social relations, the activities of Western science, the establishment of trade, the appropriation of sovereignty and the establishment of law. No great conspiracy had to occur for the simultaneous developments and activities which took place under imperialism because imperial activity was driven by fundamentally similar underlying principles. Nandy refers to these principles as the ‘code’ or ‘grammar’ of imperialism.16 "e idea of code suggests that there is a deep structure which regulates and legitimates imperial practices.

"e fact that Indigenous societies had their own systems of order was dismissed through what Albert Memmi referred to as a series of negations: they were not fully human, they were not civilized enough to have systems, they were not literate, their languages and modes of thought were inadequate.17 As Fanon and later writers such as Nandy have claimed, imperialism and colonialism brought complete disorder to colonized peoples, disconnecting them from their histories, their landscapes, their languages, their social relations and their own ways of thinking, feeling and interacting with the world. It was a process of systematic fragmentation which can still be seen in the disciplinary carve up of the Indigenous world: bones, mummies and skulls to the museums, artwork to private collectors, languages to linguistics, ‘customs’ to anthropologists, beliefs and behaviours to psychologists. To discover how fragmented this process was, one needs only to stand in a museum, a library, a bookshop, and ask where Indigenous peoples are located. Fragmentation is not a phenomenon of postmodernism as many might claim. For Indigenous peoples fragmentation has been the consequence of imperialism.

Writing, History and !eory

A critical aspect of the struggle for self-determination has involved questions relating to our history as Indigenous peoples and a critique of how we, as the Other, have been represented or excluded from various accounts. Every issue has been approached by Indigenous peoples with a view to rewriting and rerighting our position in history. Indigenous peoples want to tell our own stories, write our own versions, in our own ways, for our own purposes. It is not simply about giving an oral account or a genealogical naming of the land and the events which raged over it, but a very powerful need to give testimony to and restore a spirit,

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legitimizes imperial practices

Indigenous peoples have

their own systems of order, but

dismissed as “primitive”

Decolonizing Methodologies 32

to bring back into existence a world fragmented and dying. "e sense of history conveyed by these approaches is not the same thing as the discipline of history, and so our accounts collide, crash into each other.

Writing or literacy, in a very traditional sense of the word, has been used to determine the breaks between the past and the present, the beginning of history and the development of theory.18 Writing has been viewed as the mark of a superior civilization and other societies have been judged, by this view, to be incapable of thinking critically and objectively, or having distance from ideas and emotions. Writing is part of theorizing and writing is part of history. Writing, history and theory, then, are key sites in which Western research of the Indigenous world have come together. As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, however, from another perspective writing and especially writing theory are very intimidating ideas for many Indigenous students. Having been immersed in the Western academy which claims theory as thoroughly Western, which has constructed all the rules by which the Indigenous world has been theorized, Indigenous voices have been overwhelmingly silenced. "e act, let alone the art and science, of theorizing our own existence and realities is not something which many Indigenous people assume is possible. Frantz Fanon’s call for the Indigenous intellectual and artist to create a new literature, to work in the cause of constructing a national culture a#er liberation, still stands as a challenge. While this has been taken up by writers of !ction, many Indigenous scholars who work in the social and other sciences struggle to write, theorize and research as Indigenous scholars.

Is History Important for Indigenous Peoples?

"is may appear to be a trivial question as the answer most colonized people would give, I think, is that ‘yes, history is important’. But I doubt if what they would be responding to is the notion of history which is understood by the Western academy. Poststructuralist critiques of history which draw heavily on French poststructural thought have focused on the characteristics and understandings of history as an Enlightenment or modernist project. "eir critique is of both liberal and Marxist concepts of history. Feminists have argued similarly (but not necessarily from a poststructuralist position) that history is the story of a speci!c form of domination, namely of patriarchy, literally ‘his-story’.

