Nī Dekkers-Reihana weaves their way out of colonial binaries into an authentic ‘unctie’.
In 2021, I got a new job. In preparation for the mahi, I had been reading the organisation’s mission statement and the word decolonisation kept coming up. Decolonisation. It’s a hot buzzword everyone’s talking about. I found myself asking, how can we decolonise? Is it possible? I wasn’t sure. I’d been on a personal mission for some years to unlearn various inherited habits and I was starting to see real change in my life. I thought, maybe we can’t reverse colonisation, but we can certainly unpack what we’ve learned to be true, and free ourselves from what doesn’t serve us. Days later, I made my new email signature for work. Without thinking about it all that much, I wrote they/them/ia under my name.
A few months earlier, I’d been rehearsing for the play, The Haka Party Incident, when Tāmaki Makaurau went into a short lockdown. My accommodation was surrounded by harakeke. With nothing much to do and too much to think about, I decided it was a great time to pick up weaving again. So I tracked down a karakia for harvesting, signed up for online classes with the Hetet School of Māori Art, and began weaving. I was enraptured. Though I hadn’t practiced rāranga since I was a kid, it came back to me quickly and I was advancing fast. Sometimes elements of te ao Māori feel out of reach to me because I didn’t grow up with te reo as my first language or immersed in kaupapa Māori. But that year, I chose to weave.
After our season finished, I went back to Wellington. The weather was too wet and cold to harvest harakeke, so my weaving came to a standstill. My hands were craving craft, and my mind had gotten used to the catharsis of weaving, so I searched to fill the need. That’s when I discovered crochet. I’d tried knitting when I was a teen and it hadn’t stuck. So I wasn’t sure how I’d go with a crochet hook. But I took to YouTube and with the help of some free tutorials, I was very quickly producing sweaters and bags. I seemed to understand the patterns but I wanted to make them my own, so I started to improvise, and suddenly I had this new language in textiles.
Being able to pick up a craft like rāranga, like crochet, I saw possibility. I chose to believe in myself and I saw the results right in front of my eyes. I made things I could see and touch, things I could wear. I had the power to adorn myself in whatever I could imagine, design and make. And though it was material, it was spiritual, freeing. It helped me take control of my image and my identity.
I had forever sat outside the social norms of a girl or a woman. But it was easy to put that down to society’s impossible expectations of women. And what else could I be? Saying I was non-binary, when I was okay with the organs I had, felt illegitimate. Moreover, I was worried about taking up someone else’s space. I’d been in brown spaces where pākehā dominated the conversation. I’d been in women’s spaces overcome by men, physically, audibly, you name it. I’d been in queer spaces where straight people held the mic for far too long. I didn’t want to be that person, standing in someone else’s way. So instead, I stood in my own way. I did what we so often do, to each other and ourselves. I didn’t believe myself.
But after many years of sifting through my proverbial intergenerational laundry, of proving to myself I could, I’d begun to see change as possible. I started to believe myself. And finally, at 27 years old, I was able to give myself permission to be what I’d always known I was.
Following pronouns, I changed my name to Nī. I’d already been thinking about a new term to offer my niece and I’d come up with ‘Unctie’, my own combination of auntie and uncle. And when I decided to start sharing my crochet project all the pieces fell into place. Thus Unctie Nī was born: a genderless fashion platform I’m developing organically alongside my gender journey.
Exiting the binary came as an exceptional and unexpected result of some grueling years of addressing and actively unlearning behaviours that had me trapped in cycles of pain. I nurtured and nourished myself until I was free, and I stepped out of my own way. And now when people call me Nī or refer to me as “they” or “them”, I am filled with such an intense self-affirming euphoria, and I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude, to them – for seeing me, and to myself – for believing in who I am.
The Haka Party Incident will be touring nationally from the 1st of June.