Excerpt: The use of public records is at the heart of my job as an archivist. I view myself as a facilitator of cultural production, someone who aids the accessing of stories in order to weave new narratives (including counter-narratives). But this image of myself is constantly challenged in my day-to-day practice. As an archivist working with government records, my relationship with the user is immediately complex: I become the personification of the state. As a Pākehā archivist working with government records that document settler colonialism in its many forms—dispossession, theft, cultural suppression, sexism, murder—I become something more specific. Whether I like it or not, in my role and in relation to Māori researchers, I embody settler colonialism.