Erica McCreedy, host of the podcast Healing Our Identity.
Erica McCreedy, host of the podcast Healing Our Identity.
With the revitalisation of te reo Māori and mātauranga Māori, there are now many people on the journey of reconnecting to their roots and becoming more embedded in te ao Māori, after generations of disconnect due to colonisation.
A big part of that process of reclaiming someone’s Māori culture and identity, which isn’t always talked about, is the healing required to reconcile the parts of themselves that may not feel “enough”.
Erica McCreedy is the chief operating officer for an Australian indigenous land and sea management non-for-profit organisation and sits on the Australian Committee for International Union for Conservation of Nature (ACIUCN) board.
As a wāhine Māori (Ngati Raukawa, Aitanga-ā-Hauiti) growing up in Australia, Erica says she’s been on her own journey of reclaiming her cultural identity and knowledge.
In this episode of NZ Herald podcast The Māori in Me, host Myjanne Jensen speaks to McCreedy about her own podcast, Healing Our Identity, which is a platform where she shares her own experiences, as well interviews and shares the stories of other First Nations women from around the world.
McCreedy says it was important for her to talk about her feelings around not feeling Māori “enough” and in doing so, managed to process some of the mamae (pain) she felt around her identity.
“Healing Our Identity became my healing for myself and a deep vulnerability to speak to what my identity was and my thinking about what was Māori and what wasn’t,” McCreedy said.
“I thought, who was I asking to validate me in that and how much power was I handing over to someone else to tell me whether I was Māori enough?
“A lot of it was just an internal dialogue that was either backed up by casual comments from people throughout my life, like people commenting on my Australian accent meaning I must be an Australian now, etc.
“I came to realise that if I deny my being Māori, it wasn’t just an individual thing, I was denying my parents’ identity, my grandparents, our connection to our whenua and whakapapa.”
Dr Melissa Carey only learned she was Māori when she was 36.
Australian-born Dr Melissa Carey has also been on the journey of reclaiming her Māori identity, after finding out she was Māori at 36.
Carey was a registered nurse for 20 years before going into academia and it was during a work trip to Auckland some years ago that she first learned about her Māori whakapapa.
She said it was a life-changing moment because she’d always felt “different” and as result, decided to write about her experience in her autoethnographic PhD, A transformative journey of cultural recovery, Te Ao Māori.
“It’s kind of lonely in a sense because you miss out on all those things where you would normally be immersed with other people who understand you,” Carey said.
“As soon as I went back into te ao Māori and I walked in the room, it was like finally having people who understand you, who know you, who connect with you.
“And even though we looked different, when I look at my Māori friends and whānau, that’s how I feel.”
Listen to the full episode to hear more from Myjanne, Erica and Melissa.
The Māori in Me is a NZ Herald podcast, hosted and produced by Myjanne Jensen.
