Global indigeneity and the motif of return in Witi Ihimaera’s writing

Abstract

This paper responds to the recent promotion of Witi Ihimaera as a “pioneer in world indigenous literature” in the context of the republication of his works in the “Anniversary Collection” by analyzing the ways his writing engages with different conceptualizations of indigeneity in relation to globalization. It outlines the field of the indigenous as a contested site by distinguishing three different current conceptualizations: the ongoing commodification of the image of the indigene as a legacy of the colonial construction of the ‘native’; the burgeoning discourse of indigenous people’s rights and claims for social justice based on the recognition of histories of colonial dispossession as expressed recently in the adoption of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by the UN General Assembly; and the promotion of indigeneity as a focus for the construction of alternative models of global development and dialogue on the basis of relational values such as responsibility, reciprocity, redistribution. The paper argues that all of these conceptualizations are pertinent to Ihimaera’s emergence as a writer of global appeal and seeks to demonstrate how his writing deploys them in order to mobilize his readers’ imagination of a shared world. It does so by focusing on his handling of the trope of the return and its unfolding connotations, which lead from nostalgic search for lost origins to belated honoring of obligations and open-ended dialogic transformation.