Always Seeking the Light with Joanna Kidman

In this episode I spoke with Joanna Kidman, Professor of Māori Education at Victoria University of Wellington and Director of He Whenua Taurikura. She has a long and esteemed career as a sociologist researching the impact of the impact of institutional and systemic racism on Māori communities, including her Marsden-funded project looking at the impact of the New Zealand Wars on Māori communities and our society as a whole. Joanna was recently selected as a Fellow of the Royal Society for distinction in her research and leadership in her field. Our conversation ranged from her background, to the ways her research looks at the fractures in society, to what she has learned about peace.  Joanna brings her sociological training and Māori worldviews to the area of extremism and counterterrorism research. 

If you would like to learn more about Joanna's research, check out the following resources: 

https://e-tangata.co.nz/comment-and-analysis/joanna-kidman-standing-for-peace-in-an-angry-world/

https://www.bwb.co.nz/books/fragments-from-a-contested-past

Transcript

Unsettling Extremism 

Ep. 5 Alway Seeking the Light with Joanna Kidman

 Joanna  

People just didn't talk about this stuff. It was too difficult. Don't talk about racism. We don't talk about hate, because it just makes people upset. So I was determined that we would talk about those things that we would put them on the table. But we don't end there, we are always looking towards the light. Where do we, where do we, if we've been towards the light, where do we find hope? Where do we find spaces for dialogue and for repair?

Avery Smith  

Kia ora. I'm Dr. Avery Smith, and welcome to unsettling extremism, a podcast by a phenol Tati Kuta today, our guest is Joanna Kidman, Professor of Māori education at Victoria University of Wellington and director of He Whenua Taurikura. She has a long and esteemed career as a sociologist researching the implications of institutional and systemic racism on Māori communities, including her Marsden-funded project looking at the impact of the New Zealand Wars on Māori communities and our society as a whole. Joanna was recently selected as a fellow of the Royal Society for distinction in her research, and leadership in her field. Our conversation ranged from her background, to the ways her research looks at fractures in society, and what she has learned about peace. Joanna brings her sociological training and Māori worldviews to the fore, in extremism and counterterrorism research. I could have talked to Joanna for hours and even though I've known her for years, I still learned new things from this conversation. It's my pleasure to introduce you to Joanna.

Avery Smith

Let's talk about you. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where did you grow up? What were you like as a kid? All that kind of fun stuff.

Joanna  

So I belong to Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Toa Rangatira. So my whakapapa begins in the Waikato region and kind of moves all the way down to the tip of the bottom end of the North Island. I was born in Rotorua in grew up there we left when I was about seven or eight years old. I'm the child of a Māori father and a Pākehā mother. And that actually was a really good training for my later life as  a sociologist, growing up in 1960s. Right? It was a really interesting time to be in that space. So I'm 

