Rangitaki
These are our stories, this is our hā
FEBRUARY 2025 by TE RIU RAIHANIA
Taku Patu, Taku Patu Māori Mana Motuhake! Taku Ihi, Taku Ihi, Taku Wanawana!
Can you hear it? The sound of political chains and subjugation crashing down around us pounds in my heart like the raging Moana of Kiwa eating away at the takutai. Colonial violence is real. Climate change is real. The systemic removal of Te Tiriti O Waitangi from the very systems that are meant to serve Māori, is real. Emancipation too then is surely real. If we can see it, hear it, taste it and feel it, we can then, step by step, inch by inch, make it happen. Nothing is too hard.
Holding space for important kaupapa to support creating our own narratives so that we can thrive in our whanaungatanga here at home, in our place is pivotal in the vision of Ahikaa. The Taku Patu workshop recently held in Tokomaru Bay was about allowing us as a people to be authentically ourselves. Being "Unapologetically Māori" is our weapon in this resistance.
We enlisted the expert services of three amazing wahine, mātanga in their own rights. Tina Ngata, activist and advocate for environmental, indigenous peoples and human rights, spoke about the doctrine of discovery and how it has shaped the world we live in today. We learned about the origins of racism, de Zurara and how some indigenous populations are dismantling the systems of oppression they are living in on their own lands, followed by a process of “tuku” to let all the hara and darkness you encounter go so you don’t dwell on the horrid things that are, have been or are yet to come - in my case, I tuku so all of that yuckyness doesn’t eat away at my soul. Dr Teah Carlson, from the Tīpuna project and kaupapa Māori researcher and evaluator for Massey University, took us on a creative outlet journey, taking into account our relationships with and championing our taiao as a space of not only wonder and beauty, but healing and hope. Sealing the breakout with a pledge to tipuna passed on and a promise to future mokopuna - a very powerful practice to hold ourselves accountable and to stay the course in times of turmoil.
Dr Veronica Tawhai Pukenga Tiriti of Te Atakura Educators and Associate Professor of Massey University, wrapped up the afternoon with a Te Tiriti o Waitangi breakout. Conscientising practices that are us, naturally enacting our own mana motuhake and helping us to articulate our ways of fighting the good fight when we don’t actually know we are actively resisting. And as always, Ronnie reminds us of what our tīpuna signed up for by going over the provisions of Te Tiriti and cutting through all of the fluff and rūpahu that ingrained systemic racism and successive governments tend to try and cloud our minds with. We parted ways with critical decisions to action at mahi on Monday - and little gems to help develop our own bespoke plans for the future.
These Māori scholars, proud indigenous women, activators of learning, stirred up the ole fire in the belly and had me questioning the actions of this racist, white supremist government. “When is enough, enough? How much more are we to take?” Then I listened to Maya Angelou, (thanks for the link Teah!), as if she too has learned versus from my tīpuna waiata tukuiho, as though she too has donned the tipare and piupiu my Nanny wore as a young member of Te Kapa Haka o Te Hokowhitu Atu.
“We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated. That it may in-fact be necessary to encounter defeats. So we can know who the hell we are. What can we overcome, what makes us stumble and fall and somehow miraculously rise and go on. I know that a diamond is the result of extreme pressure. Less time and less pressure and it's just crystal or coal or fossilised leaves or just dirt. But time and pressure will create a diamond. It is considered one of the most beautiful elements and it’s one of the most hardest elements on our planet.” Maya Angelou.
This is one of my favourite Nanny Ngoi waiata, it’s as though she was a prophet - everything she wrote and sang about back in the day’s is relevant now - like she knew there was a tidal wave of concientisation coming our way and wanted to help us through it all:
As I sit here and ponder
Ka noho au i konei ka whakaaro noa
Me pēhea rā te huri a te ao katoa?
Ngā rongo kino e tukituki nei i te takiwā
Ngā whakawai e hau nei i ngā tamariki
Kua kore noa he ture hei arataki
Te mana, te ihi ka takahia mai
Kia kaha tātou ki te whakahoki mai
Te mauri ora me te wairua
Auē! Ngā iwi e!
My tipuna senses have been off the chain lately, and I can feel something coming. Only time will tell I suppose.
Reflections: As I sit here on the wet sand on my Takutai, watching my baby and moko’s play and swim, I think to myself, “enjoy your time as unknowing specs of dirt my babies, before the pressure gets hold of you, adding layers turning you into a lump of coal like me and your Aunties. Or later on when the vice grip gets tighter and you’re transformed into a crystal like Nan and Papa, then ultimately after enduring layer after layer of experience and time, you will be a pressurised diamond, - the hardest and most beautiful element, just like your Tipuna. So for now just play, be happy and carefree. Roll around on the sand, feel the dirt, taste the water, listen with all of your soul to the taiao that is yours - my cherished little bundle of mud and dirt.
JANUARY 2025 by RACHEL JANE LIEBERT ON BEHALF OF TE RŌPŪ PĀKEHĀ*
Dear Select Committee
Re. Principles of The Treaty of Waitangi Bill
We are the Pākehā collective of The Tīpuna Project (TTP) – a community-based project to research the decolonial possibilities of communing with our settler ancestors, as funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. Since our project began in January 2023, we have been collecting data with and/or from hundreds of Pākehā throughout Aotearoa as well as engaged with individuals, groups and the public across England, Ireland and Scotland.
We wholeheartedly oppose this bill, which undermines Te Tiriti o Waitangi (Te Tiriti) and thus both the sovereign rights of Māori and the rights of Pākehā and other tauiwi to be living in and caring for Aotearoa – a land and country that we all fiercely love.
As you know, Te Tiriti – written in te reo Māori and signed by rangatira Māori – is the only valid version of our founding covenant as per international law, and it was what welcomed settlers to these shores on the condition that we respect Māori sovereignty. To honour Te Tiriti is therefore to honour the labour and dreams of our Pākehā ancestors.
This bill does not honour Te Tiriti. Firstly, it reduces the text to a set of principles – a flawed approach that mindlessly repeats the flawed approach of The Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975, which incorrectly assumed that there were two valid versions of the treaty (not one).
Secondly, the proposed principles all disrespect Māori sovereignty: the principle of ‘civil government’ ignores that Te Tiriti only gave permission for the Pākehā Crown to have partial governance and ignores the 2014 finding of the Pākehā Crown’s own Waitangi Tribunal that Māori never ceded sovereignty; the principle of ‘rights of hapū and iwi Māori’ ignores that these rights are inherent according to international law on Indigenous self-determination; the principle of ‘right to equality’ ignores the need for equity given historic injustices caused by breaches of Te Tiriti and ignores the inherent coloniality of the Pākehā Crown and therefore their inherent incapacity to address Māori needs (indeed, the very attempt to effectively redefine Te Tiriti demonstrates their ongoing disrespectful, unequal, inequitable treatment of Māori).
In short, the bill is ignorant. In this sense, it risks repeating the violent mistakes of some of our settler ancestors, who also made decisions that ignored and breached Te Tiriti and therefore that continue to harm Māori and to invalidate our belonging and identity as Pākehā.
As Pākehā today, we are responsible for upholding the mana of our settler ancestors, including by cleaning up after their mistakes – not making things worse.
Yet this bill would make things worse. Te Tiriti affords a level of protection for the lands and natural resources of Aotearoa that is urgently needed in these times of climate crisis – a crisis that is affecting all of us. In addition, Te Tiriti is world-leading in terms of its protections of relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, but this bill would have devastating social consequences for Māori – remembering that Māori are not just the Indigenous peoples of these lands who our settler ancestors promised to respect, but also the descendants of those very rangatira who welcomed our settler ancestors when they were desperately seeking a place to make a better life for their families and descendants: us. Is this bill really what your ancestors would want?
In sum, this bill will create – not counter – confusion and division. Indeed, it is the original text of Te Tiriti itself that clearly states how Māori, Pākehā and other tauiwi can live together harmoniously. While we therefore agree with David Seymour and his colleagues that there needs to be national conversation on Te Tiriti, this bill is not the way. Matike Mai, for example, is a powerful Māori-led nationwide movement that has been drawing directly on the Te Tiriti text to carefully make community spaces for tens of thousands of New Zealanders to consider how the Pākehā Crown can step into authentic relationship with iwi and hapū Māori. This is what we should be resourcing – not this bill.
We do not need this bill. We do not want this bill.
