KO WAI MATOU?
THE PRIVATE NARRATIVE



To deny the importance of
subjectivity in the process of transforming
the world and history is naïve and simplistic.
It is to admit the impossible: a world without people.
(Freire, 1996, p. 33)

Ko Wai Matou?
The Private Narrative

Why and how did Cultural Safety as a set of ideas evolve? What were the historical, social, physical, political and moral influences which contributed to the ideas? And what were the subjective and personal influences and epiphanies, which brought about the personality which nursed Cultural Safety into nursing?

This section is an autobiographical narrative theoretically informed by work by Megan-Jane Johnstone (1999) in which she argues that reflective topical autobiography is an under-utilised research method in nursing. Johnstone further argues that autobiographical narrative serves the revelatory purpose of attempting to make the lived experience of the person directly accessible to others.

Christine Webb argues the case for academic writing in the first person. She writes that:
The use of the neutral, anonymous third person is deceptive when applied to quantitative research because it obliterates the social elements of the research process.
(Webb, 1992, p. 747)

It is appropriate that this narrative be told in the first person so that the social and personal context of the history of Cultural Safety can be established. In a study of this kind the narrator has a critical place, indeed an obligation to provide some insight into the personal, social and emotional processes which have lead to the particular intellectual and behavioural outcomes.
Reflective topical autobiography may be seen as a method which investigates the responsibility of the narrator to explain his or her own role as human conduit for ideas based on personal experience. Johnstone says that reflective topical autobiography enables the self-researcher to:
… return at will to his or her life story again and again to re-read, re-vision and re-tell the story in the light of new insights, understandings and interpretations of meanings acquired through ongoing lived experience. (1999, p. 25)

This argument is upheld as I read my own early work on Cultural Safety and see how it has changed profoundly in content and meaning as I have investigated new experiences and theory and combined them to enhance my own understanding of the world around me. In her broad discussion Johnstone warns that "researchers who are brave enough to write about their own emotions risk being ridiculed, dismissed and marginalised" (1999, p. 26), but encourages the search for the existential moment which Moustakas and Perry (1973) describe as a sudden understanding of life where one is aware of the rightness of a value or conviction or decision.
For me to be able to respond to the range of situations, at times painful, ridiculous and essentially human, which have been the Cultural Safety journey, has taken a consistent type of energy and commitment as well as a personality able to persist in the face of constant multifaceted challenge. It is relevant to this study to have some insight into that personality and the context in which it developed.