Tainui, but we were taken in and looked after by the Ngāti Whakaue people. So they have a papakāinga in Ōhinemutu, which is on the banks of Lake Rotorua. So we were really heavily involved with our community. When I was a child, it was a really important part of my growing up that was a space where there was a really active Māori community. And, and a very important one for that area. So we spend a lot of time there. But we lived in a very Pākehā suburb. So it was an interesting way of learning about race relations in this country. So in the 1960s, there were huge divides between Māori and Pākehā, they still are. But as a child, when you first start seeing those  divides, you don't actually understand what's going on. So the way that I experienced those interesting situations as a child, we'd spend time at the marae so our family would be at the marae, we'd be engaging with the community there. We'd be at hui my, there's a small church at the besides marae it was an Anglican Church was that it was the parish of Reverend Manu Bennett, he married my parents, so we went to Sunday school there. So it was a really important part of that, that part of my life. We'd spend time there. And I would be engaging with the families with the other children there. And it was really interesting, because when we would leave the marae, we'd drive back to our suburb where we lived around the lake, the other side of the lake and it was kind of interesting to see how the behavior of my parents would start to shift. As we were going around the lake, I'd kind of we were, I'd leave as a Māori girl, but I'd arrive in our Pākehā suburb. It's like changing your clothes. boots, I'd arrived as a Pākehā girl. Because there were different ways we talked to each other in different ways. You perceive your parents that their mannerisms starting to change. And so by the time we arrived in our suburb where we lived, it was kind of like we'd gone from being Māori family to being a Pākehā family. And so as a child of Māori and Pākehā parents, I was very, like many who were in that same kind of space that I was, we became kind of each walkers between these different worlds. So you would walk in and out of Māori worlds, and then in and out of Pākehā worlds, and you started to see, even as a child, you would see how very, very different they were. So, you know, the Māori world is not one world, it's many. So there are tribal worlds within that. So you're in your one marae, and there would be a whole set of social and familial relationships. But then when you go to another marae, you know, if you're going around, there's Whakarewarewa you know just further around the lake, there'd be a whole lot of different social relations, and tribal relations, and iwi relations and hapu relations and whānau relations. So you know, is Māori, these incredibly complex social worlds, you learn to navigate this massive complexity. So you could you could present us in one way in one tribal space, but then you would start to present another way when you go into another area. And so you can sort of be many different people in the Māori world, depending on the, the matrix of social networks that you're immersed, and at the same at that time. Were the Pākehā worlds that I lived in. It was also incredibly complex, there is not one Pākehā world, there are many, and there were many in Rotorua in the 1960s. So, but it was a different kind of nexus of social relations. So the worlds that I lived in, in that Pākehā, suburb, there were a couple of Māori families. But it was mainly the wealthy to a small number of wealthy families who kind of ruled the roost. So you know, without having a language for it, when you're, you know, 2,3,4 or 5 years old, you can see that there are ways there are different ways that people are treated. So the poor families were treated very differently. And they went to many poor families in this particular suburb. So I didn't have a language for any of this. I didn't understand what was going on. But I knew that these were really complex worlds. For me, it was just these are adults, adulting. And this is what was normal for me. But I was really aware, as a child that you would see on the marae, the would be kuia, these women of huge authority, who, who were given massive respect when you're on the marae, but in the suburb where I live this Pākehā suburb, those same women would often be the cleaners, they'd be scrubbing the floors of the wealthy. And that was always really awkward. So when I would see these people out of place, and in the suburbs, it was where do I stand in relation to these people? So they were all always those kinds of complexities. And I think that was probably the very best kind of training, I could have had to become a sociologist. 

Avery Smith  

Oh my goodness. Absolutely. I was just thinking this you're such a sociologist in training when you're describing your childhood? Right! So you were in Rotorua, and then you came to Wellington. 

Joanna  

We came to Wellington after that, and that was just a whole other world again. So that was kind of like, you know, a world just kind of fell off its axis. So, in Rotorua, we were involved with the papakāinga around Ōhinemutu with the people of Ngāti Whakaue. And then we moved to the city. And all of those connections were just in an instant, they were just gone. So I was living in an almost entirely Pākehā world. And so, you know, my parents tried really, really hard to keep those connections alive. So we went to a Māori Club and the evenings, as they were called then, and this was sort of going into the early 70s. But they weren't, they weren’t Te Arawa and they weren't Tainui. So, you know, we'd be left with these were the forerunner of kapa haka groups, and so we'd be learning waiata and I'd be singing, but I'd be singing the word words that I had learnt back in the marae back in Rotorua, and they use different words for the same songs. So it was always a kind of sense of being really out of place in that world. And you know, there were already these, these connections and these groups of people who, who were part of, of that environment, it was also coming to terms with I mean, Wellington was the big smoke for us. And I remember the very first time that I ever drove into Wellington when we moved here, and it was a really, really gray raining day. And typical Wellington, typical Wellington. And it was, it was a really cold, wet gray day, Wellington day, and it was a lunchtime, we were driving in with the people in the moving truck, and I looked onto the streets, and it was a public service place and I saw all of these gray people and black raincoats with the wind whipping around them. And the smell of the place was different so in Wellington in a southerly there is a salt tang to the air. And you know, in later life, you know, I love that it's, you know, you're alive when you're in Wellington, southerly, and you can smell the salt in the air and, and you know, you know that you're home, but back then, it smelt different from Rotorua. So I wrote her, it was the smell of that briny smell of the lake, it was the smell of the hot pools, which people think smell like farts, but you know, if you grow up in that space, you kind of stopped smelling that, but it's kind of the smell of home in some ways, which is really weird. So everything about it, and people moved at a different place, there was traffic, people didn't know each other. So all of those connections were kind of severed. And that, we were in a school, I went to a school that was primarily middle class Pākehā. And so there wasn't a place for a Māori girl from Rotorua, a Tainui Māori girl who had grown up in Rotorua to be Māori in the way that made sense to me in those spaces. So it was kind of easier to absorb into the Pākehā world of that time of 1970s. Urban, New Zealand, but it was also always accompanied with an intense cease sense of loss.