Sincerely,
TTP Pākehā Collective (and our ancestors)
*MIHI IN PARTICULAR TO THIS EXPLAINER BY TINA NGATA
Rachel’s 6yo kid, Musa - the next generation of tangata Tiriti (people of Te Tiriti) - who would not be here if their settler ancestors had not been welcomed through Te Tiriti <3
DECEMBER 2024 by LILLIAN MURRAY
Treaty Principles Bill submission
In November this year, hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders participated in a nationwide Indigenous-led hikoi in support of Te Tiriti o Waitangi – signed in 1840 by rangatira Māori and representatives of the British Crown to welcome settlers on the condition that Māori authority be respected and upheld. This founding covenant is currently under increased threat by a conservative motion to replace Te Tiriti with legislation that effectively institutionalises the retort that ‘all lives matter’, ignoring two hundred years of promises, betrayals and injustices by our Pākehā Crown, serving our country’s ongoing colonisation.
The government is currently receiving submissions about this proposed Treaty Principles Bill. Below is one of the submissions from our Pākehā co-researchers. We have posted this particular one as it is rooted in not just Lillian’s longstanding commitments to decolonisation and emerging, nuanced relationality with her settler ancestors, but also her Christianity – obliging us in Te Rōpū Pākehā to push our colonial-binary-thinking and make space for an anti-colonial Christianity to be possible, indeed to have always already been both here and even necessary for this mahi.
Tēnā koutou, my name is Lillian Murray.
In this submission, I will speak through some of my family identities as a way to articulate my strong rejection of the premise of this Treaty Principles Bill along with its content.
I am Pākehā: a Murray from Cromwell, Te Wai Pounamu (The South Island) who came over from Lanarkshire, Scotland in 1865.
That my ancestors came from lands afar is my first stake in Te Tiriti o Waitangi being protected as it was agreed to in 1840, so that indeed Te Tiriti in turn might continue to protect my rights to belong here.
I am also a Kemp from England, and then the Kerikeri Mission Station in Northland, Aotearoa. My ancestor, Henry Tacy Kemp, eldest of missionaries James and Charlotte Kemp, was a young man of about 17 when he was present at the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi / Te Tiriti o Waitangi on the 6th of Feb. He was a speaker of Te Reo Māori, so understood the discussions, deliberations and speech making. He was employed by the Crown to create with his hands an official facsimile of Te Tiriti o Waitangi which included copying over the tohu and signatures of the chiefs who had already signed. He was textually familiar with Te Tiriti for having done this, as well as contextually familiar for having been there.
His story is a sad one, one I share as a warning to you, and as a second reason for my own position on composting this Treaty Principles Bill.
Despite being so familiar with the Treaty, Henry Tacy Kemp made a decision to betray the promises of protection of Māori land and treasures in Article 2 by creating and executing the Kemp Deed. He and Gov. George Grey did this by threatening Ngāi Tahu, and by lying to them. The Kemp Deed dispossessed Ngāi Tahu of the huge middle Canterbury block of land in the South Island.
Oh, the pain of betrayal. Betrayal of his own Christian upbringing to love neigbour as he loved himself. Betrayal of the covenant of Waitangi, and a betrayal of an inheritance of honourable identity for his descendants.
I feel you are in a similar position to what Kemp was in. There has been a long understanding of what Te Tiriti o Waitangi has meant. The gathering and expression of this understanding is thanks to the Waitangi Tribunal. Therefore, you, like Kemp, have every opportunity to know what the Treaty means. You, like Kemp, are in a position of choice to betray our Treaty Partner, in this case, by robbing the Treaty of meaningful ability to effect laws and policies. Which, let it be added, would be a betrayal to me and my people of my own moral place to stand in this beloved land.
On behalf of your descendants, and mine, please don’t do this. Te Tiriti o Waitangi as it was and is, is a beautiful foundation to build upon. Every betrayal of this oath beloads the next generations with such huge responsibilities to attempt to heal those wounds. I feel tired for your descendants if the mana of the Treaty is damaged by you letting this bill go through.
Here is an articulation of my affections for Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Please hear in it the depths from which I recommend you scrap this Bill.
I love our Treaty of Waitangi
I love how it’s of us, I love how it’s of God
I revere with a tenderness the fragile circumstances of its birth
I love the warm night sky that dwelled above the wānanga before the first signing
I love the prayers that were prayed
I love the karakia that were incanted
I squeeze the Treaty’s open hands to me and my peoples
That if I could hold onto our vows, I could be held in belonging here
I love that me and my people were named as different
And blessed to govern ourselves as we would see fit to live into our highest humanity
(We have work to do and agency to do it)
I love that it meant Māori would continue to lead their own destinies
Blessed is my life for Māori leading their own destinies!
I have a favourite marriage that I love to be around
Immense is the respect for each others’ differences
Great is the desire of each for the other’s wellness
Our Treaty is like, “I do.”
Our Treaty is like my nana, guiding me how to love
Let’s call our firstborn, Treaty
I love our Treaty’s older sibling, He Whakaputanga.
A lighthouse in choppy seas.
I love our Treaty like I love a field that smells like jasmine, bonfires, and fresh morning dew all at once.
A field big enough to give each other space, and big enough to play on together.
Our Treaty is a greenstone entranceway, carved deeply with beautiful intentions
An enduring commitment to right relations
“Tēnei te kare kau, te kare ā roto e”
-
Finally, I leave you with a passage from the Bible, the book of Psalms chapter 15.
“Lord, who may dwell in your sacred tent?
Who may live on your holy mountain?
The one whose walk is blameless,
who does what is righteous,
who speaks the truth from their heart;
whose tongue utters no slander,
who does no wrong to a neighbor,
and casts no slur on others;
who despises a vile person
but honors those who fear the Lord,
who keeps an oath even when it hurts,
and does not change their mind;
who lends money to the poor without interest;
who does not accept a bribe against the innocent.
Whoever does these things
will never be shaken.”
-
Let us be people who keep our oath even when it hurts,
Let us not change our mind. Toitū Te Tiriti.
With love,
Lillian Murray
Lillian standing in front of the bay of Akaroa Harbour whereupon the Kemp Deed was arranged, July 2024.
NOVEMBER 2024 by RACHEL JANE LIEBERT
Loughcrew & Lar & love & grief
In 2022, after Teah, Tia and I applied to the AHRC for funding to do this project, my fam and I went to Ireland to ask the lands for their permission, too. A cascading series of mistakes introduced us in a 3-second window to a Gaelic elder, Lar Dooley, protector of ancestral cairns in Loughcrew, County Meath. It was Samhain – the dark month – this month, actually – when the ancestors are at their closest. Lar helped us to plan a ceremony on the back of a napkin and under a starlit sky just before dawn, we cleansed ourselves in an ancient well (now mainly covered by a not-so-ancient road) and walked up the hill to climb on top of a cairn known simply by the letter ‘T’.
I was barefoot and the cold was excruciating – I could barely think of anything else. The winds mocked my attempt at even just a flicker of flame. Our plan was failing. My friend left, and I sat up there alone, feeling disappointed, kindof desperate, with no idea what to do except get my boots back on. So I just quickly, unceremoniously muttered: CanIdothisproject?
“Only if you trust yourself”
The immediacy and lucidity of the words caught me completely off-guard – I had barely even finished my question. I was so stunned – and the message seemed so clear – that I asked and said nothing else despite the glaringly open comms. I hobbled back down the cairn, now accompanied by this conditional ‘yes’ as it immediately started to reveal its trickster energy, doing flips of meaning.
“Only if you trust your self”
As I begin to see myself as my ancestors, and my ancestors as also non-human, my self in this project has started to both unravel and entangle – with everyone and everything. Were the Loughcrew lands asking, telling, urging, inviting, beckoning me to trust in this en/tanglement?
I write entanglement as en/tanglement to bring out the tangles, the knots. So often in decolonising work we – Pākehā – can tie ourselves in knots – it is exhausting to be in and (I am told) it is exhausting to be around.
Including because these knots become nots – we go round in circles, we get scared of ourselves, we cancel, we retreat – tied in (k)nots, we cannot move – things are too “complicated”. (This word first caught my ear in relation to settler colonial genocide when I went to Palestine 12 years ago – it was a constant refrain by Jewish Israelis, no matter what their politics.)
Likewise in the ‘post-human turn’, entanglement is often implied as a problem – as something that takes away ‘our’ agency – it is as though we (researchers, activists) have no sense of what it means to be beyond individualism. We are lost – in the dark.
