Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the different narratives about the idea of rebuilding a Māori women power, memory and belonging in New Zealand. This process of claiming back leadership roles connecting to the ancestral mana is at the base of a theoretical construction of an indigenous and globalized citizenship.

Paper long abstract:

Cultural memory, like constructions of an indigenous and a national identity, can be viewed as a product of social and cultural processes. Since it is culturally constructed, cultural memory shifts over time with changing historical circumstances and social contexts.

An example is given by the re-articulation of the historical native memory through the century in New Zealand. Maori women have played a significant role in formulating identity and memory, sometime defining and redefining Māori culture through the fostering of Māori concepts, sometimes merging Māori and Pakeha (European descendants) cultures, and sometimes rethinking traditional Maori gender conceptions. Maori women reshaped the boundaries and constructed a new space for their complex and changing citizenship.

Māori identities are signified and constructed through various codes and everyday practices, so what it means to be Māori varies across space and time. In this context national imaginaries are renewed, modified and remade in generation to generation. Far from being self- perpetuating, they require creative effort; in doing so Māori women and their agency are central in the construction of a common belonging to Māori culture. Māori women claim back their mana and their roles in the public sphere, challenging the western dominance but reinforcing who they are by power, memory and belonging. Connecting their realities to what they were according to the tradition and to the Māori genealogy, they rebuild a globalized and conflicted citizenship.