 Avery Smith  

Yeah, as you're talking, I'm just thinking about how your experience would mirror a lot of experiences Māori who have moved from, their home to the city for whatever, whatever reasons. But just as you were talking, I was just really thinking about that, and how impactful that would be and how difficult it would be to have to manage all of these different social relationships and trying to find your way in the world. So how did you become an academic? Because many of the people that I've spoken to, in this podcast, nobody that I've, that I've talked to, they said, Well, when I was a kid, I wanted to be a professor, you know, like, everybody had different goals,

 Joanna  

Who comes out of the womb saying I want to be a sociology. 

 Avery Smith  

Exactly, exactly! So that's what I'm curious, like, how did you end up doing this?

 Joanna  

So um, first and finally, to come to your university, which is true for a lot of Māori, it was kind of, and I think, you know, had we not moved to Wellington, that would have been something that possibly would never have happened if I'd stayed in Rotorua. I mean, times have changed now. But there were different lives that woman girls a woman had in that space. For me, my father was a teacher. So he had gone to teachers training college, and he had those aspirations for me. My mother also had these huge aspirations this, this daughter of mine is going to have this extraordinary life, she is going to have choices that weren't available to her. She was born in 1940s. So, you know, the choices that were open to her, as she was growing up, were always quite limited. And she always saw a world beyond that. So I think there was always the expectation that I was, I was the child that would make that difference. I would go to university I would have those choices. And so it was it was never, it was kind of a no brainer for me. That was what I was going to do. That was the track that I was on. That was the expectation, I didn't really have any other ideas about what I wanted to do. I knew that I didn't, you know, at that time, I'd gone to school out at Naenae where my father was a teacher. And that was a huge state housing area. And, you know, for many, for many girls, they left school quite early had babies quite early on. So it was just that was what I did. That was, you know, I went to university, and it was tough being first in whānau going to university that the first week I was there, I felt completely overwhelmed. And that went on for several years. After that, I didn't know what a tutorial was, I didn't know what a lecture was. I didn't know what the expectations were, I didn't understand that there were ways of reading a text at university, I didn't understand that there were ways of writing about texts or thinking about them, I didn't understand that there are ways of creating an argument. So for a lot of that time, I was running just to catch up. It was, it was a, I loved going to the lectures, I loved what I was hearing what I was learning, but I didn't have my people around me. So it was an intensely lonely experience. And I think, had it not been for some fairly intense family expectations, I probably would have dropped out at the end of that last year at the end of that first year. But then what happened at the end of my first year was that I got pregnant. And so you know, as a single mom, that was like, Okay, what am I going to do, talked to my family about it, and they, we all decided to give her I would stay on at university. And it was tough, I did take some time out, you know, while I was having my daughter, and when she was quite little, but there was a point at which, you know, I looked at her sleeping one day, and I thought, yeah, I need to go back, I need to go back to university. So I went back and, kind of fell in love again, with higher education. So that was, that was what took me back into into the space. And then I kind of did find my people because the lectures, I did education, and the reason that I did education was because the lectures were later in the day. And my parents could look after my baby, so that they were the only ones that were kind of available to me at that time that fitted on with my childcare because as a single parent, you know, I couldn't really afford childcare. So I started doing these courses and was suddenly surrounded by lecturers who kind of got me they took an interest in me, they were interested in my daughter, you know, she would come into university with me, and they would be sort of picking her up. And it was in some weird ways, it was kind of like, a Pākehā version of marae. Yeah they would pick her up, and they take around and talk to her and all of them were educators. So and had been teachers and had worked with children. So they were able to engage with her. And that never felt like being a single parent, which was hugely stigmatized, and that time, but also, it was a good space for us to be and they never made me feel ashamed about myself. And I think, as a group, this group of funny, funny lectures, these strange people who I would never have thought would be my people kind of came together as a collective in the department, and it was kind of like, we’re gonna get this woman through whatever happens. And so I got a lot of a lot of care and a lot of attention. By that time, they were more Māori coming into the university space, and they tended to go into the Social Sciences. That was where I discovered sociology, in the education space, so that was a really cool thing. And that was, in the end, I did find my people within the academy and had enormous support to carry through. At the end of my first degree, I thought, What am I going to do with my life? I've done my degree, I've satisfied my parents' expectations. What do I do, why don't I go and do teacher training? And I did apply and I did get in and then one of my lecturers who, who was a real mentor of mine, he passed away last year. He came to me said, Joanna, you've got another life outside of the classroom, maybe the classroom that you're here to towards as a university classroom stay on to a postgraduate degree. And here I am. I think too you know, what's really important is that I was at university at a particular time my first year was at university was 1981. Yeah, that was the year of the Springbok tour, and everything, everything changed. So suddenly, I was, so there were Māori around, and there was protest, and there was huge activity in the university. So I became part of that the fabric of resistance that was that was starting to burn at that time. So there was there was the anti-apartheid movement that was strong here. So we're, I was marching on the streets, and my dad was with me as well, he was there he had the sh** kicked out of them. By the red squad. We were there at the Battle of Molesworth Street, which is just across the road from where we're speaking. So we saw the state in all its ugliness at that time. Also, at that time, there was a rising tide of anger that had been going on for a very long time with Māori. And so there was a real activism around that time for Māori who were becoming university educated. So in the 70s, they'd been Ngā Tamatoa. We were the next University generation on from that, and we were starting to look around us and say, look, the things that have been happening to us, there's a history and a story that we need to understand. And we need to tell about this. So, you know, I think there were all of these many things that were happening at this particular time, there was huge support for me to get through. But there was also it was a time of resistance, it was a time of protest, it was a time of trying out all sorts of new ideas. And hovering over all of us at that time was growing divisions between the state and the people.

