Your Trauma Has a Whakapapa — So Does My Anger

by Rebecca Thomas

There is so much anger in the world right now.

It coils through comment sections, woven tightly into racist group pages where fear masquerades as fact. We have heard it echo across Parliament benches, sharpened into talking points and policies.

If I am honest it sits in me when I type and write about my experiences. I have been trying to make sense of how fiercely my own rage can consume me.

Why do I feel so fiercely about the direction of Aotearoa’s education system? Why did I feel winded when the mauri that was beginning to breathe through our curriculum felt extinguished? Why does racism — even when subtle — still tighten something in my chest?

To understand it, I did something simple.

I opened Jase Williams’ new book Your Trauma Has a Whakapapa.

And I breathed in that fresh-ink smell like it might tell me something about myself.

So far, I have only read three chapters.

Because as Matt and Sarah Brown write on the back cover, this is a book that holds you. 

And Jase’s handwritten inscription invited it to hold me — not just as a reader, but as someone trying to transform what learning could look like in Kaikohe. In Te Tai Tokerau. In Aotearoa.

So when he gently suggests that our reactions often have roots, I looked inward.

Not at the people who made me angry: Erica; the Ministry; policy makers.

But at myself.

My own trauma

Back in the UK, my brown skin was both blessing and burden.

I was six when I was first called “Paki.”

Seven when a matron joked she would bathe me in bleach to make me white.

I was born to white parents. My whakapapa gifted me Spanish brown skin — oily, dark, impossible to ignore. In the mirror I saw a “darkie.” On the inside I felt white.

Education treated me through both lenses.

I was celebrated in prospectuses — the intelligent brown girl, hair scraped back, looking suitably “sciency.” A success story. Proof the school was inclusive.

But never cast as the lead in school plays — just in case parents raised quiet eyebrows at an Indian-looking girl standing centre stage.

Not quite centred.

Not quite belonging.

At the time I did not have language for it.

Now I do.

I was being curated.

Not included.

Those moments lodged somewhere quiet.

There were others.

As a teenager I wanted to be a vet. I had seen animal cruelty. I decided I wanted to save something from suffering.

I told my teacher.

She laughed.

“You’re far too intelligent to just do that.”

Those words were delivered lightly.

They landed heavily.

Compassion was positioned as lesser than intellect.

Care was positioned as small.

So I redirected my justice.

I fell in love with journalists who flew into war zones wearing flak jackets, telling the world truths it would rather ignore. That would be me, I decided. I would expose injustice. I would write it down, capture it on film so it could not be denied.

And in journalist training, I had to write a book for a purpose and test it on a real audience.

I wrote it for my foster brother’s school. He was having trouble settling in. I hand-painted it. Typed it on my type writer. Bound it. It was about an angry boy who hurt others because he felt like he did not belong. A boy who needed understanding more than punishment.

I knew nothing about trauma theory then. Nothing about neuroscience. Nothing about relational pedagogy.

But I knew what it felt like not to belong.

I wrote from instinct and love.

When I sat in that teacher’s chair and read that story aloud to the wide eyed five year olds before me, something clicked.

This was the place.

Not war zones.

Classrooms.

This was where injustice could be interrupted early. Where belonging could be built before harm calcified. Where children could experience something different.

That was my calling.

Jase writes that many of us enter education trying to right the wrongs of our own schooling.

That line stopped me.

Because maybe my anger is not about personalities.

Maybe it is not about politics.

Maybe it is about pattern recognition.

When I see curriculum stripped of cultural breath.

When I see communities measured without being understood.

When I see tamariki hot-housed or standardised into silence.

My body recognises something old.

It recognises exclusion.

It recognises being curated but not centred.

It recognises systems that smile while narrowing who gets to belong.

And my nervous system flares.

Not because I enjoy conflict.

But because somewhere in me a six-year-old still remembers.

I do not know what schooling felt like for our current policymakers.

Perhaps it was different.

Perhaps they did not feel schooling in their nervous systems the way I do.

But I know this:

Trauma has a whakapapa.

So does advocacy.

What looks like anger from the outside may, in truth, be inherited vigilance. A refusal to let harm repeat. A deep instinct to protect children from carrying wounds they should never have to carry.

If my trauma has roots, then so does my work.

And maybe the question is not, “Why am I so angry?”

Maybe the question is,

“How do I transform this anger into something that builds belonging instead of burning me out?”

Because I still believe what I felt sitting in that teacher’s chair all those years ago.

Education can be the place where injustice ends.

Not where it quietly continues.

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If you work in education — in any role — I gently encourage you to read Your Trauma Has a Whakapapa by Jase Williams.

Not as professional development.

Not as another strategy.

But as a mirror.

Pause somewhere between the pages and ask yourself:

Why did I choose this work?

What in my own story am I trying to heal, protect, or rewrite?

What experiences shaped the way I respond to children, to policy, to injustice?

We bring our whakapapa with us — the visible and the hidden.