While acknowledging the critical approaches of poststructuralist theory and cultural studies, the arguments which are debated at this

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1. Imperialism, History, Writing and !eory 33

level are not new to Indigenous peoples. "ere are numerous oral stories which tell of what it means, what it feels like, to be present while your history is erased before your eyes, dismissed as irrelevant, ignored or rendered as the lunatic ravings of drunken old people. "e negation of Indigenous views of history was a critical part of asserting colonial ideology, partly because such views were regarded as clearly ‘primitive’ and ‘incorrect’ and mostly because they challenged and resisted the mission of colonization. Indigenous peoples have also mounted a critique of the way history is told from the perspective of the colonizers. At the same time, however, Indigenous groups have argued that history is important for understanding the present and that reclaiming history is a critical and essential aspect of decolonization. "e critique of Western history argues that history is a modernist project which has developed alongside imperial beliefs about the Other. History is assembled around a set of interconnected ideas which I will summarize brie'y here. I have drawn on a wide range of discussions by Indigenous people and by writers such as Robert Young, J. Abu-Lughod, Keith Jenkins and C. Steadman.19

1 !e idea that history is a totalizing discourse

"e concept of totality assumes the possibility and the desirability of being able to include absolutely all known knowledge into a coherent whole. In order for this to happen, classi!cation systems, rules of practice and methods had to be developed to allow for knowledge to be selected and included in what counts as history.

2 !e idea that there is a universal history

Although linked to the notion of totality, the concept of universal assumes that there are fundamental characteristics and values which all human subjects and societies share. It is the development of these universal characteristics which are of historical interest.

3 !e idea that history is one large chronology

History is regarded as being about developments over time. It charts the progress of human endeavour through time. Chronology is important as a method because it allows events to be located at a point in time. "e actual time events take place also makes them ‘real’ or factual. In order to begin the chronology, a time of ‘discovery’ has to be established.

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Decolonizing Methodologies 34

Chronology is also important for attempting to go backwards and explain how and why things happened in the past.

4 !e idea that history is about development

Implicit in the notion of development is the notion of progress. "is assumes that societies move forward in stages of development much as an infant grows into a fully developed adult human being. "e earliest phase of human development is regarded as primitive, simple and emotional. As societies develop they become less primitive, more civilized, more rational, and their social structures become more complex and bureaucratic.

5 !e idea that history is about a self-actualizing human subject

In this view humans have the potential to reach a stage in their development where they can be in total control of their faculties. "ere is an order of human development which moves, in stages, through the ful!lment of basic needs, the development of emotions, the development of the intellect and the development of morality. Just as the individual moves through these stages, so do societies.

6 !e idea that the story of history can be told in one coherent narrative

"is idea suggests that we can assemble all the facts in an ordered way so that they tell us the truth or give us a very good idea of what really did happen in the past. In theory it means that historians can write a true history of the world.

7 !e idea that history as a discipline is innocent

"is idea says that ‘facts’ speak for themselves and that the historian simply researches the facts and puts them together. Once all the known facts are assembled they tell their own story, without any need of a theoretical explanation or interpretation by the historian. "is idea also conveys the sense that history is pure as a discipline, that is, it is not implicated with other disciplines.

8 !e idea that history is constructed around binary categories

"is idea is linked to the historical method of chronology. In order for history to begin there has to be a period of beginning and some criteria

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1. Imperialism, History, Writing and !eory 35

for determining when something begins. In terms of history this was o#en attached to concepts of ‘discovery’, the development of literacy, or the development of a speci!c social formation. Everything before that time is designated as prehistorical, belonging to the realm of myths and traditions, ‘outside’ the domain.

9 !e idea that history is patriarchal

"is idea is linked to the notions of self-actualization and development, as women were regarded as being incapable of attaining the higher orders of development. Furthermore they were not signi!cant in terms of the ways societies developed because they were not present in the bureaucracies or hierarchies where changes in social or political life were being determined.

Other key ideas

Intersecting this set of ideas are some other important concepts. Literacy, as one example, was used as a criterion for assessing the development of a society and its progress to a stage where history can be said to begin. Even places such as India, China and Japan, however, which were very literate cultures prior to their ‘discovery’ by the West, were invoked through other categories which de!ned them as uncivilized. "eir literacy, in other words, did not count as a record of legitimate knowledge.

