Indigenizing military citizenship: remaking state responsibility and care towards Māori veterans’ health through the Treaty of Waitangi

How does militarism reshape indigenous peoples’ relationships with settler states? In this article, we explore how military service both opens up and forecloses avenues for indigenous groups to claim new modes of responsibility, care and relationality from the state. Through a discussion of New Zealand Māori nuclear test veterans’ recent legal claims through the Waitangi Tribunal, we detail the range of ways that Māori veterans utilize and rework ethnic identity categories to encompass wider notions of citizenship, care and responsibility, and challenge neoliberal models of reparations. Claimants argue that their ongoing wellbeing sits at the centre of their partnership with the state, revealing how uneasily the Māori military body fits within mainstream logics of Treaty claim-making. Seeking healthcare and wellbeing here does not demand greater autonomy or independence, but requires ongoing interdependence, practices of care and attention to ongoing intergenerational obligations that, like radiation harm, have no clear endpoints.

The ethics of intergenerational relationships

According to the relational approach we have obligations to members of future generations not because of their interests or properties but because, and only because, they are our descendants or successors. Common accounts of relational duties do not explain how we can have obligations to people who do not yet exist. In this defence of the relational approach I examine three sources of intergenerational obligations: the concern of parents for their children, including their future children; the desire of community members to pass on a heritage to their descendants; and the relationship of citizens in an intergenerational polity.

Personalizing Immigrant Sacrifices

This research explored Korean American (KA) young adults’ experiences related to their sense of indebtedness toward their parents and perceptions of how indebtedness affected their behavior toward parents. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 25 KA young adults from immigrant families. Most respondents narrated their sense of indebtedness to parents, verbally acknowledging appreciation for parents’ hardship and sacrifice; however, they differed in how much they internalized indebtedness, varying in level of personalization and perception of salience of indebtedness. Similarly, youth did not differ in how they described the role of their felt indebtedness in shaping their behavior toward parents (including filial responsibility, desire for success, and promoting positive interactions) but their motivations and interpretations of these behaviors differed depending on the degree of internalization of sense of indebtedness. Taken as a whole, findings suggest within-group variations in how KA young adults deal with collective cultural norms regarding intergenerational obligations and relationships.

Grandparents and grandchildren: care and support in Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam

ABSTRACTRecent surveys in Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam reveal that substantial proportions of persons aged 60 and older co-reside with grandchildren and commonly provide grandparental care. Usually the grandchildren's parents are also present. Situations in which the grandchildren's parents are absent are considerably less frequent. Parents are commonly the main source of the grandchildren's financial support even if absent. Most grandparents that provide care do not consider it a serious burden even when the grandchild's parents are absent. Moreover, grandparental care is not always one-directional as grandchildren can also be of help to grandparents. These features of grandchild care reflect a regional cultural context that views acceptance of reciprocal intergenerational obligations as normal and in which co-residence of older persons and adult children is still common. Differences in economic development and past fertility trends account for much of the observed differences in grandparental care among the three countries by affecting grandchildren availability and migration of adult children. In addition, economic development and demographic trends will continue to shape grandparental care in the coming decades. Despite the lack of attention to development and demographic context in previous studies, these aspects of the changing societal context deserve a prominent place within conceptual frameworks guiding comparative research on grandparenting.