But/and as Lar has taught me, it is also here in the dark that our Gaelic ancestors are closest.
Or at the kitchen table. Recently my fam and I returned again to Loughcrew and I had the pleasure of chatting with Lar in his home over several cups of tea and a Samhain altar. Lar is now in the middle of intense chemotherapy, facing death for the third time in his life as though he himself is constantly being called toward ancestor-dom, living in a liminal space that so perfectly mirrors the surreal beauty of the lands he and others have now made home. This time I found there to be a kind of elemental synaesthesia there – spiderwebs shimmer above land as floating streams – thistles look up from grass as fallen stars – clouds wrap around hills in a frothing tsunami – the ancestors sit and chat at kitchen tables.
Chats with Lar always feel sacred. He is a fountain of knowledge about our Gaelic ancestors’ lives and practices yet I have to enter a mode of attention where I do not (often cannot) try and mind-grasp facts so much as b r e a t h e in the stories, imagery, whispers, tohu, affect – beckoning me also into a liminal space/state where binaries are at bay and paradoxes play…
I wanted to ask him about love, because love – as I understand/feel/dream it – is what drives Lar via a vibrantly-coloured mythic story that connects him deeply to Aotearoa and is enshrined around his neck through a whale-bone pikorua – two shoots, spiralling around and with each other – much how I envision Matike Mai – where the relational is our shared more-than-human materiality, our whale bones.
True to form, when I asked Lar about love he ‘just’ spoke about his love – Ani – enacting love’s energy rather than analysing it. This was the energy that directed Lar on his self-described “mission” to revive Gaelic cosmology in Ireland, and for reasons beyond articulation he found himself at Loughcrew to do so. Here on two adjacent hills – one public, one private – are the remnants of 5500yo domes hand-made via our ancestors’ collective placement of rock after rock after rock after rock after rock after rock after rock after
rock
rock rock rock rock
rock rock rock rock rock rock
rock rock rock rock rock rock rock rock
rock rock rock rock rock rock rock rock
rock rock rock rock rock rock rock rock rock rock creating an overground tunnel leading into a central recess of art that animates once a year when the rising sun shines a single beam of light directly onto it. On one hill there are eight of these cairns, with each rock-tunnel-art entanglement angled in different directions to catch different sunrises – one for each of the 2 equinoxes, the 2 solstices, and the 4 mid-points in-between.
In short, these cairns work as a giant clock. Telling our peeps when to plant/grow/harvest aka how to survive with and as the seasons and therefore with and as the Cailleach – our oh-so-witchy earthmama…
Back in the day, Lar continues, these cairns would have been covered in white quartz, charging in the day and glowing at night as they radiate an electrical charge that refuses the colonial separation of time/space – a refusal I am slowly realising is necessary for communing with ancestors.
Indeed for Lar, the best way to hear our ancestors is to simply sit up here in the dark, and listen.
Perhaps this is why colonial Ireland (for Ireland too is in decolonial struggle) still describes these cairns as “tombs”, with people assuming that they are where the dead were buried and therefore a place to be distant if not afraid. Not unlike Pākehātanga, the Church in Ireland twisted people’s relationship with death, ancestors, earthmama.
Reverberations that ache in my/our (whale)bones.
And so I also wanted to ask Lar about grief. After the unceremonious ceremony I described above, we got back to the house and I was overcome by a deep, indescribable sadness that was both mine and not-mine. Tears streamed out of me for five hours. Soaked in ancestral waters that were undeniably femme. And that have not stopped since. I told Lar about this and, after listening closely, he didn’t hesitate:
I’ve found an awful lot of grief up there. I mean I live here so for me it’s different – I was able to go up there in a sleeping bag and just sleep in the cairns and say, “Ok, tell me what this means”. So the grief is real. I go up there and I feel grief all the time. And the grief is because of what we have lost. And for Māori as well, what they have lost because of colonisation. And it goes all round the world. It was patriarchy gone mad. And I think the real grief is the fact that we have lost contact with grandmother. And the only way that we can go back through the ages and find our true lineage is through the female line. And the land itself is a feminine identity and everything that lives on the land is a feminine identity. And all of a sudden the Church came in with this patriarchal ‘Man is right, woman is wrong’ and I think that’s what broke everybody – including Pākehā – because, Who are we? We don’t know where we came from because we have lost contact with mother earth, with grandmother, with the beauty of the world, with how the sun relates to the earth, how the moon relates to the earth, all of that’s gone. And it’s painful for everybody because nobody understands, Why is life so difficult? Because we have lost contact with everything that for 300,000 years was who we were, and in the last thousand years that has completely gone. But there’s this feeling in us all, What’s wrong with this world? Where did we go wrong? And where we went wrong was putting man in charge, the male entity in charge. The grandmother would make decisions from a point of view of wisdom, from a point of view of how human relates to the world we live in. The wisdom-keeper always kept full contact with the earth, she was the medicine woman, the witch, the wisdom-keeper. Patriarchy doesn’t like that because there’s no control in it. The inability of the male to understand the female entity that we live on is endemic to how every culture has grief involved. What did we lose in order to become Irish? That’s the grief that I think everybody feels.
What did we lose in order to become New Zealanders?
What did we do in order to become New Zealanders?
For the grief that we Pākehā need to feel is not just about what we lost but also what we did - do - to Māori.
When I returned to this recording to write this post, I was struck to discover that – in mine and Lar’s entire 90-minute chat – it was these particular few minutes that were covered over by the loud noise of a jug boiling – someone else in the kitchen was making themselves a cup of tea.
English Breakfast Tea aka “normal tea”, normality – an everyday reminder of the settler colonial state in Ireland and in Aotearoa.
This colonial interference forced me to physically lean in and listen hard. Is my body showing one way that we can be response-able within this grief-full context?
OCTOBER 2024 by CARMEN FAIRLIE
Our Tipuna Our people Our stories Our Hā
Our connections as indigenous tangata whenua with te taiao and ourselves is a phenomena built into our DNA. The unseen facts have been hidden for some time due to colonisation, thought processes and belief systems that are foreign to us. The tipuna project is about trusting those things that are innate, recognising these as our tipuna and using our kare-a- roto to translate and communicate across and between the complexities of tēnei ao.
This series of poems were written with the presence and guidance of our tipuna. They are an offering of some of the unseen thoughts and feelings experienced of the effects of colonisation on our past and present and how we might move forward into the future as indigenous peoples. They also serve as a reflection, observational and connection piece of our first wānanga together with our roopu tauiwi.
Whakapapa
Remove the | differences
Tīpuna
He mā tētahi
He pango tētahi
He Māori tētahi
He Pākehā tētahi
Kōiwi
Bones
He orite te ahua o ngā kānohi
My Nans
So different yet so same
Tīpuna
Kōiwi
Bones ancestors
Ko ngā iwi
Bones whakapapa
Mine | ours
Remove the | differences
Skin | flesh
Bones remain
Same?
Same look?
Same underneath?
Difference| Masking | Hiding
Many layers
Added layers
Deeper
Higher
The more the better
Until
we look different | we feel different
Remove the layers |we are the same
My tipuna same
Same but different
In time | In place | In knowing | In being | In living | In surviving
Ngā mōrehu
Only the fittest survive
White man’s world white man survives
He farms on stolen land
Strips rākau native to these hills, valleys
Eradicates beliefs, knowledge, communities
All that scares him
one beating heart
The essence
Shot to pieces
Fragments scattered
How did we survive?
We trusted, we believed, we fought
My tipuna was a white man
My tipuna was not a white man
He pakeha
He tangata
He tangata whenua
A man of this land
A man not of this land
Of our land
Of Aotearoa
A man Amans AMEN
But what of my nans?
When I think of my tipuna I only think of my nans
Why is that? Why is that?
White man White nan
Not a white man Not a white nan
Only writings of mans
Only visions of nans
Why is that? Why is that?
Imbalance Instability Inequality
Uri dying
Koiwi remain
Wānanga
He mā, e hara i te mā
He whakamā, e hara i te whakamā
He kōiwi mā
He orite he rerekē
He tino rerekē
We are the same but we are so different
What is it that makes us so different?
What is it that we need to find within ourselves?
That we need to unlayer
What is it that we do as separate as individuals?
Together?
We are the same
But we are so different
I can’t help think about this time
And time again
Some of us have merged
Some of us have layers between layers
Our layers have fused together into some sort of grey area
One is black and one is white
The colours of my tipuna
And yet
There’s all this grey stuff in between
And now we have to figure it out
What is the grey stuff?