"e German philosopher Hegel is usually regarded as the ‘founding father’ of history in the sense outlined here. "is applies to both Liberal and Marxist views.20 Hegel conceived of the fully human subject as someone capable of ‘creating (his) own history’. However, Hegel did not simply invent the rules of history. As Robert Young argues, ‘the entire Hegelian machinery simply lays down the operation of a system already in place, already operating in everyday life’.21 It should also be self-evident that many of these ideas are predicated on a sense of Otherness. "ey are views which invite a comparison with ‘something/someone else’ which exists on the outside, such as the oriental, the ‘Negro’, the ‘Jew’, the ‘Indian’, the ‘Aborigine’. Views about the Other had already existed for centuries in Europe, but during the Enlightenment these views became more formalized through science, philosophy and imperialism, into explicit systems of classi!cation and ‘regimes of truth’. "e racialization of the human subject and the social order enabled comparisons to be made between the ‘us’ of the West and the ‘them’ of the Other. History was the story of people who ‘were regarded as fully human’. Others who

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Decolonizing Methodologies 36

were not regarded as human (that is, capable of self-actualization) were prehistoric. "is notion is linked also to Hegel’s master – slave construct which has been applied as a psychological category (by Freud) and as a system of social ordering.

A further set of important ideas embedded in the modernist view of history relates to the origins (causes) and nature of social change. "e Enlightenment project involved new conceptions of society and of the individual based around the precepts of rationalism, individualism and capitalism. "ere was a general belief that not only could individuals remake themselves but so could societies. "e modern industrial state became the point of contrast between the pre-modern and the modern.

History in this view began with the emergence of the rational individual and the modern industrialized society. However, there is something more to this idea in terms of how history came to be conceptualized as a method. "e connection to the industrial state is signi!cant because it highlights what was regarded as being worthy of history. "e people and groups who ‘made’ history were the people who developed the underpinnings of the state – the economists, scientists, bureaucrats and philosophers. "at they were all men of a certain class and race was ‘natural’ because they were regarded (naturally) as fully rational, self-actualizing human beings capable, therefore, of creating social change, that is, history. "e day-to-day lives of ‘ordinary’ people, and of women, did not become a concern of history until much more recently.

Contested Histories

For Indigenous peoples, the critique of history is not unfamiliar, although it has now been claimed by postmodern theories. "e idea of contested stories and multiple discourses about the past, by di$erent communities, is closely linked to the politics of everyday contemporary Indigenous life. It is very much a part of the fabric of communities that value oral ways of knowing. "ese contested accounts are stored within genealogies, within the landscape, within weavings and carvings, even within the personal names that many people carried. "e means by which these histories were stored was through their systems of knowledge. Many of these systems have since been reclassi!ed as oral traditions rather than histories.

Under colonialism Indigenous peoples have struggled against a Western view of history and yet been complicit with that view. We have

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politics of moʻolelo

as “myths”

Indigenous ways of knowing

privleges multiple discourses, contrary to

History

1. Imperialism, History, Writing and !eory 37

o#en allowed our ‘histories’ to be told and have then become outsiders as we heard them being retold. Schooling is directly implicated in this process. "rough the curriculum and its underlying theory of knowledge, early schools rede!ned the world and where Indigenous peoples were positioned within the world. From being direct descendants of sky and earth parents, Christianity positioned some of us as higher-order savages who deserved salvation in order that we could become children of God. Maps of the world reinforced our place on the periphery of the world, although we were still considered part of the Empire. "is included having to learn new names for our own lands. Other symbols of our loyalty, such as the 'ag, were also an integral part of the imperial curriculum.22 Our orientation to the world was already being rede!ned as we were being excluded systematically from the writing of the history of our own lands. "is on its own may not have worked were it not for the actual material rede!nition of our world which was occurring simultaneously through such things as the renaming and ‘breaking in’ of the land, the alienation and fragmentation of lands through legislation, the forced movement of people o$ their lands, and the social consequences which resulted in high sickness and mortality rates.

