Quote: Linda Tuhiwai Smith

"What kind of spaces am I narrating here and why might it be important to understand such spaces? The very idea of postcolonial spaces is layered with, and evocative of, empires past, present and future, complicated stories and identities, intimate and alienated relationships, shifting borders and contested terrains, ambivalent, partial and contradictory meanings. Within these spaces people live and make sense of their lives. Here is the riddle; they occupy shifting spaces, they shift the spaces they occupy and yet the spaces are the same spaces that existed before. The contemporary spaces I describe have been created by the synergy of other spaces that were constituted decades, centuries and eons ago. Native Americans existed before the idea of America, they exist in the transnational spaces we know now as America and they live in the nation-state of the United States of America." (Tuhiwai Smith 549-550) ----> Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. “Introduction.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. Vol. 19, No. 5, September-October 2006, pp. 549-552. Print.