 Avery Smith  

You've had a good career as an academic, I would say, and we're not going to get into all the different things that you've done, because you've done quite a lot in your career. And a lot that, you should be proud of. So you studied a lot of different topics, from education to Māori youth, to the politics of indigeneity to more recently, doing research around the New Zealand Wars. So how would you describe yourself as a scholar?

 Joanna  

Do you mean in terms of my discipline? Or in terms of my search platform? Or what do you mean,

 Avery Smith  

yYou know, you've done all of these different things in the research space. But again, I'm kind of thinking around, like, what is the thing that connects all of the research that you've done, there's a through line that goes through it, that's particularly Joanna as a scholar.

 Joanna  

You know, I think if you're Māori in academia, or any Indigenous person or any person of color, it's actually quite hard to have a single platform for your research because you're pulled in so many different directions. So you kind of have to do a bit of everything. But I guess what the joining threads for me in terms of my scholarship and in terms of who I think about, or who I what I think about myself as an academic and as a scholar, and as a researcher, is that I am a sociologist, and what ties all of the threads together for me is going back to that little girl who was leaving the marae, and driving around the lake in Rotorua and trying to understand that incredibly nuanced and fractured social relations of the world that we live in here and Aotearoa and I think the things that really get me excited and interested and get me up in the morning and into the office is looking at the broken pieces of the world that we live in. That the world that I live in as a Māori woman, you know, with Pākehā whakapapa, what did those fractures look like? How do we understand them? What is where are the pain points? How do we understand the stories that we're carrying with us that some in some cases, we don't even know that we're carrying those stories? So the work that I did on the New Zealand Wars there were massive silences around those histories. You know, people can say colonization and it's just a word, but it's a word that opens out a whole universe of stories. Some of those stories are stories of anguish and pain. Some of them are stories of defiance and resistance. Some of them are stories of joy. Some of them are stories we're, that teach us how to live in the world now. So I think it's probably that. I think my research has probably always circled around the really sh****** bits of humanity. I suppose in a lot of ways, I'm drawn to dark places. My research is probably around that really, bits of humanity I like. But I do want to use those understandings in that scholarship, to apply it to those broken pieces so that we can understand them and then find ways of looking for repair. And that could be, you know, within tribe within the Māori world, tribally, finding the moments of repair for us finding the moments where we can let go of their held breath, open up the silences, and find ways of connecting, some of that is within the Pākehā world. And some of it is between all of those multiple worlds. So I mean, that those are kind of big words for some of the small small moments of the life of the sociologists, but I think it begins with, with the fractures and the darkness, and it moves forward. Always seeking the light, really.

Avery Smith  

Oh, my gosh, yeah. That's, that's wonderful. Joanna, I think that leads really well into the next question that I had for you, which is, you know, how what have you learned in your research, maybe around New Zealand history of maybe in around your previous research that you've done, that has been useful in your role here as director at He Whenua Taurikura, and so I'm thinking about what you were just saying about looking for the light in those dark places. And I can really see that reflected in the way that you lead the centre. But I really, I just want to hear more about your take on that.