Indigenous attempts to reclaim land, language, knowledge and sovereignty have usually involved contested accounts of the past by colonizers and colonized. "ese have occurred in the courts, before various commissions, tribunals and o%cial enquiries, in the media, in Parliament, in bars and on talkback radio. In these situations contested histories do not exist in the same cultural framework as they do when tribal or clan histories, for example, are being debated within the Indigenous community itself. "ey are not simply struggles over ‘facts’ and ‘truth’; the rules by which these struggles take place are never clear (other than that we as the Indigenous community know they are going to be stacked against us); and we are not the !nal arbiters of what really counts as the truth.

It is because of these issues that I ask the question, ‘Is history in its modernist construction important or not important for Indigenous peoples?’ For many people who are presently engaged in research on Indigenous land claims, the answer would appear to be self-evident. We assume that when ‘the truth comes out’ it will prove that what happened was wrong or illegal and that therefore the system (tribunals, the courts, the government) will set things right. We believe that history is also about justice, that understanding history will enlighten our decisions about the future. Wrong. History is also about power. In fact, history is mostly about power. It is the story of the powerful and how they became

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Decolonizing Methodologies 38

powerful, and then how they use their power to keep them in positions in which they can continue to dominate others. It is because of this relationship with power that we have been excluded, marginalized and ‘Othered’. In this sense history is not important for Indigenous peoples because a thousand accounts of the ‘truth’ will not alter the ‘fact’ that Indigenous peoples are still marginal and do not possess the power to transform history into justice.

"is leads then to several other questions. "e one which is most relevant to this book is the one which asks, ‘Why then has revisiting history been a signi!cant part of decolonization?’ "e answer, I suggest, lies in the intersection of Indigenous approaches to the past, of the modernist history project itself and of the resistance strategies which have been employed. Our colonial experience traps us in the project of modernity. "ere can be no ‘postmodern’ for us until we have settled some business of the modern. "is does not mean that we do not understand or employ multiple discourses, or act in incredibly contradictory ways, or exercise power ourselves in multiple ways. It means that there is un!nished business, that we are still being colonized (and know it), and that we are still searching for justice.

Coming to know the past has been part of the critical pedagogy of decolonization. To hold alternative histories is to hold alternative knowledges. "e pedagogical implication of this access to alternative knowledges is that they can form the basis of alternative ways of doing things. Transforming our colonized views of our own history (as written by the West), however, requires us to revisit, site by site, our history under Western eyes. "is in turn requires a theory or approach which helps us to engage with, understand and then act upon history. It is in this sense that the sites visited in this book begin with a critique of a Western view of history. Telling our stories from the past, reclaiming the past, giving testimony to the injustices of the past are all strategies which are commonly employed by Indigenous peoples struggling for justice. On the international scene, it is extremely rare and unusual when Indigenous accounts are accepted and acknowledged as valid interpretations of what has taken place. And yet, the need to tell our stories remains the powerful imperative of a powerful form of resistance.

Is Writing Important for Indigenous Peoples?

As I am arguing, every aspect of the act of producing knowledge has in'uenced the ways in which Indigenous ways of knowing have been

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Lorrin A Thurston memior

1. Imperialism, History, Writing and !eory 39

represented. Reading, writing, talking, these are as fundamental to academic discourse as science, theories, methods, paradigms. To begin with reading, one might cite the talk in which M&ori writer Patricia Grace undertook to show that ‘Books Are Dangerous’.23 She argues that there are four things that make many books dangerous to Indigenous readers: (1) they do not reinforce our values, actions, customs, culture and identity; (2) when they tell us only about others, they are saying that we do not exist; (3) they may be writing about us but are writing things which are untrue; and (4) they are writing about us but saying negative and insensitive things which tell us that we are not good. Although Grace is talking about school texts and journals, her comments also apply to academic writing. Much of what I have read has said that we do not exist, that if we do exist it is in terms which I cannot recognize, that we are no good and that what we think is not valid.

