I am Maori. I am European.

Claimer: A story from one girl with one viewpoint and two heritages.

At 31 I am just starting to discover who I am. Destiny is a funny thing like that, it doesn’t all happen before you hit 25 years of age, regardless of what media screams out to us these days.

I have grown up here in New Zealand, as my parents did, and as my grandparents did. We are Kiwi through and through. I was raised in Flaxmere, a small suburb in Hawkes Bay, on the East Coast of the North Island of New Zealand. I visited a different river every summer Sunday and swam in the icy blue water with my family. I built sandcastles in the golden sand of the beautiful east coast beaches. I climbed Te Mata Peak with my friends and took in the breathtakingly green landscape many times.

My dad is an orchardist and my mum is a homemaker and we lived a good life, never wanting for anything that we needed. We took summer vacations all over the North Island, and every summer we would go on what we later nicknamed ‘Dadventures’ where Dad would decide we were going out on an adventure, and so we did! Up mountains, around lakes, on tramping hikes. And while it’s true that sometimes childhood can have that idyllic haze that comes from seeing it through a rearview mirror, mine was truly good.

I have always identified as European. I guess it was because we just looked that way, and so we had the privilege that comes with being white in New Zealand in the late 20th century. My mum used to mention that we had Maori ancestry, but it didn’t seem very important to me, being so young and unaware at the time. I remember hearing my mum say that my ‘little toe’ was Maori when describing our amount of claim to Maori ancestry. So I never thought much of it, and never identified myself as Maori.

My hometown Flaxmere is a very mixed-race community. For others living in bigger cities in New Zealand, it could be conceivable going through most of childhood and school without becoming really good friends with someone who looks different to you. But in Flaxmere, the Maoris and the Europeans and the Islanders all mix, there’s no choice, because it’s so small! Some of my very best childhood friends are and were strongly identified as Maori and/or Islander. I would go on sleepovers to my friends’ houses and never identified as ‘other’ only as ‘different’, always welcome, always accepted.

I don’t particularly remember being proud of my white heritage. But I’ve never thought of myself as not being Kiwi. That was until recently when our country starting to correct the narrative of what had happened to the Maori when the European soldiers first arrived. Europeans had for so long been heralded as saviours and life bringers, that to hear a different story was at first quite overwhelming. It’s the most unsettling feeling to find out that most aspects of your good life are a result of the mistreatment of a different people group. How can you correct something that has permeated your whole life and all the experiences and privileges you’ve ever been given, when it would wipe out your whole history and change the very fibre of who you are? It’s near impossible.

So when my husband and I decided we were going to Hungary on a long-term missions trip, I started thinking to myself that I may never return. All I can remember thinking is that I didn’t deserve to live here, on this land, when my people stole it from others to turn a profit. When my people slaughtered others to lay down the foundations for the government we now have. When my people have taken so much, and given so little. Why come back to where I’m not actually wanted? I started to think I may take a trip to London, and that when I landed I may feel at home on that foreign soil like I was wanted and like I belonged.

And then something incredible happened.

I was speaking to a beautiful Maori woman at a chance encounter in a cafe on the way to the beach in Raglan. I remember mentioning that I have European ancestry, but that one Maori woman married into our family 8 generations ago, but that it was too small to claim, and so I wasn’t going to claim something that was so small, so minimal, and dishonour the Maori culture in that way. She replied that the honour was not in stepping back, but in acknowledging the part that this woman had in my heritage, in my ancestry, no matter how small. It would be honourable to acknowledge her in me.

What a gift those few words were to me.

What a new awareness that has bought in how I see the world. What a great tension there is to hold both heritages in my hands, to acknowledge both and carry both. I am the wronged and I am the wrongdoer. I am the victim and I am the abuser. I am the missionary and the native. I am Maori and I am European.

I may still take that trip to London, and I’m sure I’ll love it, but it won’t be home. New Zealand will always be home. And my heritage here will always be both. I’m not sure how this journey of identity is going to pan out, or what I’m going to look like at the end. But I’m starting to think that the sooner we acknowledge the bothness in us all, the sooner we can move towards real peace, both inwardly and outwardly.