"I think I beleive in civil rights": Re-remembering Trans-Indigenous Political Activism in Pauline Vaeluaga Smith's Dawn Raid

Abstract:Written as a diary and set in 1976, Pauline Vaeluaga Smith's Young Adult novel Dawn Raid (2018) is grounded in the voice of thirteen-year-old Sāmoan-Pākehā protagonist Sofia, as she documents her life, including her experience of the New Zealand government's immigration raids on Pasifika Indigenous peoples. The novel challenges colonial forgetting of the dawn raids as it speaks to a youthful audience, highlighting ongoing injustices of the settler nation-state. At the same time, the novel remembers and celebrates the actions of the Polynesian Panthers, an Indigenous-centered anti-colonial resistance group. The novel navigates complex solidarities and tensions between Māori and Pasifika activists during the 1970s. By foregrounding the complexities of Indigenous activist networks, Vaeluaga Smith intervenes in persistent media narratives that marginalize Indigenous peoples and demonstrates that forms of Indigenous community organizing and understandings of sovereignty negotiated in the 1970s continue to deeply impact Aotearoa's political present and future.