I distinctly remember the first time I sat on the kitchen bench at my father’s house. Because it was also the last. It was a humid summer evening in Auckland and, pushing my weight back onto my hands, I hoisted myself up in the nonchalant way I regularly did at the home where I lived most of the year with my mother. The laminate countertop cooled my thighs as I dangled my bare feet onto the kitchen cabinets below, kicking them back and forth absentmindedly. Most nights, while my mum cooked dinner, I’d sit in a similar spot, filling her in on my day at school and all of the gossip going on between my classmates – especially with Alex, whose father I knew she had a crush on. When mine turned around to face me, the emotion on his face moved from shock to anger, to disappointment in a millisecond. “That’s tapu,” he said sternly but quietly, breaking eye contact as he did and, turning away from me, shutting both the fridge door and any chance of further conversation down. I instantly jumped off, mumbling “sorry” under my breath and moving to leave the small space as quickly as I could — before he could catch a glimpse of the tears forming in the corners of my eyes, or the shame turning my cheeks crimson.

Tapu is the strongest spiritual force in Māori life. It can be interpreted as ‘holy’ or ‘sacred’, or defined as a ‘spiritual restriction’, containing a strong imposition of rules and prohibitions. In the English language, the word ‘taboo’ originates from ‘tapu.’ Historically, tapu had three dimensions: sacredness, prohibition and uncleanliness. Tapu in the sacred sense applied to people of rank, places of worship and ancestral houses. In the prohibited sense, it applied to pursuits such as carving. (Women and children were prohibited by tapu from going near the specialist carvers – tohunga whakairo – while they were at work). Tapu in the unclean sense applied to menstrual blood, which prevented women from gardening or other pursuits connected with food. In this instance, sitting on tables is linked to Māori beliefs about the tapu nature of bodily wastes and the need to keep them separate from food. I know all of this now, but as an 11-year-old girl who spent most of her time living with her Pākeha (white) mother and all of the time trying to distance herself from her heritage – with Māori and Pacific Island jokes loitering the school playground – I had forgotten. My father went through worse at school, of course. His generation and his father’s before him were forced to assimilate through harsh punishments, oftentimes violent. In 1847, schools banned te reo, the Māori language, from being spoken and children were routinely, severely beaten if they disobeyed. In 1900, 95 per cent of Māori were fluent in te reo, but the proportion had decreased to 26 per cent by 1960. Urban migration, social pressure, physical and verbal punishment of children, and ‘pepper potting’ policies (where individual Māori families were scattered throughout Pākeha communities to encourage assimilation) all contributed to an intergenerational suppression of the language. “The damaging aspect of this practice”, writes Ranginui Walker in Struggle Without End, “lay not in corporal punishment per se, but in the psychological effect on an individual’s sense of identity and personal worth.”

There were also rules enforced specifically surrounding tapu tikanga, Māori customs and traditions. In Traditions and Superstitions of the New Zealander (1856), Englishman Edward Shortland wrote that “since the introduction of Christianity, the fear of tapu has gradually grown weaker, and the observances connected with the ancient superstitions have very generally fallen into disuse.” In 1907, the government gave Māori a further violent nudge away from their traditional belief system by passing the Tohunga Suppression Act, which applied a prohibition on “every person who gathers Māori around him by practising on their superstition or credulity, or who misleads or attempts to mislead any Māori by professing or pretending to possess supernatural powers in the treatment or cure of any disease, or in the foretelling of future events”. According to Paul Moon’s 2003 book Tohunga, by the time the law was repealed in 1964, barely a handful of tohunga (priestly scholars) remained, and many with “only partial knowledge of their craft”.

A few years ago, I saw a medium psychic. Immediately, I realised she was a fraud. “Your grandparents are here, on your father’s side,” she said, explaining what they looked like casually, as if I would have any idea myself. “They have come in very strongly. They’ve been waiting to speak to you,” she continued. I paused, unsure of how much one was meant to give away in these situations, before – feeling like the entire meeting was a waste of time anyway – telling her as much: I didn’t know them and they didn’t know me, and, if I’m honest, I really doubt they’re here to say hello now.

Not only did I never meet my grandparents, but I also didn’t know the names of my aunts, uncles or cousins. I can’t speak my language, and I recently found out I have two siblings I’ve never met. Each time I visit a doctor’s office, I routinely repeat that I don’t know my family history. Each time, it stings a little. Friends of mine recount similar stories. Many grew up in parallel environments; ones not conducive to learning about their culture. Māoridom is intertwined with abuse and intergenerational trauma that stems back decades and can be directly linked to the past violence our ancestors bore. We know this, but it doesn’t make it hurt any less.

Some also changed their names when they were young and are now slowly in the complicated personal process of reclaiming them. Some are learning te reo, while others refuse to pursue the language that was beaten out of their ancestors just because it’s now dubbed trendy by Pākeha to do so. My sister, who, despite looking like me, never had the chance to assimilate with a (beautiful) first name like “Ngahiwi” — our great-grandmother’s — recently got a traditional tattoo with five korus, one for each sibling (that we’ve met, anyway). That day, sitting across from the medium, I felt the same way I feel in the doctor’s office: exposed and embarrassed of the mess of being Māori. “What about my stepdad, who practically raised me? The granddad on my mother’s side who I grew up with and spent every school afternoon dancing with in the living room? My high school boyfriend who died in a car crash?” I thought. My attitude didn’t deter her. “It’s them, they’re here,” she said. It was then that her demeanour drastically changed. “I see,” she mumbled. I looked up at her, interested now. She was quiet for a while, frowning slightly, as if she was listening to someone or something. Whatever they were saying didn’t seem to be pleasant. “So, basically,” she began. “What they needed to say is, they’re sorry… for everything.” I looked up at her. The room felt hyper focused. The hairs on my arm stood up. “They know their actions had consequences,” she continued. “They see now the mistakes they made.”

As a once-proud five-year-old girl, I was told by a teacher I was “too white” to join kapa haka – the traditional Māori dance group. When he later saw me crying, my father stormed the school staff room and, as a result, I stood up every assembly singing in te reo with pois in my hand. But I never forgot the teacher’s confused expression at my request. As a pre-teen beginning to work through the weeds of becoming a real person, I felt a huge disconnect from my culture. Endless then-unexamined shame for the shame I felt about my heritage, guilt for not speaking the language – and for my skin – freckled – and eyes – blue – that served as a barrier, allowing me to move through spaces unassuming. No English word sums up how I felt that evening in the kitchen with my father better than ‘whakamā’, which loosely translates from te reo to a mixture of shame, self-doubt and embarrassment. Sometimes, I’ll sit around a table with my Māori friends, and we’ll speak about our shame, our pain and our longing. We’ll tell each other stories of Hawaiki, our ancestral land, teaching ourselves the history we weren’t taught in school. Sometimes we’ll sit in silence with the comfort of knowing that we have the same blood running through our veins and that we understand each other in ways that can’t, and don’t need to be, vocalised.

Sometimes I see a Māori man on the London underground and my heart skips a beat. I want to smile at him, to show him I see him. To ask him if he’s Māori so I can say I am, too. He reminds me of my dad.

Sometimes I’ll sit on a kitchen bench at my house as my boyfriend makes dinner. I don’t do it because I’ve forgotten it’s tapu. I do it because I know. Because in knowing, and doing it anyway, I feel connected to my culture. I think of my ancestors above looking down and tutting at the naughty child below. By doing something wrong, I’m reminding them, and myself, of our existence.