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This paper explores the identity markers and rules used in the process of national identity construction by young adult New Zealanders, drawing on empirical data from qualitative interviews with members of the majority culture of 'Pakeha' or 'European' New Zealanders. While these young New Zealanders draw on the markers of 'birth', 'blood' and 'belonging' identified in other studies, their claims to identity and belonging are troubled by the settler origins of their ancestors. The dilemmas these origins create for these young New Zealanders are identified along with the strategies they deploy as they seek to resolve them. The existence of these dilemmas suggests that a distinct identity rule is at work for this group that has not previously been identified in earlier studies. Thus, this analysis provides further evidence for the deployment of a common set of markers and rules as well as highlighting some of the ways in which these differ in different national contexts.In any society the dominant national culture is typically unproblematically 'at home'. The nation is first of all theirs and their belonging unquestionable. Within the New Zealand context however, the dominant national culture has settler -migrant and colonizing -origins. Their occupation of the homeland is then not so straightforwardly secured. Others were there before them. As settlers, they claim a national identity, but as Richard Handler (1990: 8) has expressed it, they are 'not the natives of choice' and remain plagued by an 'ontological unease' (Bell, 2006: 254). There is now an extensive literature on the difficulties of the contemporary white settler identities that have developed in the former British colonies of New Zealand, Australia, Canada and South Africa. 2 This literature is primarily based on historical and representational analyses -with anthropology (for example Lattas, 1990;Wolfe, 1994), museum studies (for example, Coombes, 2006) and literary criticism (for example, Goldie, 1989;Hodge and Mishra, 1991;Collingwood-Whittick, 2007) predominating. There has been little sociological analysis of settler identities (although see Stasiulis and Yuval Davis, 1995) and even less based on the empirical data provided by interview research. The primary question behind

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