Alice Te Punga Somerville.
With a PhD in English from Cornell University, Alice Te Punga Somerville (Te Āti Awa, Taranaki) has taught at universities in New Zealand, Australia and America. Currently teaching at The University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Te Punga Somerville's first poetry collection, Always Italicise – How to Write While Colonised, will be released on September 8 (AUP) and this Friday, August 26, marks National Poetry Day.
Tribally, I'm from the area known as Wellington. I was born there and started school there but when I was five and a half we moved to Auckland. Every year we'd talk about when we'd move back to Wellington, until eventually I realised we probably weren't going back.
Dad worked for Kodak and Mum was a teacher who went through high school when Māori girls were encouraged to be nurses or teachers. Because she didn't like blood, Mum chose teaching. She came from a long line of educators, and I ended up joining the whānau business.
I had a lot of privilege at Glendowie College because I look very white, which meant I got away with things my browner friends did not get away with. By seventh form I was one of only two Māori left, as everyone else was weeded out. Since I've learned more about education, I understand the power structures that were working there for that to happen.
To offer some perspective – Mum and Dad owned their own home. They had a steady income and even though money was sometimes tight, there was security for me and my older sister. There were also many university graduates on my Māori side. My granddad had a Masters and two of his brothers had PhDs, one in veterinary science and the other in geology, so although I didn't particularly like school, my whānau expected me to go to university.
It's important to make this clear, because in many ways Māori lives get reduced to types. I'm the third Dr Te Punga not the first, but there are still ways in which Māori are made to feel like outsiders at university. Every Māori student will have anecdotes of racism. Assumptions are often made that all brown university students are first in the family, which is not true for many of us. I have had to both assimilate and rail against that system.
I didn't enjoy English at school. The only reason I did it at university was because my sister had done English, so I didn't have to buy the books. Being ahead of me, my sister helped carve my university pathway. I'd originally signed up for law school, because when I was starting my degree that's what smart Māori girls who weren't doing medicine did. Here's how you can serve your broken people. But Witi Ihimaera - my New Zealand Literature tutor - pointed out that we have a lot of lawyers, and what we really needed was more Māori literary scholars. That first semester at Auckland University changed my life.
I signed up for the all-Māori tutorial for NZ Lit, and all the students happened to be women. I learned so much that semester about being Māori, and about being a Māori woman.
Sometimes Pākehā students would say it was a real shame not to hear our viewpoint but it's not for Māori and Pacific students to teach their peers. Not having to explain ourselves was liberating and conversations could go to different places. It wasn't just about comfort either, we got to be smarter with each other, and not hold back. My first teaching job was at Victoria, and one of the first things I did there was start Māori and Pacific tutorials because I knew what they'd meant for me.
When it came time to do my PhD, even though most PhD candidates in my area were encouraged to go to Oxford or Cambridge, I didn't want to go to the UK. What would conversations about Indigenous writing look like if the Crown wasn't the biggest elephant in the room? So I went to the States, to Cornell, on a Fulbright scholarship.
My husband tells everyone we met on Facebook. I'd just spent seven years teaching at Victoria, I was in Toronto for my sabbatical and had just accepted a job in Honolulu when I asked a friend if he had any single mates. My friend said yes, and set me up with Vula who's from Fiji. When Vula proposed I said "yes please" and we were married six months after we were introduced having met just three times in real life. By the time we got married in Fiji, we'd spent maybe two weeks in each other's company before starting our life together in Hawaii.
Vula comes from a public health background in Fiji, so marrying me kind of killed his career. But he's a very grounded secure person with a sense of value beyond where his next paycheque comes from. Most people didn't think we'd make a year but we're celebrating our tenth anniversary in October.
We had a long journey to parenthood which meant we learned not to assume we'd have a child. Our daughter Titilia is the only living result of many pregnancies so now I spend most of my free time with our daughter, because I thought being a mother was something that wouldn't happen for me. She's my hobby and I'm so very grateful to have her in my life.
I spend so much time writing and thinking about language, that one of the hardest parts of accepting a job in Canada was knowing I wouldn't be putting Titilia through kura. In spite of having two Indigenous languages available to her, she is functionally monolingual and already picking up a Canadian accent. I do worry that I am visiting on her the thing I wish hadn't been my experience. My generation came through a little early for kōhunga and kura. We really want Titilia to stand comfortably in both her Indigenous worlds, but it is complicated.
Most Indigenous academic women don't retire because they leave or die early. That might sound dramatic but it's the reality. I wrote the poem An Indigenous Woman Scholar's Prayer during a conference session honouring Tracey Banivanua-Mar and Teresia Teaiwa, two Indigenous woman scholars connected to Fiji who passed away in their 40s. For my own experience, after teaching in Hawaii and Sydney, I accepted a permanent position at Waikato University. But I only spent five years there, because working in an unsafe racist environment had a detrimental impact on my health and I lost the hearing in one ear due to a condition caused by stress. My daughter knows which side to hold my hand, so she's not talking into what she calls my "broken ear". My body made me face the things that my mind didn't want to admit to. Leaving that job was life-saving.
While I was at Waikato, I was one of six Māori academics who wrote a confidential letter to the Ministry of Education outlining our concerns about structural racism in the university sector. As a result, I faced serious HR consequences and now none of us who signed the letter works there.
I will never know how much yuck Vula had to absorb when my academic life dominated our family, especially those last few years at Waikato. That was so taxing, which is one of the reasons we're here at UBC in Canada, where I'm in English and Critical Indigenous Studies. But even though we're living this incredible life, and I do this wonderful job at this fabulous institution, as an Indigenous person having to make that sharp choice between the work I do and the place I can do it, there is a sense of exile. Even though it's an incredibly privileged exile, and Canada has its own problems, I'm here because of racism in New Zealand.
I know I might sound bitter but I'm saying these things because I know what's possible in the tertiary sector. I know what can happen when Indigenous people connect with the writing of their own communities. There's not a shortage of capacity. We have all the ingredients to be amazing, yet New Zealand universities are still overwhelmingly white and I am so sad when I think of the flow-on effects, of the people who fall off the back of the truck. That those with the skills and interest are not making it through to postgraduate study or to academic jobs. I still want to change the world, even while reckoning with the reality that the world doesn't always want to be changed.
'We really have something special going on here,' the academy co-founder says.