Joanna  

One of the things that we saw in the 2019 Christchurch attacks on the masks was, it was brought right up in our faces, that we're living in this very broken world. And I think for a lot of New Zealanders, that was the first time that they'd seen it, but for others, they've been living in those spaces for a long time. And as human beings, I think we do bend towards the light, you know, we want the light, you know, the darkness the hate the ugliness when it becomes a way of life, it's really toxic. So how do we move beyond that? In 2019, March 2019, you know, we saw people in Hagley Park, you know, grieving we saw, we saw public, outpourings of emotion. And then, you know, for a lot of people, you know, that deep grief was genuine, it was there was horror, there was shock, there was pain, but then for a lot of people they moved on, but there were still people who are living in that space, and they continue to live in that space. And I think that we hadn't really come to terms with that, as a society for, you know, when I began my research on racism many years ago, even just use that, you know, the R word racism, even just using that word, people would kind of lose their minds. They would get offended, they get defensive. It's like, what do you mean, we've got the best race relations in the world, they still do. And they still do still use it. Let me just tell you, I still do. So I think there was alongside that public outpouring of grief and rage about what happened. There was a creeping unease that people became aware that there were these fractures but didn't quite know what to do with them. So it became easier to move on. But to move on, keeping in mind that there are families and communities that don't get to move on from what happened that 51 people were killed in their place of prayer. And as a society, we didn't have a way of dealing with it. So coming into He Whenua Taurikura into this role, one of the things that was put to me at the outset was, you know, we've tried the old solutions, but they haven't worked. So what are the new solutions? We need new people to come into the space to tell the stories of this nation, difficult and uncomfortable as they are. But we need to do that. And maybe we need to look beyond the usual people who speak about security and terrorism and violent extremism. Maybe we actually need to go to people who are from those communities that have experienced great harm. And so coming into this role, I was really determined that I was going to bring people into the space. And we are a research centre, so that's bringing scholars academics into the space, who would have a really high level of scholarship, but bringing in perspectives from their own communities that are often missed out in the broader sweep of talking about terrorism, or violent extremism or hate or bigotry. So we have placed those communities voices at the centre of what we do and how we prioritize the space that we're in. And that's really challenging for people who have worked in the more traditional academic research spaces, which tend to be very much around Pākehā voices speaking about what is happening to us, rather than us hip, talking about what is happening, and applying a really high level of scholarship to it. We've also been really fortunate that we have independent researchers and community-based researchers who are able to come into the space and speak to us. So I think that's probably what I'm bringing into the role with me. I think, importantly, there are silences in, you know, in the research that I've done on the New Zealand Wars, people just didn't talk about the stuff, it was too difficult. We don't talk about racism, we don't talk about hate, because it just makes people upset. So I was determined that we would talk about those things that we would put them on the table. But we don't end there we are always looking towards the light. Where do we? Where do we if we've been towards the light? Where do we find hope? Where do we find spaces for dialogue and for repair? And in those places, some places there is no space for repair, that there's just not a willingness for that to happen. So how do we exist in those spaces, and maintain our humanity and our dignity within them?

 Avery Smith  

Oh, 100%. And you must be reading my mind because my next question was about silences. So one of the three lines that I have seen through your work is your focus on silences and listening for both what is being said, and what remains unspoken. What have you found is the value of that in, in your research?

 Joanna  

You know, living in a settler state, you're living with these constant silences. And if I can go back to that child at the marae, who was then going back into a Pākehā suburb where we lived. A lot of the ways that we found to live together and not kill each other was by maintaining a silence. So there's kind of a code of silence that kind of omerta that goes that if we're going to survive together, we won't talk about the hard stuff. And that this kind of wishful thinking and that the anger, the violence, the pain will just simply go away. The problem is that that doesn't work too well. So you know, if you have unresolved injustice, or if the violence goes from being overt, to ideological or even at a level lower than that, people still feel the fractures. So I think silences, this has been an absolutely central part of my scholarship, it's finding the spaces between the words and things that people don't talk about. And sometimes there are really good reasons for maintaining silence sometimes. So when I was speaking, to those from Māori communities that were really just decimated during the New Zealand Wars. There's a history of silence for some of those communities there, you know, the memories have been carried on. But in some, in some domains, there are silences that are kept because there's been shame. There's been a deep, deep sense of shame. We weren't really shamed for Tainui after the fall of Ōrākau in 1864, we were forced off our lands at gunpoint, losing our connections to the whenua. That was a source of shame, some of the things that happened. So if I can just go to that single battle. So one of the things that happened to those Māori who fought at Ōrākau There were a woman there in the pa on the day that the pa fell. There were things that happened to women that we don't want to talk about because the pain is too intense. The things happen to women on the battlefield. So there we go. Sometimes we have complicit silences because, you know, we need to keep the peace in one part of the world so that we can actually find solutions for other things. So there are always compromises and negotiation. So silence is this multi-layered thing. And, but when it's a silence that's imposed, when it’s a silence that we don't choose, that's when things get really, really gnarly. And so I'm driven to find those silences and expose them. And that does make me unpopular, because, you know, if you're talking about things that are uncomfortable or difficult or painful, that have been kind of covered over, then there is a defensiveness because people have to examine themselves. I think the attacks in 2019, that exposed a silence, a dangerous silence, it exposed, you know, there was a move to talk about the shooter as a lone wolf gunman. But in fact, this was a person who was enmeshed in a whole system, and ecology of hate. So it becomes incumbent on me, there are Muslim communities who have tried to break the silences around this. And they did try and get attention given before the attack took place. I feel that it's that I have a duty of repair towards those groups to ensure that we keep our eyes fixed on breaking those silences, and it is going to be really hard and difficult and messy and painful. But if we don't do it, then my fear is that it will happen again. And again. And again.

