Abstract
Land and place figure heavily in official narratives about nationhood. They act as a framing device for stories that speak to a territorialized sense of belonging and citizenship in the modern nation state. In post-settler societies where indigenous groups maintain unresolved claims over the land, however, the nation’s geographical imagination and memory of itself is underscored by deep-seated anxiety and unease. In these contexts, land is associated with “home” but also with dispossession and violence. Within these unsettled landscapes, the tribal geographies of indigenous young people and their everyday place-making activities are often positioned negatively by the state as a form of cultural disruption and resistance to official memory regimes.
Drawing on previous research, this chapter explores how indigenous young people are positioned within official national identity discourses and argues that in post-settler societies, historical constructions of land and childhood converge in ways that directly exclude them from many contemporary notions of citizenship. One of the responses that indigenous young people have to these exclusions from formal state narratives is to mobilize a range of cultural and geographical imaginaries located within their own readings of history and culture which provide a basis for territorialized memories and identities that sit outside dominant state discourses. This chapter concludes with the argument that indigenous Māori young people in New Zealand “speak back” to their exclusion from official state narratives by constructing their own cultural memories of place and belonging. These territorialized memories offer alternative spaces for the development of a sense of cultural belonging in the present.
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Kidman, J. (2016). Māori Young People, Nationhood, and Land. In: Nairn, K., Kraftl, P. (eds) Space, Place, and Environment. Geographies of Children and Young People, vol 3. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-044-5_24
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