Alice Te Punga Somerville
Biographic Data
| ID | 685350 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alice Te Punga Somerville |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alice Te Punga |
| FAMILY NAME | Somerville |
| SIGNATURE | SOMERVILLE A T P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Wollongong |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7490-2694 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 9 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Aute Life
How can, and do, Indigenous thinkers and artists reckon with the simultaneous horrors and vibrancy of the long eighteenth century? Aute is the NZ Māori name for a kind of cloth created from the paper mulberry plant across the Pacific region that is more widely known as tapa. Tracing the ends and new beginnings of aute production, paying attention to three different moments in which I have connected with eighteenth-century tapa, and reciting a mul…
Indigenous Backstage Pass
In her poem "from turtle island to aotearoa," Anishinaabeg writer Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm writes about travelling to the other side of the world and finding ways to connect. For my part, I have taken the ‘reverse’ journey many times from Aotearoa to Turtle Island, and the poem has both nudged and nurtured my thinking about the promises and limits of Indigenous-Indigenous connections. In Indigenous Studies, we have made really important claims about…
OMG settler colonial studies
I am one of those Indigenous scholars who often finds herself in conversations where the other person says ‘but I mean “post-colonial” ... like have the colonisers left?’. On the inside, each time th
Two Hundred and Fifty Ways to Start an Essay About Captain Cook
Searching for the Trans-Indigenous
96 Codex Searching for the Trans- Indigenous Alice Te Punga Somerville The title of this piece gestures toward Teresia Teaiwa’s 1995 poetry collection Searching for Nei Nim’anoa, which in turn refers to a Banaban female navigator. The titular poem of the collection is about Teaiwa’s own (scholarly, creative, cultural) search for Nei Nim’anoa. The poem opens “I need to learn how to navigate,” a desire expressed in relation to the act of reading: …
Introduction
Rather than being focused on Indigenous biographies as such, this special issue of Biography was conceived by Alice Te Punga Somerville (Māori), Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation), and Noelani Arista (Kanaka Maoli) as a wide-ranging conversation among Indigenous scholars, writers, artists, and filmmakers about the ethics, relations, practices, and considerations of representing Indigenous lives. The introduction by Te Punga Somerville and Jus…
Unpacking our Libraries
Unpacking our Libraries:Landlocked, Waterlogged, and Expansive Bookshelves Alice Te Punga Somerville (bio) Can we rememberthe ways we expanded our islandsto the fullness of their environments?Birds, sea, sky, coral reef, where the oceansare our pathways to each other? And when we find ourselvesin single file city streets,how do we move as a collective? How do we find our pathwaysto each other? —Karlo Mila, “Finding Our Way” Why should American st…
Living on New Zealand Street
Conventional narratives of Maori encounters with non-Maori logically cohere around the geographic space of Aotearoa, New Zealand, and tend to focus on the post-1840 (treaty) period and on Maori encounters with Europeans. This article examines two institutions in Parramatta, now a suburb of Sydney, Australia, at which Maori students were present in the first decades of the nineteenth century-the New Zealand Seminary and the Native Institution-in o…
Time to write (for Larry) [poem]
i need ten minutes to write this poem you need a couple of hours to work on your story between incoming calls and outgoing flights the best i can do is steal time from somewhere else: although you’ll read a pristine email version of this poem there’s curry from singh’s on the page of this handwritten draft. there’s no time to write, my friend
The measure of a man's worth (after MLK and the content of his character) [poem]
1. Small seeds tucked away, water stored, some dogs, a few rats look into the faces of relatives you will not see again for several hundred years sit quietly at night surrounded by constellations and a dizzying stretch of liquid the most humbling metaphor and word trick of them all: ocean-going vessels, blood vessels; genealogy and water mix in our part of the world
A new generation of historians on flight NZ449 (for Aroha) [poem]
it’s complimentary happy hour on NZ449: little plates of cheese, and wine or beer in plastic cups smiling people who can serve us in english, french or japanese even though there’s a koru on the tail of this plane
Maori Cowboys, Maori Indians
Reflecting on a short story in which two young Maori boys comment after watching a western film that "neither of us wanted to be an Indian," this article explores the layers of complexity inherent to comparative Indigenous studies. Maori engagement with the visual cultures of Cowboys and Indians suggests that Indigenous-Indigenous connection can itself be articulated as disjuncture or dis-identification. We expect Maori to identify with Indians, …
Two Hundred and Fifty Ways to Start an Essay About Captain Cook
Living on New Zealand Street
Conventional narratives of Maori encounters with non-Maori logically cohere around the geographic space of Aotearoa, New Zealand, and tend to focus on the post-1840 (treaty) period and on Maori encounters with Europeans. This article examines two institutions in Parramatta, now a suburb of Sydney, Australia, at which Maori students were present in the first decades of the nineteenth century-the New Zealand Seminary and the Native Institution-in o…
Searching for the Trans-Indigenous
96 Codex Searching for the Trans- Indigenous Alice Te Punga Somerville The title of this piece gestures toward Teresia Teaiwa’s 1995 poetry collection Searching for Nei Nim’anoa, which in turn refers to a Banaban female navigator. The titular poem of the collection is about Teaiwa’s own (scholarly, creative, cultural) search for Nei Nim’anoa. The poem opens “I need to learn how to navigate,” a desire expressed in relation to the act of reading: …
Introduction
