ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on performances of Maori cultures and identities in several locations. Common strand in introductory speeches and other Maori oratory is whakapapa, the genealogical tracing of family and iwi lineages back to an ancestor who captained, piloted or crewed one of the waka (canoes) in which Maori migrated to Aotearoa. Tawhai's diaspora is the alienation of the people from the land. It is the extinction of long-tended fires. It is the extinction of legal title because a novel and alien understanding of ownership intervenes. It is the inability to defend oneself, one's people, one's place and one's knowledge from the incommensurable difference imposed by colonial power. Colonialism necessarily involves dislocation, both for the colonizers – who attempt to disregard locative forms of identity even as they build colonies linked by trade, politics and militarism to the 'mother/father/homeland' – and for the previously indigenous people who enter a far more tenuous existence.
