Bifurcation or Entanglement? Settler Identity and Biculturalism in Aotearoa New Zealand Avril Bell Introduction My family has been in New Zealand for 150 years, on both sides of the family. I have no claims to anything in Britain, and there has been no Maori blood in the family, so I have no identity. (Gilmore, in Bain, The Dominion, 2000, p. 11) This quote from New Zealand comedian Ewen Gilmore perfectly captures the ontological status of settler subjects as ‘human hinges’ (Morris, 1992, p. 471), ‘suspended between “mother” and “other”’ (Lawson, 1995, p. 25). Although Gilmore is making a joke, like a lot of humour it has the ring of truth. Of course, settler peoples have constructed themselves identities in the form of nationalism: they are ‘New Zealanders’, ‘Australians’, ‘Canadians’ and so on. Itis through nationalism, and its narratives of the relation between people and place, that they have consolidated their rights to belong, and to rule, in the colonies they founded. Even so, these nationalist assertions frequently remain uncertain, as Gilmore indicates. In this paper I focus on the uncertainty that surrounds assertions of settler identity in Aotearoa New Zealand. I argue that uncertainty offers an opportunity for self- reflection that is currently being squandered. Rather than reflect on how settlers came to be these ‘human hinges’ and what that means for contemporary New Zealanders, official representations of national and settler identity in Aotearoa New Zealand work to elide the sources of unease in New Zealand history. Since the 1980s the dominant rhetoric of New Zealand nationalism has been of a bicultural nation with two ISSN 1030-4312 (print)/ISSN 1469-3666 (online)/06/020253-16 q 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/10304310600641786 Avril Bell is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Massey University in New Zealand. Her current research focus is the colonial relationship between indigene and settler in New Zealand and the prospects for its contemporary transformation. Correspondence to: s.a.bell@massey.ac.nz Continuum: Journal of Media & Culture Studies Vol. 20, No. 2, June 2006, pp. 253–268