Skip to main content

Remembering Aunty Leigh Taiwhati



Aunty Leigh (in red) at one of our advisory group meetings
Te Patikitiki Library in Highbury, May 2019.















E Tōku Hoa! Ko koe te rā nui o ngā rangi o Tōku tapu, kaua e tukua mā te paru o te ao tō miharo
e huna. Rukea ki rahaki te ārai o arongakore, kia puta mārama mai ai koe i ngā kapua, ka kākahuria
ai e koe mgā mea katoa ki te korowai o te ora.  - Ngā Kupu Huna o Baha’u’llah
Aunty Ilene (Leigh)  Taiwhati passed away this week. She was a member of many community groups in
Highbury and our CCA advisory group was very lucky to be one of them. The enthusiasm and generous
energy that she brought to the group will be sadly missed. She played a key role in documenting and
recording the ideas of the group and contributed ideas that were grounded in the depth of her experiences.

I met Leigh towards the end of last year when my friend Tessa recommended I talk to her about our CCA
project in Highbury.  We met at Te Patikitiki library and found a quiet corner where she happily shared
stories with me about Highburians she’s known and loved over the years. She had been collecting stories
from local kaumātua and also writing down her own experiences of growing up in Highbury in Ellesmere
Crescent, opposite Saint Micheals.

Leigh saw Highbury as a resource rich community where people help and support each other generously.
It wasn’t until she got older and became a teenager that she grew aware of how the suburb was viewed by
others in the wider Palmerston North area. For Leigh, collecting people’s stories and documenting the
many positive initiatives happening in Highbury was her way of reminding Highburians and letting others
know about the abundance of gifts and talents in the community.

Because Leigh was so amazing at documenting her experiences we’re really fortunate to have access to
some of her ideas and knowledge through the Highbury Hub. She told me that because she didn’t have
children she wanted anything that she left behind - any memory - to say that she came from Highbury,
that she was a part of this community. Leigh mentioned how she often remembered herself as a little girl
sitting on the front porch of their house in Ellesmere Crescent imagining other horizons. She wanted to
help extend the horizons of kids like her by giving them information and examples of Highburians who
have done great things. I hope that in the capacity of our advisory group we can contribute to and include
Leigh’s visions within our efforts.
Moe mai rā -
Terri



































































Popular posts from this blog

The whiteness of binaries that erase the Global South: On Communicative Inversions and the invitation to Vijay Prashad in Aotearoa

When I learned through my activist networks that the public intellectual Vijay Prashad was coming to Aotearoa, I was filled with joy. In my early years in the U.S., when learning the basics of the struggle against the fascist forces of Hindutva, I came in conversation with Vijay's work. Two of his critical interventions, the book, The Karma of Brown Folk , and the journal article " The protean forms of Yankee Hindutva " co-authored with Biju Matthew and published in Ethnic and Racial Studies shaped my early activism. These pieces of work are core readings in understanding the workings of Hindutva fascism and how it mobilizes cultural tropes to serve fascist agendas. Much later, I felt overjoyed learning about his West Bengal roots and his actual commitment to the politics of the Left, reflected in the organising of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), a political register that shaped much of my earliest lessons around Global South resistance, collectivization, and orga...
Read more

Upper caste Indian women in the diaspora, DEI, and the politics of hate

Figure 1: Trump, Vance and their partners responding to the remarks by Mariann Edgar Budde   Emergent from the struggles of the civil rights movement , led by African Americans , organized against the oppressive history of settler colonialism and slavery that forms the backbone of US society, structures around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) formed an integral role in forging spaces for diverse recognition and representation.  These struggles around affirmative action, diversity, equity and inclusion were at the heart of the changes to white only immigration policies, building pathways for migration of diverse peoples from the Global South.  The changes to the immigration policies created opportunities for Indians to migrate to the US, with a rise of Indian immigration into the US since the 1970s into educational institutions, research and development infrastructures, and technology-finance infrastructures. These migratory structures into the US were leveraged by l...
Read more

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems wit...
Read more