How might we interpret that grey stuff?
xrays | mri | blood sample | toto
Are we the grey?
It’s confusing
Navigating through grey | Deciphering the ara| the path amongst those layers
Neural pathway connections
Creating synapses from pain grief
Moving past occupation
Of our unconscious minds
Past unconscious colonising
Of our being
No longer shall we work through
We are the living breathing of that working through
We are the hā
Kua tae te wā
It is time
Time to overcome
Time to reconnect
Time to embody
Time to know
Time for naming
It is something that cannot be named
Time for naming
Time for explaining ourselves
Put names on things
Label
Explain these things
To the other people
To the white man, to the coloniser
To our tiriti partners
It is
Time to undo
Whakamatara
The undoing
Wairua | Kare-ā-roto | silence
Hā the breath
Time to visualise
Tipuna Together
You are same but so different
We are same but so different
Unlayering
Unafraid
to do things apart
to divide the cells
combine dna
Or remain separate
We are the same but so very different
We are the grey
(Photo left to right : Nanny Erana Riki (nee Saddlier), Grandad Ray Donald, Nan Myra Donald, Pāpa Duke Riki Waru)
SEPTEMBER 2024 by ROS EDWARDS
Untitled
It’s not yet time to bake a cake or to make a pie or to make a stew. It’s a time first to think about knowledge and where knowledge comes from. (Linda Tuhwai Smith)
Over the past two decades years I – a UK social researcher – have had the privilege of knowing and working in partnerships with Māori and other Indigenous scholars. I love the resources we co-produced on the Indigenous and Non-Indigenous research partnerships project – our footprints in the sand to help non-Indigenous researchers think about how they can approach working with Indigenous researchers and communities. And now I play a small part in The Tipuna Project (TTP), hooking into mainstream networks, agendas, opportunities and outputs when helpful.
This collaboration has been a ‘something else’ experience for me, where TTP invites me into another existence – a world where the past is in front of you; where bodies, land and water are listened to; where ancestors can be included as respected co-researchers in collective community participatory action research; and where methodology involves separate but fluid spheres that move with historical violence and intergenerational trauma to keep people safe. I keep a reflexive diary of my exchanges and involvement in TTP and can see a recurrent bewilderment in my entries: ‘I hang on the edge, uncertain …’ (14.4.23), interlocked with an eagerness to understand a world view that I can reach out and touch, but not fully grasp – a collective consciousness that’s larger than and beyond my individual self.
Maybe these collaborations and involvements are why I get asked to review articles on Indigenous methods that have been submitted to traditional methodology journals, as if I’m able to pronounce upon them. As if I can judge from the perspective of a (non-specific) Indigenous way of seeing and understanding the world. I have no expertise here. But sometimes I feel able to accept the review invitation because the article submissions are unhooked from the Indigenous world view that I can touch but not grasp, and rather hook themselves into a/my mainstream zone of methodology and methods.
Researchers (often non-Indigenous researching Indigenous communities) write about deploying yarning circles, storywork, beading and so on. There are discussions of weaving, stitching or braiding together Euro-Western and Indigenous methodologies, such as constructivist theory or systems theory or symbolic interactionism, as if each approach in the mixing occupies an equal place in the mainstream methodological knowledge frame. These pieces are thinking about adding in to the dominant paradigm rather than grounding elsewhere. Linda Tuhwai Smith’s cookery analogy about mixing ingredients together (above) comes to mind here.
It’s not yet time as she says, because first ‘we’ (Euro-Western-centred researchers) need to take account of the foundational issue of challenging our assumptions about what and how we can know, what’s important to know, what’s reality in the world, what’s knowledge, what and who can speak and convey knowledge – decolonisation of ourselves and the academy.
For some decolonising academic knowledges means ‘adding in’, diversifying through proactive recentring of the knowledge of the colonised, giving marginalised and Indigenous world views an equal claim to constituting genuine knowledge. For others though, decolonisation means a profound challenge, committed to moving away from Euro-Western framings of knowledge and its production. There are also concerns that decolonising in universities is – as Sisters of Resistance have put it – ‘the new black’. A diluting incorporation. Are Indigenous methods the new methodological black?
There’s been a surge of attention to Indigenous methods in the UK, a colonising nation state, and more widely – the UKRI AHRC programme that funds TTP might be viewed through this lens. This begs the question, why the interest? Do Euro-Western-located researchers obtain funding to investigate Indigenous communities, and does adopting Indigenous methods seems to offer cultural sensitivity? Is it because Indigenous approaches are contextualised, non-extractive ways about finding out about the world, that highlight the constellation of oppressions and injustices stemming from colonialism, and identify struggles and resistances to them? Is the adoption of Indigenous methods regarded as a pathway to political resistance to the neoliberal paradigm that’s taken hold in the Euro-Western paradigm, where social research is regarded as a market-driven activity serving the interests of systematic accountability and political governance?
The ‘stir in Indigenous methods’, ‘cultural sensitivity’ and the ‘Indigenous methods as resistance’ versions feel rather instrumental and appropriative to me – what has been termed epistemic capture – especially if we ask the question of whose interests these serve? Often there’s little discussion of the processes and manifestations of power dynamics from the perspectives of Indigenous scholars and communities, about relationships to and with all things. There’s scarce consideration that what constitutes a relationship depends on where you’re standing; of the need to build up relationships of trust and accountability over time rather than swoop in and expect welcome, collaboration and impact; and to address and think through the presence of historical violence and intergenerational trauma in the here and now.
The Tipuna Project challenges these absences and exclusions. It brings a positive way forward that prioritises and is led by Indigenous ways of knowing and being in exploring the process of decolonising participatory action research to work towards intergenerational healing, with potential benefits for settler societies more widely, and for non-Indigenous researchers with a commitment to participatory research and social justice.
For non-Indigenous researchers such as me, TTP can act as inspiration and exemplar. While we aren’t ourselves able to draw upon the deep well of a particular Indigenous world view, context and feeling, TTP encourages us to open up to another world view and envisage entanglements of corporality, time and space. Through accounts of the challenges of TTP practice we can understand the importance of working within spheres of existence: for safety in participatory research involving Indigenous communities, and for engaging settler peoples in intergenerational healing that encompasses accountability. We’re then facilitated to position ourselves as part of coalitions to disrupt hierarchies of knowing and being. And we can actively celebrate innovative decolonising participatory action research practice within our mainstream methodological spheres of influence.
AUGUST 2024 by TIA REIHANA
All these hands and Feet
Waewae wai wondering up to my thoughts like a backwash finding rhythm within the shorelines of Papa and Hine, rough and repetitive... comforting in its conflict.
These feet are here too.
Waewae wai wandering past pain to the river mouth to see where your fresh can meet salt, Parewhenuamea to your Hine and held by our māmā.
These feet are there too
A mouth of waharoa spitting across the fragilities of frequent apologetic nuances otherwise silent without. A mouth trembling away like a wiri, somewhat similar to shaking leaves.
Mothers and daughters, sisters and yet not. We are unstuck against the expectations of strange landscapes unrealistically painted over us as a Pania portrait.
These hands are there, too.
Digging in deep, with the child on our hip, grocery in a pocket, and vege in the garden. Growing only because it runs on minimal mauri. Just wai and ra .... and often very little wā...
The time in our ringaringa... our hands that sow seeds of potentiality via these fingers of fire. The children of our labour in birthing and making spaces for others as ourselves
WE are here too.
Often, we can look for an understanding of relationships within the environment in which we co-inhabit. Within Aotearoa, these relationships between people and place swirl in meeting places. They are frequently unsettled with a historical discourse that continues to be navigated by incoming generations whose inheritance shuffles through privilege and opportunities, both inclusive and exclusive. To navigate the binaries of the ‘bi-cultural’ seems a reductive approach, brushing over the complexities that the person so often wants to be attentive to. Here, the ‘chunks’ of a bi-cultural Aotearoa can be mis trued for an ‘us and them’ mentality advancing a cultural klumping of the self on the frontline of the everyday lived experience. Māori Marsden writes that “Until we relearn the lesson that [we are] an integral part of the natural order and that [we have] obligations not only to society but also to [our] environment so long will [we] abuse the earth” (2003, p. 69). Marsden encourages a look outside the immediate translations, beyond the human and for the rich complexities that can derail oversimplified constructions easily absorbed under the armpits of a dominant discourse.
