Being a White Tauiwi, a Tangata Tiriti, and a Researcher in Aotearoa

Abstract This article examines how the author’s positionality as a white tauiwi (non-Māori, non-Pacific), tangata Tiriti, doctoral researcher has been continually reconfigured while conducting research with Māori and Pacific young people in Aotearoa New Zealand. Situated within a critical ethnographic approach informed by the practice of wayfinding, the article argues that researcher positionality is not established through a single declaration of reflexivity but is continually negotiated through relationality, reciprocity, and ongoing critical reflexivity. Rather than presenting discomfort as an obstacle to research, it argues that productive discomfort constitutes an ethical orientation that enables non-Indigenous researchers to remain accountable to Indigenous self-determination while recognising the limits of their own knowledge and authority. Drawing on personal narrative, theoretical reflection, and methodological analysis, the article traces how engagement with Te Tiriti o Waitangi, Māori and Pacific scholarship, and Indigenous onto-epistemologies transformed both the author’s understanding of herself as a French settler in Turtle Island Canada and the design of her doctoral research. Guided by Māori and Pacific onto-epistemologies—particularly those emphasizing relationality, reciprocity, and self-determination— the author’s ‘’lens’’ shifted to explore critically the influence of her positionality within the research space and to actively dominant deficit colonial ways of doing/thinking in academia. It is through engagement with Māori and Pacific scholarship, collaboration with the research whānau and community organizations, and participation in cultural and academic spaces led by Māori and Pacific people, that the author found ways to disrupt settler-colonial research norms and prioritize the lived experiences and aspirations of participants in the research. The article offers a nuanced argument advancing that ethical non-Indigenous research is not achieved through claims of neutrality or competence but through an ongoing commitment to humility, accountability, relational ethics, and the continual redistribution of research authority in support of Indigenous aspirations and decolonial futures.