 Avery Smith  

Yeah, I understand that. I think it was really impactful when you were talking about finding the spaces between the words, I think that's what you said, it really makes me think about who we think of when we use the term like terrorist or whatever, or we use the term extremist. And I know a lot of your work as a sociologist, doesn't focus on individuals, as much as it focuses on systems, and perhaps even the state itself. And so I wondered if you could talk a little bit more about that.

Joanna  

You know the word terrorist, the word fight the term violent extremist, these are terms that are applied to individuals by the state. So the definitions tend to be generated by governments, this person is a terrorist. So the definitions of terrorist and violent extremists, they tend to be government-mandated ones. And that is really problematic in many ways, we do have to keep our eyes on those who are going to hurt us, we do need to keep our eyes on the non-state actors who will do harm. So that is the Christchurch shooter it is. In New Zealand, the Proud Boys have been listed as terrorists. So there are people whose ideas are circulating that are harmful and we do need to be aware of that. However, we also need to be aware of the problems that come with that. So for example, who the state designates as terrorists is really problematic in some contexts, we think about 2007, the police raids on Māori communities in the Ruatoki Valley. These were families, Māori families, people who were designated falsely by the state as terrorists, and they were terrorized in that context by the state. Also in New Zealand and you know, you've heard me talking about this before, the Dawn Raids in the 1970s with Pacific communities. The police were given the authority by the state to stop people on the street to enter their homes to demand their passports, their papers, their visas to prove that they have the right to be in this country. And that was even though most of the overseers and our total at time were actually from North America and Europe. But it was directed primarily at Pacific people. We need to remember Nelson Mandela was on US terrorist national watch list for many years up until 2007, 2008, something like that, as we're members of the Black Liberation movement like Angela Davis, so you have to be really careful when you're using this term, I do think that you need to think about who's making the definitions and how they're being applied because often they're being applied in, in kind of fairly, covertly ideological ways. 

Avery Smith  

Interesting, and studying war, the New Zealand Wars in particular, what have you learned about peace?

Joanna  

Wow, you know, it's really interesting, you know, going into Māori worlds, there's, there are really clear ideas about what peace is and it's not this one thing, it's many things piece can be a momentary compromise, that can be a pause in hostilities, so that you can take the bodies from the battlefield. That's not peace. That's kind of like ceasefire, but there are agreements, it's something which is constantly negotiated. And it takes time. So an enduring peace is something which is a matter of negotiation. It's just not an event. It's a structure. So you enter into that structure with those former combatants. And you're constantly having those negotiations about reparation and repairing those broken bits. So it's exhausting, peace is really exhausting. So it can be a short-term peace that can be a long-term peace. Sometimes it can take hundreds of years, for former combatants, iwi, to come to a place where they're willing to negotiate those moments, and each peace is different. It's very contextualized. It fits the situation that it's in, so peace is many, many things. You can't have peace without conflict though conflict is, if there is no conflict if it's just peace then all you've got is this kind of mind-numbing consensus, that can be extraordinarily painful. So part of the negotiations around peace is how you manage conflict, and there's a whole tikanga for that in Māori world. So when you go on to a marae, and you know, you have people, you hear some of the most robust discussions taking place, I mean, some of them just some brutal.  Again, you know, I go back to that Ngāti Whakaue, marae and, you know, as a very small child, and just hearing the debates and, but also feeling safe, because I knew that they were happening within a structure. So I knew that no matter how angry the voices got, there was a kind of like a code of conduct sure that you're going to obey. So you might not resolve it, then you might not resolve it next week, or next month or next year. You might not resolve it for 10,50, 100 years. But you're working on that relationship, and you're not discounting conflict. I think this is really hard for a lot of people, you know, in, and I've told you this story before, but in my classes at the university, when I'm talking about these sorts of issues, the first thing, one of the things that I ask, and these are in quite large classes, I asked my students to just take a moment, I ask them to close their eyes. And imagine conflict, what does conflict look like? And I get them to fit what is common, can you imagine if you've got a vision in your head of what conflict looks like. And so a lot of them are very sweet, they will close their eyes. And you can see them thinking it through. And then you can see them nodding, because we were surrounded by images of conflict, turn on the news. And we see we see wars, we see people killing each other go to film we can see, there are huge, huge visuals for conflict. So we're surrounded, we're immersed in the imagery of conflict where we're aware of the fractures that are around us. So students can really easily you know, they imagine soldiers killing people, or, you know, they've got different views of what that looks like. And so then I say, Okay, so you've got an image of that. Now close your eyes again, imagine what does peace look like? And that's when things go haywire in the class, because I look at the students, I'm watching them. And they just simply can't imagine what peace looks like. Because it's such a kind of abstract notion. So I mean, you know, best that they can come up with, well, it's, you know, the sun's shining on my face, and I feel a sense of peace, and that is peace. But it's really hard to imagine what a peaceful society looks like. So that's where I do retreat back into to te ao Māori, because those are the discussions that take place about what peace looks like, between former combatants. And if you're wanting to hold the peace, and whether it will be a short-term peace, so that people can go out and grow the crops and harvest them. And then they'll go back to a time of ill will and fighting, or if it's going to be a more lasting relationship. So peace, the relationships that we have, with peace, which also incorporate those times of frustration and anger and conflict. It's a really multi-layered thing and we don't have a language as a society for talking about those things.

