More than unfinished business: Transgenerational trauma and Indigenous storytelling in Tina Makereti’s Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings

Abstract

Abstract This article sets out to examine the ways in which Indigenous trauma texts employ storytelling as discursive practice and convention to narrate the complex forces of collective and transgenerational traumata. This will be established through an analysis of Tina Makereti’s debut novel Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings (2014). Examining trauma narratives within the limited analytic framework of traditional trauma theory remains unsatisfactory with regard to Indigenous texts that deal with the multiple-layered forms of collective and transgenerational trauma. Thus, while informed by literary trauma theory as well as postcolonial studies, my theoretical approach is first and foremost based on Indigenous theories and knowledges, which are crucial to better comprehend the representation and articulation of trauma in Indigenous narratives. Focus will be on examining the Indigenous tradition of storytelling as a narrative mode and convention for Indigenous trauma fiction. Irene Visser persuasively argues that ‘[t]he nuanced exploration and conceptualization of the function of indigenous belief systems in the engagement with trauma would constitute a further necessary development in the project of achieving a fully decolonized trauma theory’ (Visser 2015: 263). By engaging with Indigenous epistemologies with regard to storytelling in the analysis of Indigenous trauma narratives, this article aims to contribute to the discussion.