I recently returned from New Zealand as a Fulbright Specialist. One of the places I visited was Te Puna Wānanga, which is a small piece of Māoriness on the Epsom Campus of the University of Auckland. The building that houses the classrooms and offices are slated to be razed. The demolition of the building and removal of the staff echoes the history of Auckland and its indigenous people, Ngāti Whātua, who have had their ancestral lands carved up to make way for the establishment and expansion of New Zealand's largest city, so that instead of fertile sea beds and bush there are anchorages for individual recreational sailing vessels and asphalted foot paths and campgrounds.

This seizing of lands and the dispossession under marching colonization of its indigenous people is a story told and retold across the planet. My own people, the Choctaw and the Cherokee, along with most of the those living east of the Mississippi were removed from their ancestral lands for the expansion of the US. And once the US had expanded to surround the lands given to all these discarded nations, the land was carved up into individual plots--160 acres for each adult and 40 acres for each child--creating a checkerboard effect in the planned-to-be 46th state, less than a hundred years after the land was given in perpetuity to these nations, completing its Manifest Destiny. The Allotment Act effectively reduced the political and economic influence of my ancestral nations. Today non-Indians easily out number Indians in Oklahoma, another blow to any political power.

All this might be considered ancient history if not for the demolition of Te Puna Wānanga or the Native American Studies building at the University of New Mexico, a little piece of land and Indianness along the edge of that campus. The latter is now safely surrounded by Academia, its own little reservation in the heart of the university. Perhaps the intent now is similar to the original intent of reservations, the academization of these indigenous study programs.

Next to Te Puna Wānanga is a marae. I wonder if the expansion of the University of Auckland will require that space as well.