The word tribe has an uncomfortable connotation for many indigenous people. British explorers used it to define the peoples they encountered. Jackson once wrote<\/a> there was a hierarchy of colour where \u201cwhite Europeans were ensconced in splendid isolation at the top and other colour-coded peoples were placed at lower levels in a kind of inferiority rainbow\u201d. The way British settlers named the parts of the rainbow is what matters here.
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Colonial settlers didn\u2019t call themselves a collection of tribes. This gives us some insight into what the word meant, and maybe still means, to descendants of those settlers. Like many westerners, the British tended to refer to themselves as a race or nation, often qualifying it with adjectives like civilised and superior. Early settlers to Aotearoa described M\u0101ori communities as \u201cbarbarous and savage tribes<\/a>\u201d or \u201cpetty tribes, who possess few political relations to each other, and are incompetent to act or even to deliberate in concert<\/a>\u201d. Settlers also used the word tribes to group animals<\/a>.<\/p>\n There has been a noticeable reduction in the use of the word tribe in New Zealand English, with the word iwi taking its place. I suspect Jackson, who died in 2022, would have enjoyed seeing that. I support it too, because all incremental usages of M\u0101ori in New Zealand English bring us closer to what both Ng\u0169g\u0129 wa Thiong\u2019o and Jackson wanted for us.<\/p>\n The use of the word tribe in anti-M\u0101ori contexts persists, often under the umbrella of a sister term, tribalism<\/a>. Some people capitalise on the fact different people treat words differently across languages to create misinformation, misunderstanding or play to understandable yet misguided fears. I\u2019ve never heard a M\u0101ori speaker critique the word iwi negatively in te reo M\u0101ori. We often ignore the fact that what happens in English is an English-only problem \u2013 even when words of M\u0101ori origin are concerned \u2013 and we do decolonisation a disservice by ignoring the reality of speakers who use the M\u0101ori language every day, instead demanding that English carries the only linguistic reality. I don\u2019t agree that iwi is a post-colonial concept. I also don\u2019t agree that iwi is a harmful word just because it appears next to tribe in the dictionary \u2013 that is not decolonial thinking. Critiquing a M\u0101ori word for its relationship to an English one means privileging English to the detriment of M\u0101ori. Decolonial thinking, rightly, doesn\u2019t allow for that.<\/p>\n Many people \u2013 even those adept in decolonisation and decolonial thinking \u2013 won\u2019t care about the use of the word tribe at all. Some of us try not to spend too much time thinking about coloniser tools \u2013\u00a0 if they\u2019re occupying our minds too much, they\u2019re still winning. If I hear the word tribe, I don\u2019t cast judgement on the speaker at that point. I reserve that for when I ascertain the quality of the thought and the intent behind it. If the thought process is bigoted, that is when I\u2019ll consider the word problematic.
The only example<\/a> I\u2019ve seen of a settler referring to themselves as being part of a tribe was when the word was used to complain that M\u0101ori were thinking of the settlers as an equal tribe and not a race to revere: \u201cWe are now in the position of an uncordial and envied tribe amongst them, instead of being regarded, as at first, an essentially different and superior race,\u201d read a letter to the editor of the Nelson Examiner in 1845.<\/p>\n
Tribalism is one of those, but the best example is the word P\u0101keh\u0101. I recently used the word P\u0101keh\u0101 on social media and received a response from someone who took issue with my use of it, because it offended them. They referred to themselves as \u201cTangata Tiriti\u201d. Despite the obvious fail in allyship, this illustrates how the word P\u0101keh\u0101 is plagued with debunked negative connotations<\/a> in English. In te reo M\u0101ori, however, it\u2019s a pedestrian word.<\/p>\n
But some M\u0101ori don\u2019t like the word iwi<\/a>, believing it to have similar connotations to the word tribe. For them, they attach it to what both Ng\u0169g\u0129 wa Thiong\u2019o and Jackson have raised about the idea of a tribe. I understand this, because some believe we didn\u2019t coordinate ourselves by iwi in pre-colonial M\u0101ori society, as much as we grouped ourselves by hap\u016b. So, for them, iwi and tribe go hand-in-hand.<\/p>\n
My iwi are my bones \u2013 the ones I share DNA with. The Anglosphere will likely continue to raise pop-culture pushes to find your tribe and that will annoy those of us involved in decolonisation because of the word\u2019s harmful history. It won\u2019t change the fact, though, that I\u2019m already found. Ar\u0101, kei t\u014dku iwi, kei Ng\u0101 P\u014dtiki a Tamapahore.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It might sound harmless, but for many indigenous people the term \u2018tribe\u2019 carries a colonial history of hierarchy…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":320903,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[26380,492,102387,111,43,139,69,2114,173480,26379,22319],"class_list":["post-320902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-atea","tag-comments-enabled","tag-linguistics","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-opinion","tag-socio-linguistics","tag-te-wiki-o-te-reo-maori","tag-te-reo-maori"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=320902"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320902\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/320903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=320902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=320902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=320902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}