For me, this was conversations about Te Tiriti o Waitangi, movies like ‘Once Were Warriors’ or ‘Boy’. Then there was seeing non-Māori, those privileged few, being welcomed into a Māori community to learn the language when I was ostracised for leaving my marae as a teenager to “learn the ways of the Pākehā.”
I asked: Why do we keep bringing these topics up? How are we helping by keeping us stuck in the past? Show me what I need to do to move forward? I found I quickly shut these conversations down or left.
Although you walked away from the conversation, your reaction bothers you…” why was I so triggered by that topic?”.
You have probably tried to explain it to yourself: anxiety, introversion, childhood stuff; bad luck. You have probably tried some of those explanations in therapy, or conversations, or in the long thinking hours of 3 am. And they fit, sort of, but none of them is quite right. Because none of them names the source.
That’s what we name today.
The morning, I saw the whakapapa-pond
In my business as a counsellor and wellness framework developer, I have read research on historical trauma, particularly the colonisation of New Zealand. I had worked with clients who carried exactly what I am about to describe. Then there was that morning, at 3 am — when I was sitting with something difficult, and I realised why I was so triggered:
- I was not being pulled back into the wound to my past; I was still in the pond, I had never been out of it. I just couldn’t see it because I was swimming in it – the whakapapa-pond.
- That morning, something shifted. Not resolved — shifted. Because I finally had a name for the pond. That name is Colonisation PTSD. This was the inception of The Whakapapa Of Colonisation.
What naming does
There is a principle in neuroscience — “name it to tame it” — that describes what happens in the brain when you put a feeling into words. When you name an emotional experience, the rational part of your brain activates, and the threat-detection part quietens. Not immediately, not completely — but measurably. The body, presented with a name, begins to understand that the threat is not happening right now. That it happened then. That it has a location in time and space and genealogy, and that changes something.
For Colonisation PTSD, the naming does something specific. It moves the wound from inside you — from “this is who I am, this is what is wrong with me” — to outside you, where it belongs: in a genealogy, in history, in a set of specific mechanisms that can be traced and named and ultimately interrupted.
The wound did not originate in you. Naming it accurately is not about blame. It is about precision. You cannot interrupt what you cannot see.
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Six things that were displaced — and can be named: 1. From land — Papatūānuku, the physical and spiritual foundation of identity 2. From language — te Reo Māori, the vessel through which identity transmits 3. From lineage — Whakapapa, the web of ancestors who tell you who you are 4. From knowledge — Mātauranga Māori, the healing and epistemological system 5. From community — Marae and hapū, deliberately dispersed by pepper-potting 6. From self — tuakiri, the identity that was replaced with internalised colonialism
Each of these displacements has a name. Each named displacement is a wound that can now be located — and located wounds can begin to heal. |
Why naming is so difficult
If naming heals, why do so many people spend decades without the name?
Because the wound installs its own prohibition against naming. The very whakamā that colonisation produced (the Taniwha of Shame) also makes claiming it feel illegitimate. “This happened a long time ago.” “Others have it worse.” “I’m not Māori enough to say this.” “I don’t want to be a victim.” “Can’t you people move on…we’re not responsible for what our ancestors did!”
Those thoughts feel like common sense. They are not. They are the colonial project’s most elegant achievement — the moment when the people who were wounded began to enforce the silence themselves. The doubt about your right to name your own inheritance is itself part of the wound.
Then there is grief on the other side of naming that is real and not small. When you name displacement from whakapapa, you grieve a connection that was taken before you were born. When you name the lost language, you mourn a tongue you never had. That grief is necessary. It is not the same as being stuck. It is the appropriate response to a real loss — and until the loss is named, it cannot be grieved, and we must grieve to move forward.
What the kaiārahi does with this
If you are a counsellor, kaumātua, social worker, doctor, teacher — anyone who sits with people carrying this weight — the most powerful thing you can often do is name it first.
Not as a lecture or political statement. As an act of witnessing: “I wonder if some of what you’re carrying has a genealogy that goes back further than your own experience?”
Watch what happens when those words land. The client who recognises themselves in that question has already begun the act of naming — and something in their nervous system has already begun, quietly, to change.
You do not have to fix the wound in that moment. You are just seeing it and saying so. That is enough to begin.
The first step in Te Ngāhau Kiri
The first step of my healing programme, Te Ngāhau Kiri, is called Te Ohorere — Awakening. The first instruction is “don’t edit your thoughts. Write your first impressions. Write what’s true”.
That instruction is a naming permission. It says: in this space, you are allowed to see what you see. You do not have to translate your experience for anyone else’s comfort. Or make it smaller to be acceptable or less. You can just write what is true.
For many people carrying Colonisation PTSD, that permission — the simple act of being told they are allowed to name their own experience accurately — is itself the beginning of something that has been waiting to begin for a long time.
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You did not plant the poison ivy. You are not the wound. You are the person in your whakapapa who finally has a name for it.
That is not a small thing. That is the beginning of becoming the ancestor your descendants will thank.
Kia tau te Rangimārie ki runga i a Koe. |
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This blog accompanies Paper Two of the Whakapapa of Colonisation academic series: “Te Tūāhuatanga — Naming the Displacement: The First Clinical Act in Healing Colonisation PTSD.” The full academic paper is available through IAnTeMo.com. Te Poutama Ora — the nine-dimensional Māori wellness framework developed by Ruku I’Anson — is available at IAnTeMo.com. |