Half Māori. Half Pākehā. Whole Me

The Power of the In-Between

I’ve lived all of my life in the in-between.

Half Māori, half non-Māori.

Strong, but told to shrink.

Constantly curious, but raised in systems that praised control, silence, and standardisation.

Too much. Not enough.

Seen, but misunderstood.

And for a long time, I thought that being in-between was a disadvantage, like I was split down the middle, not fully belonging to either side. But I’ve been learning something new: being in-between isn’t a weakness. It’s a location of power.

Where Did These Beliefs Come From?

Lately, I’ve been asking myself a question I never thought to ask before: Where did these beliefs about my body, myself, even come from?

So much of what I thought I knew about whakapapa, size, health, strength, femininity, didn’t actually come from me. It came from systems, from somewhere outside myself.

Through my PhD, I’ve been learning more about epistemology (how we come to know what we know) and ontology (how we understand our place in the world).

It’s helped me realise that I wasn’t born disliking my body or who I am. I was taught to. I was socialised into certain “truths” about what’s acceptable.

I absorbed messages through sport, media, school, and even from whānau. Messages shaped by colonial, Western frameworks about what’s normal, what’s healthy, what’s beautiful.

When we question how we know, we’re also questioning whose knowledge we trust. When we rethink how we see ourselves, we’re reclaiming our right to see ourselves through our own cultural lenses, through whakapapa, mātauranga Māori, and embodied experience.

So for me, trying to unlearn systemic structures has also meant unlearning dominant epistemologies.

It’s meant turning back toward ancestral ways of knowing ways that honour the body, the way we bleed, the softness and the unruliness. The parts we were told to hide, that we were told are promiscuous.

Navigating Two Worlds - Te Ao Māori & Te Ao Pākehā

Being half Māori and half Pākehā has meant constantly navigating two different worldviews, not just culturally, but physically. My body has been the site of that tension.

One side of me feels the pull of whenua, wairua, and ancestral knowing. The other has felt the pressure of control, invisibility, and perfection. And in the middle is me, trying to feel at home in my skin.

And I want to be clear: I love both sides of my whakapapa. Sometimes it feels like a pulling place, because I don’t like what colonisation has done to my people. The more I learnt about it the more it hurt.

I never learnt about colonisation deeply enough in school to understand its weight. Through this study, I have sat in that learning, sometimes crying as I uncovered the depths of what has happened to Māori. How much we have had to fight, and how much we continue to fight every day!!

But I also love my mum. I love my Pākehā family. I am Pākehā.

That’s the in-between: not rejection of either side, but carrying both, the pain, the beauty, the contradictions and learning to see it as wholeness.

I created this image with ChatGPT: wāhine Māori on one side, non-Māori women on the other. And in the centre, a space that felt familiar. That space was me, shape-shifting, surviving between two worlds.

Not quite one thing. Not quite the other. Something whole, and complex, and worthy.

It reminded me: this is not a deficit. This is not something to apologise for.

This is a location of deep, radical power.

Movement, Learning, Returning

Movement taught me to be strong, but it also taught me to control.

To perform.

To compare.

To critique my body in brutal detail.

It took years before I realised that strength could be more than just muscle.

That it could be softness.

Rawness.

Resistance against Western ideals of being feminine.

Depth.

Knowing.

That movement didn’t have to be a way to prove my worth, it could be a way to come home.

Now, I coach and research wāhine Māori in these spaces, women who are also navigating strength, identity, and reclaiming their bodies from expectations that were never made for us.

This is Part One of Two.Part Two will be about how movement opened the door for my first steps onto my marae, a moment that shifted everything for me, and made me honour movement even more.

To You, If You’re in the In-Between

If you’ve ever felt like your body didn’t fit.If you’ve ever been told to be less, or be different.If you carry multiple identities and no clear map...

Know this:

Being in-between isn’t a weakness. It’s a location of power. It’s where knowing lives.

Where resistance grows.

Where you belong — fully.

🧡 If you made it this far through my rant — well done, and thank you for reading xxx

If this resonates, I’d love to hear what it stirs up for you.

Message me.

Share your story.

We don’t unlearn alone.

We remember together.