Southern Celts: Voices from “Aotearoa” New Zealand

Abstract

Interview narrators reflect on living their cultural connections to Ireland and Scotland while living in Aotearoa New Zealand. Among the questions they focus on are whether the experience of colonisation in the northern hemisphere has influenced relations with Maori, the indigenous people of Aotearoa. These co-created, layered and complex narratives are viewed as ‘‘lived and told stories’’, with the reader seen as a co-participant in the narrative. Applying the narrative analysis lenses of time and place left the researcher with a sense of the passage of time and the constant change that it bought for her own family and for interview narrators. These narratives are offered with a sense of celebration for the strength of cultures which can remake themselves across hemispheres and generations.