ABSTRACT
In this chapter I outline how a map drawn in 1841 by Ngāi Tahu, a Māori iwi (tribe), inspired me to pick up the needle. Adopted, I discovered at the age of 30 that I have Ngāi Tahu ancestors and I am on a journey to repair my sense of not-belonging using my creative practice of embroidery. In the map, the men turned their oral knowledge into colonial knowledge, but the map itself is joyously strange, a visible entanglement of knowledges. In response, I embroidered my own map of Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand, stitching my childhood belonging. In this exploration I use the idea of wayfinding (Dening, 2004; Ingold, 2011), moving towards an uncertain destination without compass or map. Critical autoethnography (Holman Jones, 2018) as a decolonizing methodology guides me as I work to undermine Western essentialisms around space, body, and mind (Smith, 2012, 2014), stitching a map that may help guide others.
