Honouring Our Ancestors

Description

Title: Honouring Our Ancestors: Takatapui, Two-Spirit and Indigenous LGBTQI+ Well-being

Editors: Alison Green and Leonie Pihama

Publisher: Te Herenga Waka University Press, Wellington, 2023

Format: Paperback

Condition: Excellent – as new

Description:

The word takatapui is old. In te ao Māori it referred to an intimate companion of the same sex; in contemporary usage it has been reclaimed by Māori who identify as LGBTQI+ as a term that locates queer identity inside a Māori cultural framework, not an imported Western one. This book is built on the argument that this reclamation matters — and that the suppression it is reversing was not accidental.

Honouring Our Ancestors gathers 28 writers from Aotearoa and Turtle Island (Canada and the United States) to explore the well-being of takatapui, two-spirit, and Māaori and Indigenous LGBTQI+ communities. The essays are rigorous and scholarly — this is not a popular text — but they are grounded in something urgent: the knowledge that before colonisation, Indigenous peoples had their own understandings of gender and sexuality, and that those understandings did not map onto the binary categories imposed on them.

The collection grew out of two research projects: the HONOR Project, investigating well-being in American Indian and Alaskan Native two-spirit communities, and the Honour Project Aotearoa, which produced the first data of its kind on takatapui lived experiences in the New Zealand healthcare system. That data matters. The Mental Health Foundation called the book “insightful and moving” and “a highly recommended resource.”

Editors Alison Green (Ngāti Awa, Ngāti Ranginui) and Leonie Pihama (Te Atiawa, Ngā Māhanga a Tairi, Waikato) are two of Aotearoa’s most significant Kaupapa Māori scholars. Pihama is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand, a Professor of Māori and Indigenous Research, and has been listed among the 100 Māori leaders by Te Rau Matatini. Green is a Professor in the School of Indigenous Graduate Studies at Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiārangi.

This copy is secondhand. The book is currently in print at $35.00 new.

Why We Stock It:

A serious piece of Kaupapa Māori scholarship on an underserved subject. The conversation it is part of — about what colonisation did to Māori understandings of identity, and what decolonisation might restore — is one The Gravy considers worth keeping on the shelf.