This agency for a ‘human-centred’ life pedagogy often leaves little for the in-between necessities of our pluralities. The vast umbrella of ‘decolonisation’ that expands into the culturally illiterate landscapes of globalisation can result in some being left to ‘dodge balls’ that keep you distracted in your surroundings and exhausted in maintaining safety. My realities of dodging balls as an Indigenous person are everywhere when I shop, wait in line for a coffee, rent a house, walk my dog, go for a promotion, enter my son’s school, talk with work colleagues, deliver my teaching content, go to the hairdresser, eat at a restaurant... it’s everywhere... and it is laboursome. Thus, when we come into these meeting places that swirl and wish for more generosity outside the proofreading that already exists – the trust in which to speak, move, and fall into your own ‘vulnerabilities or fragilities of human experience’ become swept into the placelessness that can exist within cultural literacies. So, we know what we know, but when does the knowing become an excuse for the absence of our actions? Where the reason or urgency to hold a space overpowers the value of listening and listening and then just listening some more.
And, if we have listened, how might this inform the spaces we co-inhabit and then thus determine the labour distribution? From dishwasher to karanga and back again, roles and responsibilities decided over generations and yet often expected for consumption in but a moments interaction. Decolonisation for consumption resistant to meaningful action and loosely woven as a te reo email greeting and farewell... These words dance next to guilt-zoned territories that can dispossess moments of authenticity. Leaving it rummaged like a fatigued and fragile happening easily lost in the loudness of the privileged DJ whose music drowns the room, even in silence. Afterwards, such assaults of the contemporary community riddled in historical amnesia can weave a bureaucratic collage of what we think we may need to be socially cohesive and politically astute. These brittle banners of success delivered as spiritual and personal awakenings breed contempt and ongoing distrust.
It’s so messy with good intention. It’s so flawed with the human experience – and it is ongoing. It is in our feet, and it is in our hands. It is felt when we breath in each other’s mauri, it is seen in silence, in the arrangements of space, and the rhythms of our expectations that present tohu throughout. It is evidenced in the teachings of our tīpuna, as we collect the reminiscence of their ways to navigate the now. It is in our intertribal alliances remembered in battle and lived today in partnerships, and in the chromosome’s of tikanga activations which provide a way to create connectiveness.
Outside of these connections, I often feel tikanga can be an abstract notion loosely held within structure, statements, policy, and frameworks. Said and delivered in scattered confidence with occasional apologetic comments, and loose translations that continue to rely on and sometimes burden the manaakitanga of our whakapapa and territorial teachings. The taonga passed down by the ancestors is embraced momentarily and only as needed. For a moments reconciliation? Like a passing car, that doesn’t stop yet slows down enough to be able to describe the scenery. And as the car leaves, perhaps to return tomorrow, others cannot travel. Instead, they remain on the brink of social abandonment reflected still in the ongoing disparities, injustices and the social/political and historical racism of this Country. It’s like a forever haka gurgling away in the puku of our body and whenua. Soren and Johnson (2017) write that “Place calls us to quire definite protocols for balance and understanding. Place calls us to the struggles of coexistence in this pluriverse, a world of many worlds” (pg.1). Yet my whenua, my kurawaka itself the creator of worlds, life and more screams in my karanga and mispronounced te reo about place… The one I searched for, the one I have in Waiomio and the one I want for my son.
All these places, all these hands and all these feet…
JULY 2024 by RACHEL JANE LIEBERT
White womxn & ‘intergenerational trauma’
I wrote the piece below before July 29th, before the devastating stabbings in Southport, UK, before the sickening explosion of fascist riots that have continued ever since. I read it now – one week later – and so much is swirling around my head and heart and gut that I feel dizzy, my shoulders, arms, hands, fingers so heavy they are struggling to type.
As thousands of fascists bus into cities, throw bricks at people, attack mosques, burn refuges for asylum-seekers, they smell of a familiar, White supremist pattern. They are largely White men, and they are ultimately out to protect White women – or, more accurately, White wombs.
This might sound far away – literally and conceptually – from our work in The Tīpuna Project, but it is frighteningly close to home. These riots are a violent reminder that the collision of whiteness and victimhood is nothing short of terrifying. And this collision, as I try to untangle below, is something we risk when turning to ancestral praxes with White womxn.
—
Whiteness. It’s on my mind. It is my mind.
And it’s a mind-fuck.
The whole concept of a ‘mind’ is drenched in Descartes, separated from flesh, spirit, cosmos and, therefore, ancestors.
Disrupting this colonial separation is part of the radical and magical possibilities of The Tīpuna Project.
But can I, we really get away from our whiteness so easily?
I can’t just unzip my White skin, my layers upon layers of privilege and entitlement and violence. Layers that go far deeper, wider, tangled than ‘me’.
So what happens, then, when whiteness meets ancestral praxis?
Indigenous and Liberation psychologies have long recognised that the violence experienced by people’s colonised or enslaved ancestors is passed down through generations, creating ‘soul wounds’ that play a key role in not just the distress of individuals and communities but also coloniality itself. Both specialist mental health services and decolonising social movements have thus been innovating ancestral praxes for healing this intergenerational trauma in Indigenous and Black peoples.
Increasingly, practitioners and activists globally have also been calling for and experimenting with the potential of these praxes in White settler peoples. For a small handful of trauma practitioners this involves approaching whiteness as a ‘moral injury’ inherited from our ancestors’ perpetration of colonial violence – an approach that has emerged through the treatment of veterans. Many decolonial activists, however, are drawing on the work of Black therapist Resmaa Menakem or Nigerian post-activist Bayo Akomolafe to approach White settler peoples as ourselves victims of collective violence since the ‘Dark Ages’ of Western Europe, including internal colonisation and forced migration, which is thought to have created the conditions of possibility for our subsequent participation in colonial violence. As the saying goes, “Hurt people, hurt people”.
Te Rōpū Pākehā has been energised by these happenings, which are quite rapidly gaining in popularity – and quite rapidly making us nervous. As a group of White femmes experimenting with the decolonial possibilities of ancestral praxes, the risks of this work have been circling.
In Aotearoa, people with our kinds of bodies make up the vast majority of non-Indigenous decolonial activists. However we also play a complex role in sustaining coloniality that, yes, can be traced back to 15th-18th-century Western Europe: in particular, when our femme ancestors were targeted en masse during the ‘witch-hunts’. This prolonged violence aimed to eradicate collective holdings of land that were used by communities for the day-to-day harvesting of food, firewood, medicine and other necessities and delights of living. Largely femme spaces, such ‘commons’ had also become a powerful site for cultivating relationships and, therefore, seeding revolutions that threatened the cis-male, land-owning elite. In the name of capitalist productivity, land was to be enclosed, and in the name of capitalist reproductivity, womxn effectively were also to be enclosed – cut off from the land, each other and, indeed, our own bodies.
Feminist Marxist Silvia Federici documents how the large-scale, state-led violence that followed eventually created The Good White Woman – detached and docile, pure and innocent – in support of first capitalist and then colonialist interests as similar tactics were then used to violently enclose land and Indigenous and Black bodies elsewhere, including Aotearoa. White womxn, then, became agents of the capitalist, colonialist state that both killed and created us. So much so that today we are arguably the figure of coloniality.
Figures, it turns out, with some pretty layered grief and rage and shame in our bones.
As my own ancestral praxis has been unfurling, I’ve been thrown by these affective encounters. Sometimes it feels as if my femme ancestors are screaming at me to listen to their pain. And yet I don’t want to. Why? What am I afraid of?
White womxn’s role in coloniality comes largely from a weaponising of the abovementioned ‘virtues’ literally beaten into us through the witch-hunts. From lynch mobs during US slavery to missionary schools in Aotearoa and current-day Karens, a now naturalised innocence and purity enables claims of vulnerability or victimhood that can be used to justify another’s racism or dismiss our own.
Amidst the smoke, White womxn are granted humanity and protection from White men, but only in exchange for our ongoing submission to White cis-hetero-patriarchy – with violent consequences for feeling, thinking or acting otherwise.
Our perpetration of coloniality is thus not, as some try to suggest, despite our historic and contemporary oppression as womxn but entwined with it – tightening a knot of racism and sexism that, in Aotearoa, has significant consequences for Māori womxn in particular.
And yet, (trans)misogynist violence is often used by White womxn to deflect, rather than deepen, our response/ability for racism.
So couldn’t engaging our ancestors’ experiences of (trans)misogyny just further serve this deflection?
