So I’m in my first week of uni. I only have one tutorial in the first week and doing my prep work for it in the past two days has started something of an identity crisis within me. I’ve chosen to do a Minor in Indigenous Knowledges and my first unit is about Indigenous Representation in media. There are a few sets of questions in the first lecture for us to think about but two of them have been stuck with me since and I even found myself being kept awake by one of the activities in the second week involving the topic these questions surround.

To condense the list, the question was: What is my culture?

Whenever someone asks about my culture or ethnicity, I’m always proud to rattle it off that I’m a combination of Tongan, Samoan, Swiss and Australian (which is by birth soil, mother’s family is from England but I rarely acknowledge it properly). I’m excited by my Polynesian blood and use it as my primary culture when asked. People are usually surprised because I’m a pasty introvert. Although, when I looked at the little bunch of questions in my lecture, I realised: ethnicity isn’t the same thing as culture. And so when I went back to answer ‘what is my culture?’, I realised that I don’t have a clue.

Growing up, I was shuffled around a lot and so the influence of different types of societies and cultures have kind’ve left me with a patchwork identity that I can’t really sell to anyone. I’ve come to realise that I don’t know if I really belong anywhere. The different people I was ‘raised’ (I put that in quotations because… well if I start posting my memoirs for one of my other units then you’ll get it) were a bit of a variety: my father is Tongan with a Samoan and Swiss blend; my stepmother is Aboriginal; my uncle has the same blend of my father; my mother is Australian, second-gen English (from what I’ve been told); my stepfather has a slice of Aboriginal in his bloodline and has a daughter by an Aboriginal woman; and my sister (product of my mother and stepfather) and her partner (Australian-born but a few generations down from immigrating from England).

With my father, uncle and stepmother came the most ‘cultural exposure’ that I had. I took part in cultural festivities, learnings and some customs in relation to my Tongan heritage. My stepmother, and her family who I am still connected with through social media, taught me some of their culture. My uncle shed some more light on my family’s life in Tonga and New Zealand and often taught us tidbits and expected us to live up to the behaviour cultivated by some Tongan beliefs, like generosity, kindness and respect.

My father and stepmother were always cloudy about their cultures and so what I learnt was usually something small or through other relatives. Growing up has made me realise that this was a way of them protecting me from certain things. The older I got, the more hindsight I had and the more people were willing to tell me. I didn’t know that my father faced racism in his own home country because he was of a mixed ‘race’. This mixture was something I was so proud of and yet it had ostracised him from the rest of the island he lived on. My stepmother’s story was similar. She is from a very proud and big family where I’ve received more love and guidance than from my mother’s family. And it wasn’t really anything too extra. They’re just good people. But even though I never noticed it, they suffered plenty of racism because they were Aboriginal. My stepmother and her family are very active within their community in order to better the conditions of other First Nations people. She was never overly political when it came to issues the Aboriginal people suffer by but as we got older we were exposed appropriately to it. To suffering that we were more or less shielded from. One of the last times I saw my stepmother, her neighbour was an elderly woman who was a representation of the racist Australian today. She called my stepmother the ‘n’ word and tried to claim that all she could do was have children, stay at home and collect money from the government. This really threw me. I would have been about fifteen or sixteen and it floored me. My stepmother had worked full-time for as long as I knew her, diligent and often praised by her workplace. She not only had to try and raise her own children on her own but she also helped raise me and my two younger siblings, even when the family probably caused her more harm than good. In hindsight, I don’t think my stepmother did a truly great job at raising us, but I think she did her best with the situations that went on. And so it baffled me that she had to defend her integrity as a person just because of her race.

Tongan, or just Polynesian, festivities were always fun. We learned dances, how to cook things, ate new things, celebrated with others and often sang and took part in religious activities (Catholicism is important to the older generations of my Tongan family. They do not restrain the younger generations to it. My Tongan Nan told me that I don’t have to believe in it one-hundred-percent, but I was going with her to mass anyway). Whenever I could, I centred my homework on Tonga. For the Commonwealth Games Studies, I was so excited because they were part of the Commonwealth and that meant I could use the entire project to write about them. I learned various things and used to memorise stats about them that I could recite from the back of the school atlas without looking that made other kids surprised. I loved the flag and made it known. Once I was eventually left to look after myself, this part of my culture was almost gone. Today I still do some little research or remember my dancing steps and take pride in having the flag and the blood. But I feel a little like I’ve lost the most important part: the family. Like I detached and now I just watch from the benches. Can someone’s culture be lost like that? Am I overthinking it? I don’t have the dresses and leis and grass belts anymore. The mats are gone. The fans are gone. If I’m relying on memory, can I still say that is my culture?

I’ve taken part in Australian culture but have never really considered it a ‘culture’. Being an ‘aussie’ was just part of everyday life because, well… I live in Australia. I don’t believe I belong to Indigenous Culture but I do hold great importance in it, even if I’m only really opening my eyes to it now. My Swiss culture manifests in my strange accent, ability to imitate the accent really well and my interest in the European culture. I only found out about my Samoan blood last year. Tongan culture was the ocean I swam in the most. But now I feel like I’m sitting on the sure, waving to my relatives.

Being an adult has provided me moments of shock concerning my heritage. Not white enough, not black enough. I don’t like being denied my Polynesian blood but don’t ‘look’ it enough and don’t participate in it much. Because of this, I’ve had people ‘assume I’m white’ and they have made racist remarks to me about my own bloodline. Pulling them up doesn’t really make them apologise. It makes them go quiet. I have the same defensiveness over racist remarks about the Aboriginal people. Can’t stand them. But they let their guard down because I ‘look white’. I’m using this term here rather loosely and don’t want anyone to feel singled out by it but I’m hoping you understand my point. One of the most interesting things that have happened to me, and it’s happened a couple of times, is that I’ve had racist remarks made against me only when they’ve found out the makeup of my bloodline. The ‘n’ word doesn’t hurt me because I don’t like awarding it power and it’s not something I’ve ever had to suffer with to the extent of others, but it does hurt me in the sense that someone has deliberately used the slur because I am Polynesian and only because they know that.

So, I’ve had to find the definition of ‘culture’, and I still don’t know if I can give an answer to ‘what is my culture’. The bigger part of why I’ve been thinking about it so much is because in Week 2 we are expected to take to class an object that is important to our culture. And I have no idea what to take. I have things at home that display Tonga but nothing that I feel is important to the culture. A mini flag and a mug are really all I have left. And I think of the mug as more a novelty than anything else. Can I just take myself? Not really. Not when I doubt my own belonging to a culture. The next best thing is a huge shirt with a faded back. It has the crest of family on it. So that’s what I’m considering. But even though I feel like that’s what I can take in, thinking about it more has made me wonder where I stand in regards to that question. What is my culture?

I think what’s made me think about this so much is that I don’t really think of myself as in a ‘culture’ separate to those around me. I acknowledge other cultures when they’re blatantly obvious (by this I mean, I can see them and understand I’m not really part of them, like when we do Ramadan at work etc.) and such but have never looked at it as something divisive. There wasn’t a barrier that separated me from my father because of his ethnicity or my stepmother because of hers, or my mother and stepfather because of theirs. So I’ve never really had to think about it other than ‘I’m a proud Polynesian’.

Week 1 at Uni and I’m already having an identity crisis. Yikes.