Leonie Pihama makes a similar point about !lm. In a review of !e Piano she says: ‘M&ori people struggle to gain a voice, struggle to be heard from the margins, to have our stories heard, to have our descriptions of ourselves validated, to have access to the domain within which we can control and de!ne those images which are held up as re'ections of our realities.’24 Representation is important as a concept because it gives the impression of ‘the truth’. When I read texts, for example, I frequently have to orientate myself to a text world in which the centre of academic knowledge is either in Britain, the United States or Western Europe; in which words such as ‘we’, ‘us’, ‘our’, ‘I’ actually exclude me. It is a text world in which (if what I am interested in rates a mention) I have learned that I belong partly in the "ird World, partly in the ‘Women of Colour’ world, partly in the black or African world. I read myself into these labels partly because I have also learned that, although there may be commonalities, they still do not entirely account for the experiences of Indigenous peoples.

So, reading and interpretation present problems when we do not see ourselves in the text. "ere are problems, too, when we do see ourselves but can barely recognize ourselves through the representation. One problem of being trained to read this way, or, more correctly, of learning to read this way over many years of academic study, is that we can adopt uncritically similar patterns of writing. We begin to write about ourselves as Indigenous peoples as if we really were ‘out there’, the ‘Other’, with all the baggage that this entails. Another problem is that academic writing is a form of selecting, arranging and presenting knowledge. It privileges sets of texts, views about the history of an idea, what issues count as signi!cant; and, by engaging in the same process uncritically,

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Decolonizing Methodologies 40

we too can render Indigenous writers invisible or unimportant while reinforcing the validity of other writers. If we write without thinking critically about our writing, it can be dangerous. Writing can also be dangerous because we reinforce and maintain a style of discourse which is never innocent. Writing can be dangerous because sometimes we reveal ourselves in ways which get misappropriated and used against us. Writing can be dangerous because, by building on previous texts written about Indigenous peoples, we continue to legitimate views about ourselves which are hostile to us. "is is particularly true of academic writing, although journalistic and imaginative writing reinforce these ‘myths’.

"ese attitudes inform what is sometimes referred to as either the ‘Empire writes back’ discourse or post-colonial literature. "is kind of writing assumes that the centre does not necessarily have to be located at the imperial centre.25 It is argued that the centre can be shi#ed ideologically through imagination and that this shi#ing can recreate history. Another perspective relates to the ability of ‘native’ writers to appropriate the language of the colonizer as the language of the colonized and to write so that it captures the ways in which the colonized actually use the language, their dialects and in'ections, and in the way they make sense of their lives. Its other importance is that it speaks to an audience of people who have also been colonized. "is is one of the ironies of many Indigenous peoples’ conferences where issues of Indigenous language have to be debated in the language of the colonizers. Another variation of the debate relates to the use of literature to write about the terrible things which happened under colonialism or as a consequence of colonialism. "ese topics inevitably implicated the colonizers and their literature in the processes of cultural domination.

Yet another position, espoused in African literature by Ngugi wa "iong’o, was to write in the languages of Africa. For Ngugi wa "iong’o, to write in the language of the colonizers was to pay homage to them, while to write in the languages of Africa was to engage in an anti-imperialist struggle. He argued that language carries culture and the language of the colonizer became the means by which the ‘mental universe of the colonized’ was dominated.26 "is applied, in Ngugi wa "iong’o’s view, particularly to the language of writing. Whereas oral languages were frequently still heard at home, the use of literature in association with schooling resulted in the alienation of a child from the child’s history, geography, music and other aspects of culture.27

In discussing the politics of academic writing, in which research writing is a subset, Cherryl Smith argues that ‘colonialism, racism and

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1. Imperialism, History, Writing and !eory 41

cultural imperialism do not occur only in society, outside of the gates of universities’.28 Academic writing, she continues, is a way of ‘“writing back” whilst at the same time writing to ourselves’.27 "e act of ‘writing back’ and simultaneously writing to ourselves is not simply an inversion of how we have learned to write academically.29 "e di$erent audiences to whom we speak makes the task somewhat di%cult. "e scope of the literature which we use in our work contributes to a di$erent framing of the issues. "e oral arts and other forms of expression set our landscape in a di$erent frame of reference. Our understandings of the academic disciplines within which we have been trained also frame our approaches. Even the use of pronouns such as ‘I’ and ‘we’ can cause di%culties when writing for several audiences, because while it may be acceptable now in academic writing, it is not always acceptable to Indigenous audiences.30