Add to this that coloniality has been linked to a kind of chronic dissociation in White settler peoples – inherited from our ancestors’ role in racist violence and sustained by our own ongoing role in the same – that prevents us from feeling the painful truths of racism, further enabling our coloniality.
For White womxn, such a loop seems even more tangled as our feelings have long been treated as threatening within cis-hetero-patriarchy and also, of late, within anti-racist movements themselves, where ‘White tears’ or ‘White fragility’ are found to recentre if not reinscribe our supposed vulnerability or victimhood and therefore, once again, White supremacy.
Does this mean that both the absence and the presence of our feeling sustains coloniality? What do we do with our intergenerational grief, rage, shame within this seeming paradox?
I tried to draw all this below.
Figure 1: White womxn’s intergenerational trauma
For so long, trying to articulate – let alone untangle – the knots of my White womxn-ness has just made me go blank, silent, once again repeating, weaponising the trauma of my femme ancestors: during the witch-hunts, womxn who spoke out were muzzled with an iron bridle that forced spikes into their/our tongues if they/we tried to speak, and paraded through the village.
The Good White Woman: more White than womxn.
What might this mean for Te Rōpū Pākehā in The Tīpuna Project?
I don’t know. But I am wary of any analyses that seem to land us in paradox, immobility, silence. They suggest binary thinking, that my imagination is once again trapped within the colonial episteme. Surely something else is possible, something other-wise.
For example, what could open up if our ancestral praxes explicitly move not only from and to decolonisation but also from and to feminism? Not the White, transphobic kind that violently imposes its own narrow understandings of ‘woman’. But the kind that shows White womxn that there is more strength in being womxn than in being White, that refuses victimhood and its so-called ‘humanity’ and ‘protection’.
And/or what of the body? Mainstream trauma practitioners argue that healing requires somatic intervention, however this typically ignores the coloniality of our relationships with our bodies: the witch-hunts persecuted femmes whose collective strength came from our fleshed entanglement with an animated cosmos. In order to dominate earth-mama, capitalism required that she be disenchanted and that the body’s capacity to attune to her magic be exorcised - capacities embraced by witches. Separated and put into a hierarchy where ‘the mind’ ruled, the new Cartesian body was treated as brute matter disconnected from knowing, feeling, being the world. Alienated, it became what Federici called ‘the first machine’ of capitalism, both intelligible and controllable: two goals promoted in mainstream trauma studies.
Moreover, this mechanisation enabled a detached figure-cum-standard of humanity – what Black Philosopher Sylvia Wynter calls ‘Man’ – to be at the core of the colonial episteme, thereby ignoring, denigrating or exterminating all those who live in relationship with flesh, spirit and cosmos. Not just the witches within White womxn, but also Indigenous and Black peoples.
For five hundred years, then, our White femme bodies have been socialised – through violence and through seduction – to be robotic foot soldiers of colonisation. What if our ancestral praxes were a means to reconfigure them/us?
This is not a call for some kind of ancestral extension of ‘self-care’ – still too often wooed by whiteness into individualism. To have decolonial potential, ancestral praxes with White womxn must engage the body as common – that is, as something more-than-human, collective and counter-colonial.
For Pākehā womxn, this suggests firmly grounding our work in the land itself. Papatūānuku, our foster-earth-mama who has raised us for generations, holds close both the ongoing violence of colonisation and our ongoing more-than-human-ness. And she has the profound capacity to love us, her foster-children, throughout this painful, knotty work.
Maybe ancestral praxes for White womxn are ultimately about (re)learning how to receive and give this kind of deep, radical love?
It will require care, it will take time and it will be a mind-fuck. But/and surely something else is possible, something other than passing on our (ancestors’) violent grief, rage, shame. Something other-wise.
JUNE 2024 by TEAH CARLSON, RACHEL JANE LIEBERT & TIA REIHANA
Karanga mai te pō
Following is an extract from an academic article written by the co-leads of The Tīpuna Project after conversations with and makings by the other Māori and Pākehā co-researchers. The article is part of a special issue in Compass on freedom struggles within the academy, edited by Puleng Segalo and Michelle Fine.
In Aotearoa, ordinary talk of tīpuna is not of genealogy or lineage but of whakapapa – both a noun and a verb of, once again, never ending beginnings. Whakapapa encompasses not only the beginnings of passed (not past) generations of humans and non-humans but also the ‘dark interstices’ in-between (Mika, 2015; Paraha, 2020). These spaces of in-between are the third, the vā, where connections, relationships, stories are. It is this tangling fibrous weave, not ‘individual’ people nor even ‘lines’ of blood, that weave, that whakapapa.
In The Tīpuna Project, then, as all our eyes and I’s get tugged and pulled by the colonial episteme, we call on darkness and te pō to help us be in the cracks of not just coloniality but also of whakapapa. Those in-between ‘borderland’ spaces of radical potential (Anzaldúa, 1987), where what matters is our becoming together, our ‘poetics of relation (Glissant, 1990), our ‘entanglement’ (Akomolafe & Ladha, 2017) - all called upon as tactics for decolonisation.
However these cracks are also reminding us, that, in the words of Puerto-Rican activist-scholar Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2016), there is no ‘place for laziness’ in this work – there is colonial in the anti-colonial and anti-colonial in the colonial. Darkness and te pō protect us from these and other binaries and colonial leanings toward categorisation and reductionism (Glissant, 1990). They blur the edges of things, merge things together, foreground&background, individual&context, now&then, me&you. The eye and the I are lost. Things shift shape, shapeshift, allowing contradictions to cohabitate, sheltering the plural and the more-than-human (Mika, 2020; Stengers, 2012).
The desire.
The rua.
The mana, the mama.
The worms.
The whispers.
The witches.
The queers.
The prayers.
Darkness invites a world of lively forces that question, tease, disrupt, animate and crack our work together, tricksters that refuse to be caught (dead) in a think-net.
In turn, we move slowly, tentatively and carefully, with uncertainty, not seeing where we are going so much as sensing the way, expecting only that we will bump into things, including each other, and that we will likely stumble if not fall. Any lurking colonial goal of mastery, of solution in the ‘tidy activist sense’ (Akomolafe & Ladha, 2017), continually displaced by a non-linear, loopy path of mistakes and failures and trying again. An onto-epistemology, a praxis of not doing Knowing, having Knowledge, being Knower, where we do not (cannot) seek to simply move forward – or even backward – so much as awkward (Akomolafe, 2024).
In turn(ing), we feel awkward. We feel lost. We feel dark.
And
we
s
p s
i
pr l p
a
i s
pr l
a i
i s r
pr l s l
a i
i spa s a
pr lrp
a
i ai l
r r s
a
As we spiral, we spin, sometimes we realise we are dancing.
Sometimes we realise we are writhing.
And that we need to sit.
Talk, whisper, cry (sometimes with laughter).
Together: If there were one prescribed method that we are employing, it is whitiwhiti kōrero, spiral dialogue, developed by Māori researchers to actively take the dynamic of control away from the researcher. Instead, through constant reflection and negotiation with others, meaning is woven in the collective (Bishop & Glynn, 1999).
But to call on darkness is not to declare a methodology so much as move to the cracks – to seek entanglement, not (just) Enlightenment – senses heightened, (more) protected from binaries, urgency, mastery so we can try and be (with) our shimmering otherworldly guides, our ancestors, our tīpuna, both because of and in spite of the colonial episteme.
And it is to move to the caves,
Hine-nui-te-pō,
the slowing of time, a retreat, to rest,
a cool shelter,
to preserve the paintings on the wall.
As we have listened to the echo………
Tangata Whenua lets rest, karanga mai te pō.
Tangata whenua spend so much of our time/labour/attention doing partnership work, decolonising at every hui, every sentence, every research activity, having to give, highlight, spotlight, paint banners, protest, challenge, be challenged, to be the lone Māori voice – to explain the ordinary. We are trying to rest, sneak in a daydream, but we are exhausted, numb, hurt, overwhelmed, underwhelmed.
Māori methodologies aren't separate from our everyday lives of relationality. It's not an extractive, step by step process; it's a return to Tāne, to push up against the sky and the earth to honour in the between. When we travel from universities into community we don't arrive as institutions, we arrive in service. To learn from communities. They are expert. We are translators, from western worlds, with agendas in (re)indigenisation. So when we lean on PAR as a means to describe a process knowing its limitations. In this weaving we act then give ourselves/each other permission – to rest, unravel, sigh, swear, laugh, cry and bleed in the cave…
As the thighs of Hine-nui-te-pō squeezed the life from Māui-tikitiki-a-taranga, the shapeshifter/trickster, we have realised we are PAR and more, our lives are legacies of action and participation – we are power, mana wāhine, and we need more of us.
