Pride Month: Post-Colonial Indigenous Queerness in the Moana
As New Zealand celebrates Pride month this February, Auckland based iTaukei and Girmitiya queer activist Shaneel Lal explains how colonialism uprooted Pacific indigenous queer identities, and that for restoration and decriminalisation to place across the region, indigenous queerness must be seen outside a neo-colonial white lens.
This year marks 36 years since the New Zealand Parliament passed a law decriminalising homosexuality. The Homosexual Law Reform did not free me because it did not free all queer Pacific people. I cannot celebrate 36 years of the Homosexual Law Reform in New Zealand while so many of my people throughout the Moana are still criminals for being queer. New Zealand colonised Samoa and the Cook Islands, and both continue to criminalise homosexuality. The New Zealand state is responsible for it.
Before colonisation, queer people were integral to indigenous communities, playing a role in raising children, cleaning the house, caring for the elders, and doing things indigenous peoples relied upon to survive. However, the unholy marriage of colonisation and Christianity violently ripped through the fabric of our culture, supplanting the love, celebration, and acceptance of indigenous queerness with homophobia, transphobia and queerphobia.
During colonisation, anger from indigenous elders towards visibly queer people was not directed at queer people for being queer. It was directed at queer peoples' lack of concern for the consequences of being visibly queer under European imperialism. Being visibly queer under European imperialism resulted in death. The elders' commitment to hiding queerness was not a result of queerphobia; it was a survival tactic. The trade-off was unfair but necessary to keep queer people alive. In modern times, the anger that was once a concern for the safety of indigenous queer people has degenerated into anti-queerness. However, the struggle to keep indigenous queer people alive through colonialism has suppressed indigenous queerness itself.
Indigenous queer identities are pre-colonial and distinct from colonial queerness. It is not the terminology that we cannot translate. An attempt to translate indigenous queer identities will cause them to lose their meaning and cultural significance. Indigenous queer people must resist translations of our identities to white frameworks of queerness as staunchly as we resist our erasure.
Colonialism uprooted indigenous queer identities. The liberation of indigenous queer people cannot simply be an extension of the liberation of white queer people. The white queer identities often captured by the LGBTQIA+ acronym leave no room for indigenous queerness. My people are vakasalewalewa, fa'afafine, fakaleitī and māhū among others. There is no V, F or M in LGBTQIA+. Indigenous identities are rendered invisible by the + that follows the acronym of colonial queer identities. Indigenous identities are shoe-horned into an acronym that privileges colonial queer identities. The process of forcing indigenous queer identities into white frameworks of queerness is the neo-colonial erasure of the indigenous sexualities and genders that survived British imperialism.
Non-queer indigenous peoples pretend that the struggle of queer people isn't an indigenous struggle. But indigenous peoples cannot exist in systems that are anti-queer. The systems that criminalise queerness were the same systems that facilitated the colonisation of the Pacific.
The Pacific Islands are facing an intersecting crisis, being hit with the worst natural disasters due to rapid climate change. Our islands will be gone before we even get an opportunity to decriminalise homosexuality if countries like New Zealand do not act now. Unfortunately, battling the climate crisis has provided our governments with an excuse to discard queer liberation from their agenda.
New Zealand queers have a trickle-down equality mindset. They believe that their rights will naturally trickle down to the queer people living in the Pacific islands once they are fully liberated. New Zealand decriminalised homosexuality over 35 years ago, but that equality is yet to trickle down to Samoa, Tonga or the Cook Islands. As long as queer people throughout the Pacific are not free, I see no reason to celebrate in New Zealand. The New Zealand queer community is under a moral obligation to stand up for queer people in the Pacific. We must challenge our government to act. The fight for queer liberation is not limited to queer people. Non-queer Pacific peoples living in the diaspora must stand up and demand their home islands to decriminalise queer people. Love holds the Pacific community together, so if you love us, why won’t you liberate us?
Decriminalisation of homosexuality is long overdue in the Pacific. A process of restoration must take place; indigenous queer people need to be returned their place in our community. This will come through resourcing years of education to decolonise the mindset of generations of people. However, that is no justification or excuse to delay decriminalising homosexuality.
Queer liberation is an intergenerational fight in the Pacific. Those who came before me fought and prepared a kinder world for me. I continue the legacy of my elders, so those who come after me are connected to the fight for freedom. I struggle to picture the day queer people will be free throughout the Moana, but I refuse to give up on my people. I cannot be free until all my people are free.
Author Bio
Shaneel Lal was the 2020 Pacific Cooperation Foundation's Supreme Award Winner for Inclusion and is the founder of the Conversion Therapy Action Group, a group working to end conversion therapy in Aotearoa New Zealand. They are an executive board member of Rainbow Youth and the Auckland Pride Festival, and a trustee of Adhikaar Aotearoa.