Edward Said also asks the following questions: ‘Who writes? For whom is the writing being done? In what circumstances? "ese it seems to me are the questions whose answers provide us with the ingredients making a politics of interpretation.’31 "ese questions are important ones which are being asked in a variety of ways within our communities. "ey are asked, for example, about research, policy making and curriculum development. Said’s comments, however, point to the problems of interpretation, in this case of academic writing. Who is doing the writing is important in the politics of the "ird World and African America, and indeed for Indigenous peoples; it is even more important in the politics of how these worlds are being represented ‘back to’ the West. Although in the literary sense the imagination is crucial to writing, the use of language is not highly regarded in academic discourses which claim to be scienti!c. "e concept of imagination, when employed as a sociological tool, is o#en reduced to a way of seeing and understanding the world, or a way of understanding how people either construct the world or are constructed by the world. As Toni Morrison argues, however, the imagination can be a way of sharing the world.32 "is means, according to Morrison, struggling to !nd the language to do this and then struggling to interpret and perform within that shared imagination.

Writing !eory

Research is linked in all disciplines to theory. Research adds to, is generated from, creates or broadens our theoretical understandings.

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Decolonizing Methodologies 42

Indigenous peoples have been, in many ways, oppressed by theory. Any consideration of the ways our origins have been examined, our histories recounted, our arts analysed, our cultures dissected, measured, torn apart and distorted back to us will suggest that theories have not looked sympathetically or ethically at us. Writing research is o#en considered marginally more important than writing theory, providing it results in tangible bene!ts for farmers, economists, industries and sick people. For Indigenous peoples, most of the theorizing has been driven by anthropological approaches. "ese approaches have shown enormous concern for our origins as peoples and for aspects of our linguistic and material culture.

"e development of theories by Indigenous scholars which attempt to explain our existence in contemporary society (as opposed to the ‘traditional’ society constructed under modernism) has only just begun. Not all these theories claim to be derived from some ‘pure’ sense of what it means to be Indigenous, nor do they claim to be theories which have been developed in a vacuum separated from any association with civil and human rights movements, other nationalist struggles or other theoretical approaches. What is claimed, however, is that new ways of theorizing by Indigenous scholars are grounded in a real sense of, and sensitivity towards, what it means to be an Indigenous person. As Kathie Irwin urges, ‘We don’t need anyone else developing the tools which will help us to come to terms with who we are. We can and will do this work. Real power lies with those who design the tools – it always has. "is power is ours.’33 Contained within this imperative is a sense of being able to determine priorities, to bring to the centre those issues of our own choosing, and to discuss them amongst ourselves.

I am arguing that theory at its simplest level is important for Indigenous peoples. At the very least it helps make sense of reality. It enables us to make assumptions and predictions about the world in which we live. It contains within it a method or methods for selecting and arranging, for prioritizing and legitimating what we see and do. "eory enables us to deal with contradictions and uncertainties. Perhaps more signi!cantly, it gives us space to plan, to strategize, to take greater control over our resistances. "e language of a theory can also be used as a way of organizing and determining action. It helps us to interpret what is being told to us, and to predict the consequences of what is being promised. "eory can also protect us because it contains within it a way of putting reality into perspective. If it is a good theory, it also allows for new ideas and ways of looking at things to be incorporated constantly, without the need to search constantly for new theories.

