Intergenerational Financial Trauma

Abstract

Catherine Comyn’s The Financial Colonisation of Aotearoa is long overdue. In it, she covers the well-researched, familiar ground of our colonial history but through a seldom-applied lens. The result is thus entirely novel, and desperately needed. With this focus, we’re able to observe that the causes of political economic crises plaguing New Zealand today were already in motion at the moment the first of the Wakefield brothers set foot on these shores. We’ve long known the lizard has a forked tongue and many claws. In 1984, Donna Awatere described how ‘sovereignty was never surrendered. It was taken—by trickery, by numbers, by force, by accepting no opposition, by chauvinism and contempt, and by cultural imperialism’. Comyn’s book homes in on one of the lizard’s overlooked
claws, finance capital, and thus lays a missing puzzle piece in the colonial picture. This response to Comyn’s text traces the
scars left on my whānau by that particular talon, beginning with the recollections of my father that have been recounted to me. The
experiences of financial colonisation and intergenerational financial trauma in my whānau are in no way exceptional. Every whānau has their story, and many would provide stronger evidence of this phenomenon. This story is, however, my own.