Karanga mai is more than calling on the darkness, it means to invoke and embrace our natural cycles.
(We) have been violently placed out of sync with the environment for the benefit of a capitalist agenda – facing the commercialisation of education/knowledge and we are overdue to rebalance.
Our atua rae, atua wāhine, tīpuna whaea are this rhythm.
Hine-Ti-Tama is the dawn, their call is seen as the glow before the sunrise, an affirmation of aroha. Their karanga is heard in the song of the manu. As the sun rises Hine-Ti-Tama evolves into Hine-Ata, Hine, of the reborn morning. Their dominion is the creation of the new day. The day continues to grow as they reach full flourishment. They become Hine-Ranui. Hine of the great Sun. This is their zenith of power. They change again and become Hine-Ahiahi. Hine of the burning fires. They bring comfort, warmth and coming together. Day continues and they change again to Hine-nui-te-Po. The Great Hine of Night. Now they are our Great Hine of Death. They welcome us with a different karanga. Te Karanga o te Mate. The call of death. This continues until the next dawn when the cycle starts again. (Nā Timoti Pahi).
Te pō is us. It is deeper, richer and more fibrous than night, darkness, nocturnal – it is breath.
In the words of Pāpā Hohepa Delamare: The mystery of all creation is the goddess breath. She takes a piece of earth & blows it into space. Her life force creates the universe. The human mind, with many illusions, thinks it is important. If we could understand her neutrality, we would know that we are nothing but potential that came from the exhale of a wondrous god.
As descendants (also) of Hineamaru and wayfarer of the physical body, the relationship to whenua and Moana nui a Kiwa is paramount. They create danced narratives that reflect currents of waterways as a conscious and tangible reality... as it flows under skin... as salt in my/our tears... in the maramataka and internal experiences that work alongside rhythms of the moon; in reflection to the migration of my tūpuna on waka; and .... in the pūrākau (cultural stories) of ātua (our spiritual beings and deities and the ‘original activists’). For their stories are activisms, or – as Samoan artist and general bloody trouble-maker, shaker and breaker Rosanna Raymond (2021) advances in her work around Oceanic methodological engagements – Te Vā ‘Activāations’ (the intrinsic relationships and in-between spaces coded with potentiality), offering culturally relevant pathways to remember, re-imagine and revitalise.
And so, as we sit, writhe, dance in the cave, we gently shovel place and space as means to
recentre.
And to re-centre asks for us to re-focus and even re-prioritise an already heavy bureaucratic collage of what we (including the ‘we’ of this piece) think we may need to be socially cohesive and politically astute. Graham Hingangaroa Smith’s (2015) articulation of ‘conscientisation’, and the revitalization and rejuvenation of a Māori imagination, challenges us to move beyond the engrossing politics of distraction that place colonisation at the centre of argument, not the needs of Indigenous peoples…
References
Akomolafe, B. (2024). We will dance with mountains. https://www.dancingwithmountains.com. Last accessed April 2024.
Akomolafe, B., & Ladha, A. (2017). Perverse particles, entangled monsters and psychedelic pilgrimages: Emergence as an onto-epistemology of not-knowing. ephemera: theory & politics in organization, 17(4)
Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera. Aunt Lute Press.
Bishop, R., & Glynn, T. (1999). Researching in Maori contexts: An interpretation of participatory consciousness. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 20(2), 167-182.
Glissant, É. (1970). Poetics of relation. Michigan: University of Michigan Press.
Hingangaroa Smith, G. (2015). The dialectic relation of theory and practice in the development of Kaupapa Maori Praxis. Kaupapa rangahau: A reader, 17.
Maldonado-Torres, N. (2016). Outline of ten theses on coloniality and decoloniality.
Mika, C. (2015). Counter-colonial and philosophical claims: An indigenous observation of Western philosophy. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 47(11), 1136-1142.
Mika, C. (2021). Subjecting ourselves to madness: A Maori approach to unseen instruction. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 53(7), 719-727. Conversations in Kaupapa Maori, 97.
Paraha, T. (2020). A choreopoetics of Te Pō. Ka Mate Ka Ora: A New Zealand Jounral of Poetry and Poetics, 18, 29-41.
Raymond, R. (2021). Conser.VĀ.tion|Acti.VĀ.tion Museums, the Body and Indigneous Moana Art Practice. https://openrepository.aut.ac.nz/items/54fb9b6f-b123-4ada-aacc-74d8ba83b35f. Last accessed, April 2024.
Stengers, I. (2012). Reclaiming animism. E-flux., 36. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/36/61245/reclaiming-animism/. Last accessed, April 2024.
MAY 2024 by NAOMI SIMMONDS
(re)store
She sits guard at the entrance to the underneath
As kids we are allowed to move through the system of rua - pits, caves, storehouses, our own underground playground!
Our childhood curiosity doesn’t speak of the ancient wisdom but we feel it in our dirt stained knees and hands.
We duck in and out, moving from below to above with ease
Nan, just sits at one of the entrances, kete in hand, long grass all around her, quiet but not silent.
These were our storehouses, our aisles for food and medicine held in the cool embrace of the kōpū of our whenua
The smooth walls formed by ancestors hands and tools with a wisdom that permeates the darkness
Light streams in from the entrance ways and even as kids we know what that light means, that light reveals the cracks of a world of rules and responsibilities that aren’t formed by this land
We return. Our underground playground feels much smaller and through my mother eyes feels more dangerous, cliffs, uneven terrain, overgrown entrance ways
Cautionary words are uttered, ‘watch your feet’, ‘don’t go to close’, ‘watch your sister’, they don’t listen
They’ve been here before even though they have not set their feet on these pathways
They have touched the floors and walls in this network of caves
I sit at the entrance to one of the rua pits as the kids quickly fall into the intergenerational memory, play and joy, their laughter echoing against the earthen walls
The grass is high around me, it’s itchy
And then I see …
What Nan must have seen as
She sat voice stilled but spirit searching
The farms, the dam, the quarry, the power lines. The extraction of things to make other things. The draining of lifeblood and chipping away of flesh and bone. For what? For who?
No wonder she was quiet, the noise outside was deafening.
The kids pop out all smiles and earth browned palms of hands and soles of feet and ask when we can come back.
I visit often in my dreams, feeling myself drop down into the rua pits received by the dark embrace of our mother’s womb. I lean into, and learn from, the cool and gentle folds of her walls; seek hibernation. Her darkness is potent. It transforms. From earth, dirt brown to kōkōwai red. Reddened. She cycles through the ripples within, storing them, holding them in the membrane of her walls. She is where I (re)store my sweetness.
The light punctuates through the entrance/exit the precipice between within and without. And not far away I hear the sounds of extraction and exploitation rattling the walls of our storehouse, it keeps going, when will they stop? When is enough enough? How many more things do they need?
The sounds get louder, closer, reaching into the cave, trying to wrench out the pieces of me that it can get its hands on, trying to turn me into things that others want. The Crusher starts up. Whole pieces of me are fed into the top, compressed into thousands of smaller pieces, it's hard to recognise myself.
She gathers me up and keeps me in her embrace, places me piece by piece into the storage pit, and sits at the entrance.
I hear the kids crying.
It's son crying. It’s a nightmare.
Eyes open, it’s dark, 3am kind of darkness
I roll over and kiss my son’s forehead, his ringlet curls tickle my mouth and I taste the sweetness of his pale skin.
You too, my son, will play in the underground network of wisdom and intelligence that our ancestors built, I will make sure of it.
Note: this writing is inspired by this photo of my Nanny Daisy and my cousins and one of our many visits to the extensive rua network on one of our pā sites Piraunui in Te Wāotū.
APRIL 2024 by WREN & THE AUNTIES
AUNTIES
We
Miss-fits
We
between the cracks of ka puta ko
We
the jagged twigs on family trees
utterly b u r n a b l e
utterly on fire.
We who bleed all through the ‘child-bearing years.’
We who miscarry
silently, in the second month.
We who never bleed.
I want to say: “check your pro-natalism”
without sounding like a misanthrope, a misogynist - make no mistake:
he taonga, he toa ngā māmā
and
can we make a little more space
for the aunties.