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1. Imperialism, History, Writing and !eory 43

As Teresia Teaiwa says, ‘Engaging broadly with theory and theorists of all kinds is part of exercising intellectual agency and is a necessary foundation for achieving fuller self-determination for Native and Indigenous and Paci!c peoples in the academy.’ She goes on to argue that ‘Sovereign intellectuals have nothing to lose by admitting that some white men, white women, and white people are part of our genealogies of thinking whether we like it or not. Some white men, white women, white people are the ancestors we get to choose’. "e challenge for centuries has been the absence of the sovereignty to choose native and Indigenous scholars writing about Indigenous matters while drawing on Indigenous knowledge, languages and values.34

A dilemma posed by such a thorough critical approach to history, writing and theory is that whilst we may reject or dismiss them, this does not make them go away, nor does the critique necessarily o$er the alternatives. We live simultaneously within such views while needing to pose, contest and struggle for the legitimacy of oppositional or alternative histories, theories and ways of writing. At some points there is, there has to be, dialogue across the boundaries of oppositions. "is has to be because we constantly collide with dominant views while we are attempting to transform our lives on a larger scale than our own localized circumstances. "is means struggling to make sense of our own world while also attempting to transform what counts as important in the world of the powerful.

Part of the exercise is about recovering our own stories of the past. "is is inextricably bound to a recovery of our language and epistemological foundations. It is also about reconciling and what is really important about the past with what is important about the present, and reprioritizing accordingly. "ese issues raise signi!cant questions for Indigenous communities who are not only beginning to !ght back against the invasion of their communities by academic, corporate and populist researchers, but to think about, and carry out research, on their own concerns. One of the problems discussed in the !rst section of this book is that the methodologies and methods of research, the theories that inform them, the questions which they generate and the writing styles they employ, all become signi!cant acts which need to be considered carefully and critically before being applied. In other words, they need to be ‘decolonized’. Decolonization, however, does not mean and has not meant a total rejection of all theory or research or Western knowledge. Rather, it is about centring our concerns and world views and then coming to know and understand theory and research from our own perspectives and for our own purposes.

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As a site of struggle, research has a signi!cance for Indigenous peoples that is embedded in our history under the gaze of Western imperialism and Western science. It is framed by our attempts to escape the penetration and surveillance of that gaze whilst simultaneously reordering and reconstituting ourselves as Indigenous human beings in a state of ongoing crisis. Research has not been neutral in its objecti!cation of the Other. Objecti!cation is a process of dehumanization. In its clear links to Western knowledge, research has generated a particular relationship to Indigenous peoples which continues to be problematic. At the same time, however, new pressures which have resulted from our own politics of self-determination, of wanting greater participation in, or control over, what happens to us, and from changes in the global environment, have meant that there is a much more active and knowing engagement in the activity of research by Indigenous peoples. Many Indigenous groups, communities and organizations are thinking about, talking about and carrying out research activities of various kinds. In this chapter I have suggested that it is important to have a critical understanding of some of the tools of research – not just the obvious technical tools but the conceptual tools, the ones which make us feel uncomfortable, which we avoid, for which we have no easy response.

I lack imagination you say No. I lack language. !e language to clarify my resistance to the literate. . . .

Cherrie Moraga35

London visit 2019

Cobbled stories Buried deep A narrative Woven in stone Grand and assured "e empire Inhabits "e illogic of these Crooked little streets As well the Proud displays of stolen knowledges In museums And archives

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1. Imperialism, History, Writing and !eory 45

conserved and preserved trophies to inhumanity How cosmopolitan How metropolitan How very modern How steeped It seeps In its imperial glory "is little island "is grand city "at once ruled the world

Linda Tuhiwai Smith

Notes

1 Lorde, Audre (1979), ‘"e Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’, comments at ‘"e Personal and the Political’ panel, Second Sex Conference, reproduced in Moraga, C. and G. Anzaldua (1981), !is Bridge Called My Back, Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, New York, pp. 98–101.

2 Newcomb, S. (2008), Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, 3rd Edition, Fulcrum Publishing.

3 See Sale, K. (1990), !e Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy, Alfred Knopf, New York.

4 See Churchill, W. (1994), Indians Are Us? Culture and Genocide in North America, Common Courage Press, Maine.

5 Trask, H. K. (1993), From a Native Daughter, Common Courage Press, Maine, p. 7.

6 Lehman, G. (1996), ‘Life’s Quiet Companion’, paper, Riawunna Centre for Aboriginal Studies, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia.

7 Giddens, A. (1989), Sociology, Polity Press, Cambridge, pp. 530–3. 8 "e term ‘rules of practice’ comes from Foucault. See, for this encounter,

Salmond, A. (1991), Two Worlds: First Meetings between M"ori and Europeans 1642–1772, Viking, Auckland.

