Bread and Breath: Two Reflections on the Ethics of (Doing) History

Abstract

[...]I would need to move back to New Zealand, I would need to learn Maori and I would need to be prepared to put in a lot of unpaid work on the marae. [...]both models misrecognise something fundamental about the nature of our responsibility to the past-the responsibility that goes well beyond diligent record-keeping, well beyond the best reflection and analysis we are capable of and right towards the maintenance of 'the bonds of mutual life-giving' between the past and the present (Rose). [...]the past that sits on the tip of people's tongues ready to be turned into a story, the past cocooned in archives and photo albums ready to be seen, the past that gets a ritualised airing once a year at an anniversary or a commemoration ready to be paraded around, in other words, the kind of the past that is always ready to manifest itself as the past, is only the starting point for writing history. Is it possible to think of her grandmother as an archive-not as someone whose memories can be extracted by a skilful oral history interviewer-but as something more than that, as someone whose actions, inactions, words, silences, appearances and choices are all records worthy of examination? I think my grandmother Rawinia Queenie Agnes Buchanan's life (especially her obsessions with manners, appearances and secret property acquisition) can be read as evidence of the destructive power of assimilationist policies in New Zealand, of the power of blood quantum laws to shape identities, of the double-sided shame associated with being Maori or not being Maori enough (Buchanan, Parihaka Album, 203-234).