Tapu Misa: With multiple ethnic identities, it's getting a bit confusing

I don't want to get possessive about this. It's true that he has a matai title from his grandmother's village in Samoa. True, too, that we mentally ticked him as one of ours each time he won All Black selection.


No matter that the bloodline was mostly German, we felt sure that the talent was pure Manu Samoa.


So are we going to get precious about the fact that our boy, Christian Cullen, has suddenly invoked Ngai Tahu links through his grandfather? No, we're happy to share him with tangata whenua. Really.


Besides, with 10 Pacific Islanders in the All Black side, it doesn't do to be ungenerous about these things. Even if we can't help wondering which side of his whakapapa Cullen might have chosen if the International Rugby Board's eligibility rules didn't make it impossible for him to be available for Manu Samoa.


But let me not get into an unseemly tug of war. If Christian Cullen's "fingernail" claim to tangata whenua status is good enough for the New Zealand Maori rugby team, who am I to argue?


I've never bought the argument, anyway, that ethnicity could be measured in strict mathematical terms. Matt te Pou, the Maori coach, has it right when he observes that Cullen's ethnic multiplicity is just a sign of the times. Maori these days are just as likely to be part Fijian, Cook Island, Samoan, or, as is the usual case, Pakeha. "It's just the type of life we're in at the moment, he said.


In these days of multiple ethnic identities, it is getting harder to work out where one identity ends and the other begins. And this question of divided loyalties is a continual challenge for those with several cultural identities.


Not long ago, a friend described how one of her daughters had given a graduation speech in which she had paid long and passionate tribute to her Samoan culture. There was no mention of her Palagi mother's side at all - an oversight that left her more bemused than hurt.


And in a Listener editorial, Denis Welch wondered why so many New Zealanders prefer to be thought of as Maori, despite having a Pakeha parent.


He wrote that he was "sometimes startled by the extent to which people have downplayed, even invisibilised, their Pakeha side". He theorised that as full-blooded Pakeha didn't take pride in their past, you could hardly expect part-Pakeha to do so.


But guilt is only part of the answer. The Maori renaissance of the 1970s demanded a certain solidarity, not surprising after decades of the kind of assimilationist policies that made it difficult to be Maori in this country.


Affirming one's Maori bloodlines was a matter of survival. It wasn't possible then to be a staunch Maori and admit to being proud of your English forebears.


The documentary producer Rhonda Kite, who made Chinks, Coconuts and Currymunchers, recalled in an interview with Mana magazine that for half-castes like her there was never a sense of "being able to walk down the middle and just be myself".


After years of confusion, she has finally worked out how to reconcile her Te Aupouri whakapapa on her mother's side and her Ngati Rarana links through her London-born dad's side. "I am a New Zealander of Maori and English descent. I can't split myself in two. I've tried that and only ended up pretending I was one or the other. It was not good for me."


How we are defined isn't always up to us, of course. As one Samoan-Scot has lamented, it doesn't matter how much of a connection you might feel to your Scottish clan, if you look like a Pacific Islander chances are that's how you'll be seen by the mainstream.


Still, if the demographers have it right - and more than a third of us will have some Maori, Pacific or Asian whakapapa by 2021 - it's a safe bet he will be among a growing group of New Zealanders juggling various ethnic identities.


It's happening in my own family, in which only one in five of us has married another Samoan. The rest have blended with Kiwis of Tongan, Scottish, Welsh, Irish and English descent. We think, of course, this makes our children richer than New Zealanders with only one culture, more able to navigate those tricky cultural divides.


But we have found already that it can also be challenging. My sister was shocked a few years ago when her eldest, then still a preschooler who favoured his dad in looks, described the extended aiga as "those dark people". After a bit of intensive cultural education, he was introducing himself as a Samoan.


We are becoming much more comfortable with our multiplicity. But it's going to take a while before Pakeha parentage loses the invisibility that Denis Welch noted in his Listener article. That's the kind of invisibility that comes with being the dominant culture in this society.


It's why you will never see headlines that say: "Pakeha broadcasting heads to roll". Or "Pakeha dad sexually abuses then murders stepdaughters". And why offenders continue to be part-Maori rather than part-Pakeha. But that's another column.


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