Rather than being focused on Indigenous biographies as such, this special issue of Biography was conceived by Alice Te Punga Somerville (Māori), Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation), and Noelani Arista (Kanaka Maoli) as a wide-ranging conversation among Indigenous scholars, writers, artists, and filmmakers about the ethics, relations, practices, and considerations of representing Indigenous lives. The introduction by Te Punga Somerville and Jus…
Unpacking our Libraries
Unpacking our Libraries:Landlocked, Waterlogged, and Expansive Bookshelves Alice Te Punga Somerville (bio) Can we rememberthe ways we expanded our islandsto the fullness of their environments?Birds, sea, sky, coral reef, where the oceansare our pathways to each other? And when we find ourselvesin single file city streets,how do we move as a collective? How do we find our pathwaysto each other? —Karlo Mila, “Finding Our Way” Why should American st…
Maori Cowboys, Maori Indians
Reflecting on a short story in which two young Maori boys comment after watching a western film that "neither of us wanted to be an Indian," this article explores the layers of complexity inherent to comparative Indigenous studies. Maori engagement with the visual cultures of Cowboys and Indians suggests that Indigenous-Indigenous connection can itself be articulated as disjuncture or dis-identification. We expect Maori to identify with Indians, …
Maori Cowboys, Maori Indians
Reflecting on a short story in which two young Maori boys comment after watching a western film that "neither of us wanted to be an Indian," this article explores the layers of complexity inherent to comparative Indigenous studies. Maori engagement with the visual cultures of Cowboys and Indians suggests that Indigenous-Indigenous connection can itself be articulated as disjuncture or dis-identification. We expect Maori to identify with Indians, …
Time to write (for Larry) [poem]
i need ten minutes to write this poem you need a couple of hours to work on your story between incoming calls and outgoing flights the best i can do is steal time from somewhere else: although you’ll read a pristine email version of this poem there’s curry from singh’s on the page of this handwritten draft. there’s no time to write, my friend
The measure of a man's worth (after MLK and the content of his character) [poem]
1. Small seeds tucked away, water stored, some dogs, a few rats look into the faces of relatives you will not see again for several hundred years sit quietly at night surrounded by constellations and a dizzying stretch of liquid the most humbling metaphor and word trick of them all: ocean-going vessels, blood vessels; genealogy and water mix in our part of the world
A new generation of historians on flight NZ449 (for Aroha) [poem]
it’s complimentary happy hour on NZ449: little plates of cheese, and wine or beer in plastic cups smiling people who can serve us in english, french or japanese even though there’s a koru on the tail of this plane
Living on New Zealand Street
Conventional narratives of Maori encounters with non-Maori logically cohere around the geographic space of Aotearoa, New Zealand, and tend to focus on the post-1840 (treaty) period and on Maori encounters with Europeans. This article examines two institutions in Parramatta, now a suburb of Sydney, Australia, at which Maori students were present in the first decades of the nineteenth century-the New Zealand Seminary and the Native Institution-in o…
Unpacking our Libraries
Unpacking our Libraries:Landlocked, Waterlogged, and Expansive Bookshelves Alice Te Punga Somerville (bio) Can we rememberthe ways we expanded our islandsto the fullness of their environments?Birds, sea, sky, coral reef, where the oceansare our pathways to each other? And when we find ourselvesin single file city streets,how do we move as a collective? How do we find our pathwaysto each other? —Karlo Mila, “Finding Our Way” Why should American st…
Introduction
Rather than being focused on Indigenous biographies as such, this special issue of Biography was conceived by Alice Te Punga Somerville (Māori), Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation), and Noelani Arista (Kanaka Maoli) as a wide-ranging conversation among Indigenous scholars, writers, artists, and filmmakers about the ethics, relations, practices, and considerations of representing Indigenous lives. The introduction by Te Punga Somerville and Jus…
Searching for the Trans-Indigenous
96 Codex Searching for the Trans- Indigenous Alice Te Punga Somerville The title of this piece gestures toward Teresia Teaiwa’s 1995 poetry collection Searching for Nei Nim’anoa, which in turn refers to a Banaban female navigator. The titular poem of the collection is about Teaiwa’s own (scholarly, creative, cultural) search for Nei Nim’anoa. The poem opens “I need to learn how to navigate,” a desire expressed in relation to the act of reading: …
Two Hundred and Fifty Ways to Start an Essay About Captain Cook
Indigenous Backstage Pass
In her poem "from turtle island to aotearoa," Anishinaabeg writer Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm writes about travelling to the other side of the world and finding ways to connect. For my part, I have taken the ‘reverse’ journey many times from Aotearoa to Turtle Island, and the poem has both nudged and nurtured my thinking about the promises and limits of Indigenous-Indigenous connections. In Indigenous Studies, we have made really important claims about…
OMG settler colonial studies
I am one of those Indigenous scholars who often finds herself in conversations where the other person says ‘but I mean “post-colonial” ... like have the colonisers left?’. On the inside, each time th
Aute Life
How can, and do, Indigenous thinkers and artists reckon with the simultaneous horrors and vibrancy of the long eighteenth century? Aute is the NZ Māori name for a kind of cloth created from the paper mulberry plant across the Pacific region that is more widely known as tapa. Tracing the ends and new beginnings of aute production, paying attention to three different moments in which I have connected with eighteenth-century tapa, and reciting a mul…
History (8 works) · Art (7 works) · Indigenous (6 works) · Literature (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Poetry (5 works) · Archaeology (4 works) · History (4 works) · Media studies (4 works) · Ethnology (3 works)