“Gather Your People”: Learning to Listen Intergenerationally in Settler-Indigenous Politics

• Author: Emily Beausoleil
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591720919392
• Date: 01 December 2020
• Published date: 01 December 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591720919392

Political Theory

2020, Vol. 48(6) 665 –691

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591720919392

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Article

“Gather Your People”:

Learning to Listen

Intergenerationally

in Settler-Indigenous

Politics

Emily Beausoleil1

Abstract

Decolonization requires critical attention to settler logics that reinforce

settler-colonialism, yet settler communities, as a rule, operate without a

collective sense of identity and history. This article, provoked by Māori

protocols of encounter, explores the necessity of developing a sense of

collective identity as precursor to meeting in settler-Indigenous politics.

It argues that the ability, desire, and experience of being unmarked as a social

group—apparent in paradigmatic approaches to engaging social difference

in settler communities—is at the heart of the particularity of settler group

identity and also stands at the heart of countless failures to meet in settler-

Indigenous politics. This essay thus seeks to mark the particular ground of

this unmarkedness of settler identity in Western philosophies that set being

unmarked as both ontology and ideal; the dominance of settler communities

in places of settlement; and the willful forgetting of the colonial histories

brought about by such dominance.

Keywords

settler-colonialism, liberal multiculturalism, settler identity, decolonization,

encounter

1Political Science and International Relations Programme, Victoria University of Wellington,

Wellington, New Zealand

Corresponding Author:

Emily Beausoleil, Political Science and International Relations Programme, Victoria University

of Wellington, PO Box 600, Wellington, 6140, New Zealand.

Email: emily.beausoleil@vuw.ac.nz

919392PTXXXX10.1177/0090591720919392Political TheoryBeausoleil

research-article2020

666 Political Theory 48(6)

The person who perceives . . . has historical density, he takes up a perceptual

tradition.

—Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Debates without a history are a dead end.

—Moana Jackson

Introduction

“Will you meet me?”

At some point in the midst of the five day workshop on tikanga Māori (Māori

protocols), as the group of civil servants sit inside the wharenui (meeting

house) hundreds of kilometres and a world apart from the seat of government,

workshop convenor Teina Moetara stands and steps across the floor to formally

separate himself from the group. He turns and asks this question. The civil

servants are bewildered. “Of course, Teina—we’re meeting you—we came all

this way, we are giving this time . . .”

He repeats the question. “Will you meet me?”

The participants scramble to understand. “What do you mean, Teina? We’re all

in the same room together,” “I’m doing what I can,” “I’ve been learning te reo

(Māori language). . . .” “I’ll try harder. . . .” A rise of heat, a tautness, an

uneasiness fills the room, as each participant looks earnestly, separately,

individually, towards him to meet the challenge.

He repeats the question, earnest gaze looking back at the group, one flat hand

cutting the air to the ground before him like a spear. “Will you meet me?”

A burgeoning field of listening studies helps to draw attention to the

long-neglected responsibilities of and resistances to listening among

dominant groups, such as settler communities. Yet without a sense of

what settlers should be listening to, this runs the risk shared by recogni-

tion, multiculturalism, and inclusion scholarship of forgetting the neces-

sity of attending not simply to those from disadvantaged positions but

also to the broader systems that produce such penalty and one’s own posi-

tion within them.

In light of working since 2018 with educators in Māori protocols of

encounter, and with their generous encouragement to share these stories in

this context, this article explores the implications for settler societies when it

is deemed necessary to develop a sense of collective identity as precursor to

meeting. In tikanga Māori, the individual is always engaged as part of a col-

lective—the karanga, sung to invite a visitor onto the grounds, acknowledges