Going Home? A Question of Paakehaa Belonging
On a recent trip to Europe I was excited to be able to visit three places where my ancestors had lived. First, in the northwest of England we spent time in Cumberland, visiting Cockermouth and braving the rain and blistering wind to search through the Maryport cemetery for signs of my grandmother’s mother’s family (despite appearing on cemetery records our search came up short). A few days later, finding ourselves near Norwich we spent the morning in Castleacre and explored the church where my grandmother’s father’s ancestors would have worshipped and been baptised and married. Finally, we travelled by ferry to the Netherlands and landed in the Hook of Holland where my grandfather grew up. My mother’s cousins met us off the ferry and we spent the day seeing the land where my family lived for generations upon generations before my grandfather left in 1952.
Parish Church of St James the Great in Castleacre
Until recently, it was common among European New Zealanders to refer to trips to Europe as “going home.” This habit persisted into the later part of the twentieth century despite the “returning” New Zealanders commonly having lived in Aotearoa for generations and having little or no connection to or knowledge of their supposed homeland. While this sense of return may no longer be commonly referred to with homegoing language, the persistence of the European OE in Pākehā culture suggests that the drive to return to one’s ancestral land still holds some strength.
Perhaps unusually, my journey “home” was marked by significant knowledge of my ancestral connections to those lands. Rather than a vague sense of European heritage, my own genealogical research gave a specificity to the return: these were the exact places where my ancestors lived and from where they chose to emigrate to Aotearoa.
I meditated on this sense of “home” as we travelled around the UK and the Netherlands. While Cumberland, Norfolk, and Holland seem so foreign to me, it is not that many generations ago that these lands were the only familiar lands for my ancestors. And, with people far less likely to move great distances historically, these lands were likely the homes of my ancestors for vast swathes of human history. Indeed, it seems like an extremely unlikely and strange twist of history that I was raised on land so far from my ancestral home, the product of at least thirteen separate immigrant journeys over the course of 110 years (from 1842 to 1952). All of this could also only occur within the political context of a European colonisation of Aotearoa which opened the door for a new life far from “home” at the expense of another’s home.
“The more I sit with these reflections the more profound is my feeling of homelessness.”
As I walked these far away lands and dreamed about my ancestors’ lives, I was not, however, struck by a feeling of belonging. Instead, the more I sit with these reflections the more profound is my feeling of homelessness. There were moments of connection that stuck out to me like how the wind at the coastal cemetery in Maryport reminded me of the windswept beach in Castlecliff, Whanganui, where my grandmother spent her childhood, causing me to wonder if they, too, felt that connection and if Whanganui felt homely to them. More common, however, was a feeling of distance and wonder at how radically different my life in Aotearoa is to the lives of my ancestors in Europe.
Questions of Pākehā (un)belonging are well documented and receive significant academic attention. Avril Bell calls these feelings of unbelonging an “ontological unease.” Memoirs like that of Alison Jones’s This Pākehā Life highlight the potential “unsettledness” of Pākehā belonging in spite of Pākehā existence in Aotearoa initially being as foreign settlers. I won’t rehash these discussions here more than to say that I was shocked by how personally I felt this unease and confusion about belonging.
The questions of home that my travel experiences raised bring me to a theological question: what belonging should Christians expect in the world? In the evangelical context which I grew up in, it was common to talk about being citizens of another kingdom, or to say that we were “in the world and not of it.” These commitments to a form of Christian homelessness are now concerning to me due to the sense of escapism that they suggest. Implicitly, although sometimes explicitly too, they convey to Christians the idea that we have no responsibility for what happens in this world because it is not truly ours—we’ll be heading out soon so it doesn’t matter if we make a mess.
I wonder if there is a similar concern to be raised here about Pākehā unbelonging. Pākehā continue to hold significant political power in Aotearoa, both in terms of individuals in parliament or private industry leadership as well as by population in the sense of democratic power. Without a feeling of belonging or commitment to this whenua as “home,” what responsibility is there to this land? Is there a risk, like with the Christian belief of otherworldly citizenship, that decisions might be made with the knowledge that there is a backup “home” that Pākehā can return to if all else fails?
“As those passing through another’s home there is a higher duty to care for and acknowledge those whose home we are in.”
At the same time, I am torn by the question of whether there is some truth to be grasped in these theological commitments, although this must be done with care to avoid the dangers of an escapist eschatology. From a positive perspective, the claim of being in the world but not of it conveys a sense of a higher responsibility to love and serve the world in which we are placed. There is a tentative offering I wish to make here to Pākehā Christians to recognise our place in Aotearoa in a similar way: that we are in this whenua but not of it. Our responsibility to the land which homes us is not diminished by the existence of an additional, ancestral home elsewhere. On the contrary, as those passing through another’s home there is a higher duty to care for and acknowledge those whose home we are in.
My own questions of belonging are, in some ways, far from resolved. I did not feel the rush of “home” in the UK or the Netherlands as others I know have. And I certainly do not feel cultural unbelonging in the Pākehā society of Aotearoa as so many do. However, coming face to face with the lands where my family lived for generations, my understanding of “home” is becoming unsettled.
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Jaimee van Gemerden is editor at Metanoia.