 Avery Smith  

It's true, it's true. And I think, as you were talking, I was kind of struck by, you know, the image of peace and the idea of peace being this, you know, Let's all hold hands and skip through the daffodils. You know 

 Joanna  

Unicorns, rainbows, glitter.

 Avery Smith  

And how absolutely unrealistic that is, like, we have this idea of peace that is completely unattainable.

 Joanna  

And often that's kind of, you know, when people do describe their notions of peace, that sounds like a totalitarian state.

 Avery Smith  

Yeah, yeah. And so for me, it was really useful to think about the relationship between like, you're saying peace and conflict because you need both. You know, they have to exist together. And it's how do you manage? How do you manage both? Because peace isn't like the saccharin, sugar, you know, dream? There are hard parts to it. There are there are sacrifices that have to be made. There are difficult conversations that need to be had. It's not all puppy dogs, you know. And so I think that that's really what you're talking about right now is that language that we currently don't have and in I would say, Pākehā, you know, Western societies around what peace is what are how do we engage each other in peace? Because we talk about engaging people in war, but we don't talk about engaging people in peace? And how do we all kind of like work together for that? So it's, yeah, I just brought up a few a few questions and observations on my part. 

Obviously, I work with you here at He Whenua Taurikura and I have a really strong understanding of what we do, and sort of how we work together. And I just want you, as our director, to talk about what you think our center's biggest contribution to this counterterrorism space in understanding extremism. In Aotearoa is?

 Joanna  

I think, you know, one of the things I feel proudest of, is when we came into the space in when the center was set up a couple of years ago, in 2022, the space was limited, the academic space, the research space was really limited. It was small. There wasn't a huge amount of research going on in terms of extremism here in Aotearoa. And so we had to build, we've got to build capacity, we have to build new research spaces, and we need new voices from different disciplines coming in. Disciplines can get tired and old sociology can get tired and old, we've got the same voices, you know, talking about us all the time. So we have to constantly reinvent the research space, the intellectual space, we have to act as critics and conscience. So one of the things that I feel excited about is that we have prioritized creating spaces for new scholars to come in. So that's been through scholarships that's been through the support that we've given to postgraduate students who are coming in with new ideas. So they looking at the standard scholarship and they becoming really aware of that, and bringing in new understandings from the communities from different disciplines. And they're putting together knowledge and all sorts of new ways. Now, that sort of thing always takes years to come to fruition. But we already have attached to the centre, exciting emerging scholars who are saying new things, things I haven't heard. So you know, they're combining their understanding of terrorist studies with things like for example, sociology or areas of the social sciences. And they're saying stuff that I would never have dreamed of, because they are putting these new, new kinds of knowledge worlds together. And I think that's a huge legacy. I think the other thing that has been exciting has been bringing together Research Associates. So these are people at different levels of the academic world, you know, from professors, distinguished professors, through to very early career researchers again, from a range of disciplines, so they're not tied to the same disciplinary frameworks that they're kind of breaking out of those. And there's a lot of mentoring that's going on. So I think that's probably the biggest contribution that we will make. And in the long term, it's not going to happen immediately. We need to provide time and space  for those new ideas to take hold. And I think that's the legacy that we'll leave behind. But I think already, what we're seeing is these scholars coming forward, you know, the students that the more established academics coming forward, and asking questions that haven't quite been asked in that way before. So they're shedding new light. And how do I know this is working? Because people are getting defensive. And so you know, when we hear them asking those questions, we see a kind of anger directed towards them for even daring to ask, because they're making people feel uncomfortable, not intentionally, it's just that they're asking questions that haven't been in the space in that way before and we see. We see that defensiveness coming from all over the place. Sure. That's really uncomfortable. We don't want to make people feel uncomfortable. But I think it's important that we do because unless we're willing to own the hard bits then we're going to see another Christchurch. Yeah. And it might not be in a mosque, it might be a synagogue or a marae or a kura or whatever. So I think I think what the center is doing is disrupting it's perhaps transgress. So intellectually a little bit, but creating new spaces to talk about these really painful, hard, ugly, difficult, messy issues.

