Two weeks after celebrating Auckland Anniversary Day, we got another holiday for Waitangi Day. All of New Zealand has observed this February 6 holiday since 1934 to commemorate the nation's founding document. While 52 Māori chiefs had already signed a Declaration of Independence to create the United Tribes of New Zealand in 1835, which was explicitly recognized by King William IV, no united tribal government emerged. By 1840, the British state got over its reluctance to establish yet another colony and sent a representative to negotiate a treaty with the Māori that would establish British rule and protect the commercial interests of UK citizens in the country. Auckland Day celebrates the arrival of William Hobson, who negotiated the treaty and became governor, and Waitangi Day celebrates the treaty itself, the 'founding' of the nation, and a myth of racial harmony between Māori and Pākehā.
For my Waitangi Weekend, I went to a dance party, a birthday BBQ party, and took a long walk out along the waterfront to see some Waitangi Day celebrations. The dance party was a big highlight of the weekend. It started off with swing dance, which is hard for me to do here since East Coast isn't a thing and I've just started learning Balboa. Then a live blues guitarist and singer started playing. Almost all the swing dancers cleared out at that point, but I had some really good dances to awesome live music.
Above all, the most useful part of the ResBaz (as they call it) for me was the Program Management workshop, where the presenter introduced us to Scrum - an iterative approach to projects that focuses on finishing 'potentially shippable' products on the way to completing the final objective - and showed us all of the web tools she uses to communicate with her team and manage her workflow. After that talk, I immediately set myself up on the web app Trello and designed some Scrum-inspired project management boards to help me manage grad school. In the first week since I started implementing the ideas I got out of the workshop, I feel a major improvement in my productivity, and a major reduction in my stress-load now that I keep track of my work, have a way to hide my to-do list from myself, and take breaks more frequently (5 minute stretch after 25 minutes of work, longer snack/lunch every 2 hours). Talk to me if you want to hear more!
After waking up late on Sunday and spending a good part of the early afternoon cleaning up the flat and vacuuming all the doritos out of our carpet, I went to an Auckland dance community meeting to discuss community safety. Dancers around the world are having some tough conversations right now after a number of women came forward with accounts of sexual assault and rape perpetrated by several big-name dance instructors in France and the US. Auckland dancers responded in a very mature way by coming together to establish a community code of conduct with mechanisms for enforcing that code so that we can prevent similar scandals before they develop, make everyone feel welcome and safe (LGBTQ people haven't necessarily been welcomed with open arms to date), and detect ongoing or future issues before assaults happen.
The plan is to have trained Community Volunteers at every dance for anyone to talk to about how they're feeling and being treated, or to report any shenanigans they see or hear about. Those CV's will report to a handful of community leaders who will keep records of any complaints so they can spot patterns and intervene when necessary. Those leaders are trained to refer victims to counselors or legal help. The goal is to break through the barrier of social isolation that perpetrators create to protect themselves from retribution and increase their control over their victims. The more I think about it, the more I feel that it is essential for any community to have similar mechanisms in place to make it harder for anyone to get away with abuse.
We had several flat activities this week ahead of Sehui's departure for a month-long visit to Korea and for John's birthday. First we went out to dinner at a Japanese restaurant for John, and then we went out to Burger Burger for burgers, shakes, and onion rings. I was semi-horrified to see that Sehui eats her burgers with fork and knife.
There were also several anthropology events. On Thursday I went to an Anthropology Department Seminar about petroleum exploration and the ways that the government is undermining the voice of local councils and communities in a newly reframed top-down, paternalistic relationship. I spent Friday night at an Anth Read-In, a global effort to get anthropologists reading political literature and discussing current events. It looks like the Auckland chapter is just me and Corina, a Romanian applied anthropologist, but we had a great conversation about the political economy of social media and the importance of civic engagement.
Finally, on Saturday I went to the Auckland Art Gallery and checked out the Lindauer Māori portraits, which are a series of amazingly life-like paintings of important Māori political figures from the 19th and early 20th centuries. I was also impressed by the Gallery's main collection, which has represents tons of Māori artists and perspectives.
After I posted results from my survey of new about the new President's deplorable actions, I ran out of steam. I couldn't keep up with the constant barrage of terrible things. Fortunately, someone else has started keeping track for us. You can follow along on with this daily summary by Jezebel if you ever worry that you aren't hearing about every action the new administration is taking to erode democracy and our trust in government.
No comments:
Post a Comment