As noted in ths history of colonial Empires, the language and methodology of "science" have often been used to systematically turn human beings into populations to be studied and scripted, into subjects of interventions, as passive objects to be examined through the methodology of the scientist. The collection of systematic processes has in such instances been set in motion in order to precisely carry out the colonial project through the generation of knowledge. The ways in which knowledge has been produced have been intrinsically connected with the uses of such knowledge to perpetuate the oppression and exploitation of the subaltern classes, simultaneously keeping the subaltern sectors of the globe out of the discursive spaces of the mainstream. It is in this very backdrop that the native is once again silenced because she is told that she can't participate unless she trains with the masters, uses their tools, and speaks their language. The legitimacy of science is used as a basis for maintaining the "Club" of privilege and for carrying out the violence that is embodied in this very privilege. Therefore, any centering that happens in the culture-centered approach has to be continually tied to de-centering the fundamental processes and criteria through which knowledge is evaluated.
The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe An Indian in Aotearoa reflects on resistance, complicity, and the solidarities we have yet to build Mohan Jyoti Dutta I watched the haka. I watched it several times, in fact. Each time, I tried to sit with what I was feeling before reaching for what I was supposed to think. Let me be honest about who I am in this conversation, because that matters. I am an upper caste, upwardly mobile Indian man. I am a professor at a university in Aotearoa. I carry the accumulated privileges of Brahminical socialisation, of English-medium education, of institutional access that was never designed for the communities I now write about and alongside. I say this not as confession but as orientation — because where you stand shapes what you see, and I have learned, through years of working with communities at the margins, that the refusal to name your own location is itself a colonial habit. The haka directed at Parmjeet Parmar did not offend me. It ...