9 Mackenzie, J. R. (1990), Imperialism and the Natural World, Manchester University Press, England.

10 "ompson, A. S. (1859), !e Story of New Zealand: Past and Present, Savage and Civilized, John Murray, London, p. 82.

11 Goldberg, D. T. (1993), Racist Culture, Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning, Blackwell, Oxford. See also Sardar, Z., A. Nandy and W. Davies (1993), Barbaric Others: A Manifesto of Western Racism, Pluto Press, London.

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Decolonizing Methodologies 46

12 Fanon, Frantz (1990), !e Wretched of the Earth, Penguin, London. 13 Ibid., pp. 27–8. 14 Ibid., p. 27. 15 Nandy, A. (1989), !e Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under

Colonialism, Oxford University Press, Delhi; Mignolo, W., Walsh, C. E. 2018. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis, Duke University Press. Durham and London.

16 Memmi, A. (1991), !e Colonizer and the Colonized, Beacon Press, Boston, p. 83.

17 For a critique of these views refer to Street, B. V. (1984), Literacy in !eory and Practice, Cambridge University Press, New York.

18 I have drawn on a wide range of discussions both by Indigenous people and by various writers such as Robert Young, J. Abu-Lughod, Keith Jenkins and C. Steadman. See, for example, Young, R. (1990), White Mythologies: Writing, History and the West, Routledge, London; Abu-Lughood, J. (1989), ‘On the Remaking of History: How to Reinvent the Past’, in Remaking History, Dia Art Foundation, Bay Press, Seattle, pp. 111–29; Steadman, C. (1992), ‘Culture, Cultural Studies and the Historians’, in Cultural Studies, eds G. Nelson, P. A. Treicher and L. Grossberg, Routledge, New York, pp. 613–20; Trask, From a Native Daughter.

19 Young, White Mythologies. 20 Ibid., p. 3. 21 Mangan, J. (1993), !e Imperial Curriculum: Racial Images and Education

in the British Colonial Experience, Routledge, London. 22 Grace, P. (1985), ‘Books are Dangerous’, paper presented at the Fourth

Early Childhood Convention, Wellington, New Zealand. 23 Pihama, L. (1994), ‘Are Films Dangerous? A M&ori Woman’s Perspective

on !e Piano’, Hecate, Vol. 20, No. 2, p. 241. 24 Ashcro#, B., G. Gri%ths and H. Ti%n (1989), !e Empire Writes Back:

!eory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, Routledge, London. 25 "iong’o, Ngugi Wa (1986), Decolonizing the Mind: !e Politics of

Language in African Literature, James Currey, London. 26 Ibid. 27 Smith, C. W. (1994), ‘Kimihia Te Matauranga: Colonization and Iwi

Development’, MA thesis, University of Auckland, New Zealand, p. 13. 28 Ibid., p. 13. 29 van Dijk, T. A. (1989), Elite Discourses and Racism, Sage Publications,

Newbury Park, California. 30 Smith, L. T. (1994), ‘In Search of a Language and a Shareable Imaginative

World: E Kore Taku Moe, E Riro i a Koe’, Hecate, Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 162–74.

31 Said, E. (1983), ‘Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community’, in !e Politics of Interpretation, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, p. 7.

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1. Imperialism, History, Writing and !eory 47

32 Morrison, T. (1993), Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Vintage Books, New York.

33 Irwin, K. (1992), ‘Towards "eories of M&ori Feminisms’, in Feminist Voices: Women’s Studies Texts for Aotearoa/New Zealand, ed. R. du Plessis, Oxford University Press, Auckland, p. 5.

34 Teaiwa, T. (2014), ‘"e Ancestors We Get to Choose’, in !eorizing Native Studies, ed. Simpson A. Smith, Duke University Press, Durham and London, pp. 43–55.

35 Moraga, Cherrie (1983), quoted by G. Anzaldua, in ‘Speaking Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers’, in !is Bridge Called My Back, p. 166.

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