 Avery Smith  

Just my own two cents, do you mind me adding my own little thing? 

 Joanna
Go!

 Avery Smith

The thing that that I am most proud about, of the center that we work at, that you lead, so in the book decolonizing methodologies by, by Linda Smith, you know, she talks about research being a dirty word in a lot of indigenous communities and communities of color, because I feel the same way, as a Black American. For so long. minoritized communities have had research done on them to try to figure out what's wrong with these people? Right? Why are they not like XYZ? Why are they not, you know why are they not acting like the white standard? Right, the Pacquiao standard. And the thing that I appreciate most about this, and probably the thing that's most, in my mind, the most disruptive to this discipline, is that we are not researching on people we are researching with people, we are asking them to bring themselves into this research space, to take their lived experience, and use that to help inform our understandings of terrorism, extremism, hate missing mis/disinformation, social cohesion, all of the myriad of things that we are charged with, right? And so to me, that feels really powerful and really respectful in this way that it hasn't. A lot of this research hasn't been in the past. And I know that maybe some people don't like that. And that's okay. They don't have to like it. But I do think it, it makes you think about power in this sort of way. Like, who has the power to decide what's going to be researched? And who's going to research it? And what questions to ask, right? And we want to give that power to the communities who are impacted by these things. And other people just want to be in charge of asking those questions in their own way.

 Joanna  

Yeah, exactly. Ka pai.

 Avery Smith  

So what can we all do to push back against the current tide of extremism and populism that we're seeing now in Aotearoa? 

 Joanna  

So to answer that question, let me go back to 1864. And again, Battle of Ōrākau. You know, at that time, New Zealand had one of the biggest standing armies outside of India. And what you saw, at that time was a massive onslaught against small Māori communities who were defending their lands and their ways of life. And from that battle, which is where some of my tīpuna fell, there was one thing but that goes with me. So this is quite a personal response. When the British called on Māori to surrender one of our rangatira stepped forward , Rewi Maniapoto, and he spoke back to the British and he said ‘E hoa, ka whawhai tonu mātou, Āke! Āke! Āke!’ – ‘My friend, we will fight on forever, forever and forever!’. And so we have, and so whenever I go back to that battlefield, I feel all the feels I feel the grief, I feel the anguish, the pain, the despair. But I also come away from that, you know, my tīpuna come really close to me at those moments when I'm on that battlefield, but I also come away feeling strong and defiant. Because we were given this legacy to fight on forever and ever and ever. So there is ugliness and injustice and horror in what we see around us at the moment we see a surging populism we see surging hatred, not just here, in Aotearoa, but we see it around the world and we see people doing ugly mean vile things to each other. And so this is when I go into my Tainui  self and I say ka whawhai tonu mātou, Āke! Āke! Āke! We will fight on forever. That's what took me into sociology. That's what keeps me coming into work each day, we will fight on and we will bend towards the light.

 Avery Smith  

There is no better way to end this interview. I mean, really, that says it all. That really does say it all. Thank you so much, Joanna, for coming and talking with us today. 

 Joanna

You’re welcome.

 Avery Smith

I really appreciate it. 

Thanks for listening to Unsettling Extremism. Joanna left us with a mic drop moment there at the end, but so much of what she said was valuable. Following Joanna's lead, He Whenau Taurikura will continue to diversify the field of Counterterrorism, and use research as a way of working with communities that are impacted by extremism and terrorism. As Joanna so beautifully said, we will not look away from the fractures as we bend towards the light. Please share this podcast with your community. Like and subscribe to Unsettling Extremism on your preferred podcast platform so you never miss an episode.