Abstract
In a world of increasing complexity and interconnectedness, societies are faced with endless and all-encompassing risks. And in these times, Indigenous communities are at greater risk than their non-Indigenous neighbours, and seemingly at more risk than their own ancestors. This chapter (re)examines the experiences of Māori in the city of Ōtautahi Christchurch during the extended period of seismic activity that destroyed many residential and commercial properties and significantly disrupted social and cultural networks in 2011. This disaster provides a regrettable but unique opportunity to understand how a disaster affects urban Indigenous communities in the 21st Century, a demographic that is rapidly increasing. The earthquakes exposed more than geological fault lines. Māori continued to respond to and recover from the disasters of colonisation, neoliberal marginalisation, and structural racism. Two fault lines are drawn in sociological space; the first framed as tradition and glossed as ancestry; the second, all too modern neoliberalism.
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Notes
- 1.
Several reports modelled the damage to Ōtautahi Christchurch city from an earthquake. See Lamb (1997).
- 2.
Gramsci (1971) saw the elevation of knowledge as emerging from medieval Europe where “education” reflected two dimensions. At the level of the individual, “intellect” could be both broadened and deepened; at the scale of society, specialisations were simultaneously multiplying and narrowing.
- 3.
See Mead and Grove (2001, p. 60) who records this as “Calamity on land, ruination at sea” and cites the scholars Ngata and Williams.
- 4.
The Ngāi Tahu dialect for mātauranga.
- 5.
“It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism” (Jameson, 1994, p. xii).
- 6.
Lest this be used to support a conspiracy theory, we should not necessarily be surprised that in a pandemic that has depressed all economies, several vaccines appear within months of the initial shock. Coronavirus research was well-advanced before this current manifestation.
- 7.
Māori scholar Mason Durie made this connection between resilience and time in his 2005 “Ngā Matatū: Tides of Māori endurance.”
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Lambert, S. (2022). Critical Indigenous Disaster Studies: Doomed to Resilience?. In: Uekusa, S., Matthewman, S., Glavovic, B.C. (eds) A Decade of Disaster Experiences in Ōtautahi Christchurch. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6863-0_5
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