ABSTRACT
This chapter engages Pacific methodologies of talanoa and tauhi va with poetry as an expressive and embodied act. What the terms Pacific and Pasifika offer us, however, is an opening to the intersectionality of identity, culture, place, belonging, and becoming, which has helped to explore the Pacific connections in Aotearoa (a place that is not ancestral lands). Pasifika is a term coined in New Zealand during the mid-1990s as a bureaucratic terminology, and this term has permeated the encounters in and with education, such as in education policy, teaching, and learning. Identity and identity politics of who belongs, who does not, and who gets to decide are some of the questions and concerns facing indigenous and Pacific peoples in Aotearoa. The negotiation of multiple cultural identities is common for indigenous and Pacific people living in Aotearoa, and ways of navigating these identities are varied.
