Notes
The beginning of the talk is powerfully emotive, hard to summarise well but it made me feel a small glimpse of the impact of racism and colonisation.
The perspective of Cook is fairly often seen as an overall positive impression, yet there is good reason to view him and their crew in a very negative light (to put it mildly). This has come to a head at times like when the Captain Cook replica was banned from docking in Mangonui.
See also the book.
The strong perception of many native peoples is that their people are the ones who the focus and subject of research more than any other people. And I think in particular much more than the people groups who colonised them - across NZ, Australia, Canada, US and more.
“Scientific Racism” “Eugenics” “Settler capitalism” “Paternalistic and pathological”
“I would like to think that these ideas have disappeared by their ghostly discursive threads and vocabularies are deeply embedded in popular discourse … and in the default settings of those in power.”
The section at this point and the few minutes afterwards touches on the reactions academics may have to the idea of making some key changes to decolonise a discipline (and I imagine most if not all of the reactions she lists are based on real experience).
“The discipline does not exist as a singularity”
“Small pockets of radical work may form but they spend almost their entire careers having to prove they are good when in fact, they are exceptional”
“It is where accepting that there are different conceptions of knowledge is a possibility”
About ethics policies
“Constant seeking of permission and expression of gratitude”
“Based on caring and compassion for the entity that I work with”
My concluding thoughts
Fixing the issues raised in this talk is very challenging, and I think it also requires real forward-thinking to be able to make decisions that may in the short term seem to hold back progress (e.g. somewhat radically changing the structure of educational institutions, having people spend significant amounts of time and effort learning Te Reo) but may well have long-term gains (potentially beyond our lifetimes). The sceptic in me admits that such changes are a gamble on whether these types of things will be beneficial (what beneficial means is also up for change too though). But one of my takeaways is that it must be worthwhile to try and if it is driven by Māori and other indigenous groups then arguably the “colonisers” especially, more than owe it to take the gamble and try.
If you’re reading this and wondering what you can do about this, I am not well-placed to know or give suggestions. But what I would perhaps suggest is to try find someone knowledgeable about the current state of racial inequality and related issues within your field either in person or on the web somewhere and spend time engaging with all this.
If you are knowledgable about this and want to add to the conversation right here on this site, please feel free to annotate this page (see Interacting with this blog).