Maori Youth in the Colonized City and Their Dreams for the Future

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 11
  In Roundtable Session: The Dreams, Possibilities, and Necessity of Indigenous Education: Research and Praxis 1

Abstract

Drawing on a study about indigenous young people’s hopes and fears about the future, we explore the experiences of urban Māori youth in two New Zealand cities. These young people are technically homeless, are disconnected from tribal homelands, and have fallen through the cracks of an increasingly remote and bureaucratized state. As such, they are radically affected by colonial narratives about indigeneity as well as a history of dispossession of Māori peoples from the land. Yet these young people refuse, defy, confront and ‘speak back’ to the ‘white’ spaces of the city— every day, staking a claim on the future, as Māori people, regardless of the structural inequalities they face; and, we ask what we can learn from them.

Author

• Joanna Kidman, Victoria University of Wellington