Bro's/pro's (re)developing an authentic Maori presen(t)ce: creating identities about (professional Maori?) men

This work unpacks the identity marker professional Maori men, as politicked by two Maori men who are university graduates of Maori Studies and who work directly within Maori development fields as an executive officer of a tribal resource management unit and a secondary school teacher. It examines why these two Maori men resist the identity marker of professional Maori men as a subject-indicator of their working lives and public status. It unravels their (re)constructed meaning of professional Maori men, and asks why they criticise this identity reference as representing an assimilated movement toward institutionalisation, colonisation, and the Pakeha value-system of a dominant Anglo/Celtic hegemony in New Zealand. It investigates how both men perceive an authentic Iwi (tribal) identity of real Maori practices as an essential journey for liberating one's participation within a professional field of an institution from risk of hegemonic co-option and violent cultural corruption. It asks what political risks are involved for Maori and Iwi researchers and writers within various institutions in New Zealand, when at one level, they are expected by the hegemony to perform official tasks as indigenous representatives, and at another level, it is desired by their own ethnic group they will fulfil cultural responsibilities in the interests and on the terms of their people. Social science terms used in this text: Other, Statehood, Liminal Space, Liminality, Marginalisation, Marginality, Subaltern, Disjuncture, Difference, Displacement, Travelling Theory, Symbolic Interaction, History from Below, Performative Identity, Responsibility, Binary Inter-Play, Selfhood. This paper is dedicated to Maori men and women who participate in a professional field, and find themselves constantly struggling to assert their personal Maori-ness/Iwi-ness, while facing an external range of public demands, restrictions, barriers, and expectations.