Who may be māmās too (now, or one day)
who may be any gender
who may or may not get paid for babysitting
who may or may not get to be special to a child
or a few.
can we take one b r e a t h
for those of us who birth a thousand things
in the light
and in the dark
who suckle the more-than-human
beget their bodies through our bodies
who wrap our arms around entire families
entire movements
and keep vigil through the nights?
For we who may yet grieve
an emptiness -
might you be generous, and gentle with us?
might you consider us kind-of bereaved?
Might you not assume where we might be choosing to fit within the Mystery?
might you not assume that we have (had) a choice
at all.
To my aunties: I see you.
To the crones and queers, the quiet ones, the whores and sorcerers:
I see you and I am of you.
To the crazy cat lady: meow. I love you.
MARCH 2024 by SARAH HOPKINSON
WORMS
This writing began after our second wānanga Pākehā as a response to our collective wonderings on the role and potential of darkness in The Tīpuna Project. You can see some of the other contributions here.
In the pitch dark, worms writhe and wriggle. They eat the rotting organic materials that are in the soil, releasing it as soluble nutrition for plant growth. They leave drilospheres wherever they roam - tunnels that are lined with tiny amounts of matter that have gone through them and out the other end.
Drilospheres are worm-width underground tunnel systems, tiny fertile tracks that run behind the worms. Without earthworms and these tunnels, plants can’t access nutrition and humans have to rely on fertilisers. Much like the bee, the earthworm is a keystone species for all life on earth.
We started worm farming seven years ago, and now tend hundreds of thousands of red wigglers. They’re a different species to the earthworm, but the process is the same. They live in a pitch dark environment, feeding off waste from our plates. When the worms eat the rotting food, the associated microbes (bacteria, fungi, nematodes, protozoa) also go through the worm's digestion. The resulting worm castings are so nutritionally rich and microbially alive that there is no other way to either manufacture it, or replicate it.
In European folklore, worms are symbols of both death and renewal. The Tīpuna Project feels strongly of both. We are in the decomposition and we are in the spiral.
Darkness is a place of incredible fecundity. A place for rotten ideas and decomposing structures to be rearranged. In the dark, life can transform what was finished into something anew. Here in the Tīpuna Project, we have a chance to digest hospiced ideas of separation and supremacy and create nutrient tunnels, oriented to life, for understanding ourselves as Pākehā.
The ‘I’ is truly lost in decomposition. The worms, and their work, quickly erode any illusion that we are singular, individual, corporeal entities. This ‘I’, that is identified as Sarah-body, rose from, and will eventually return to the earth - a flow of entropy and syntropy that destroys boundaries of my people’s individuation. I am you, and you are me and together we must writhe.
In this darkness, of what we seek to do in this project, I feel truly lost. But it is a lost-ness of fitting proportion. The framework for understanding our reach both back to our ancestors and into ourselves, doesn’t exist and can not be seen. There is no linear form, and so there is no knowing. We are in the sludge, twisting, turning, without sight of what is ahead. Perhaps that is how it has always been. We create routes for travel through practice, through practice, through practice.
There is inherent discomfort using the analogy of red wiggler worms for what it is to do this work as Pākehā. I wonder whether the work we are tending to in the Tīpuna Project is more important than just worms. I am gentle with these feelings though. Hello there, I say, recognising the brine I have been pickled in, the centuries and centuries of white supremacy and human centrality.
Perhaps humans are more important than other living kin, my dis-ease whispers.
Your ideas are quite separate from a pile of food scraps in the dark! my hubris scoffs.
The grumbling, manly mutters coming from somewhere, wander off as I keep on going.
Here in this project, we attempt to digest the unresolved, the suppressed and the unspoken from our shared settler colonial violences. In the tilled, deplete soil of what it is to be Pākehā, the drilosphere of this project is undoubtedly infinitesimal. But these subterranean tunnels, both underground and fugitive, might structure and sustain diverse new growth for understanding ourselves in relation to place in ways that are as yet unimagined. In ways that can’t be manufactured, or replicated.
Sometimes, when I imagine us as worms, the scale feels out. Like I am too big for that skin.
And then I zoom out.
Notice the size of us today, in relation to all that was, and all that will be.
Notice the size of us today, in relation to all of the universe.
Notice that there is more life in a teaspoon of living soil, than all people on this earth.
And then Pākehā humans as worms, creating drilospheres?
That feels just about right.
FEBRUARY 2024 by INGRID HORROCKS & TEAH CARLSON
ŪAWANUI A RUAMATUA WAI:
Movements from water to wai
Cyclone Gabrielle Tairāwhiti, Anniversary Week
Four women spilling out of Lily’s van at Makarori. Three from here, one from elsewhere. Hair, waves, dresses, flapping shirts, thighs, wombs, disks, spines.
When we take our feet to the warm water, bury our toes, a mā whai strokes silently by, wings as fluid as water, all the colours of sand. A kaitiaki.
*
On the beach, a fragment of crayfish shell, a reminder of alert red orange.
An image of Carmen’s daughter, Te Waiotu, standing in a river mouth soon after the cyclone, piles of slash behind her. I really love the water, she says. Being detached from it – I get really sad. Really anxious. I just can’t get all the logs out of the water and I can’t clean the water.
Teah asking, baby in arms, but what do we need,
as wāhine ma?
The weight of exhaustion in the air, so humid it makes faces wet.
As Ingrid arrives the wai calls,
she has been cleared to swim after an operation,
the soft inner lining of her womb removed.
Hinemoana holds her in the shallows.
*
*
Four women on the sand. Hair, waves, legs, sticks for drawings and words. Carmen writing first about our kaitiaki,
mā whai, then ma wai, who will do it, and
ko wai, who are we, and
he wai, how can we go back?
*
Lily tells about the toxins poisoning the crayfish. Fish exported. Kai moana depleted, sickened, nothing to eat. She draws a crayfish on the tideline.
Two days on, she will stand in the project exhibition space dressed as another kaitiaki, a kōura, crayfish, all claw and boiling rage.
*
Up at Ūawa we watch as Mere bends down into the stream with a clarity tube taking samples, the word Disolve on the back of her waders. I love investigating our awa.
Her reference point from the 2018 flood: tuna hung on fence lines, suffocating, you could hear the sound of their gasping.
After the water has bubbled in, she takes aim down the sightline of the tube.
52 centimetres clarity.
She gets right in the river..
19.9 degrees.
Conductivity 574.
DNA captured.
Two snails and one karawai – a tiny cuzzy of Lily’s kōura.
A water boatman, racing round with a couple of oars.
Only when we step out of the river does it become clear how small the space allowed for the awa is, a precious, fragile passage, a canal held lush with riparian planting, moving through fields of maize. We need to start upstream, Mere says. Everything comes from the source.
Beneath all the talk, the awa flows toward the sea, its sound weaving with wind in the harakeke.
*
These are some of the most sediment-laden rivers in the world.
*
In the cyclone we watched water come from two valleys, then it went dark.
*
Being told that that family there, the father with a baby on his hip, lost their home to water. That there, a swimming boy was killed by slash in the sea.
*
Drawing stick in hand, Carmen says, Sometimes I get stuck in the darkness, and I thought I better come back to the light. I thought of this place here. Takutai. Where we stand. The tidal form.
At Tatapouri a group feeds stingrays, a circle standing in the moving sea. The whai can recognize the heartbeats of different people. Beat to beat. Pumping vibrations of shared blood and wai.
We are more than half water.
In the sand, Teah maps the river mouth along an MRI of Carmen’s spine, shows the shared pressure points of pain between body and whenua. But as Teah draws the pain a year on, Carmen stands beside her, her body soft, her back tall again, though there is still pain. Her daughter Te Waiotu is not here, but a year on she is up too, surfing, riding waves.
Over the coming days, while feeding her baby, with the help of her whanau, who bend and saw, etch and hold, Teah creates a lightbox, Ū awa nui.
We work together to describe it.
The work embodies layerings of whenua, wai, body and kupu.
It is about pain and the journey of not being believed,
a representation of the devastation but also the beauty that remains.
Map of the mouth of Ūawanui a Ruamatua
Magnetic resonance image of a slipped disk in Carmen’s tūara. The disc bulging out. Pain like childbirth.
These tohu are here..
We can’t ignore that,
We need to pay attention.
We were talking about Papatūānuku, earth mother giving all these signals.
We wanted to make
something beautiful
to embody our wai.
*
At sunrise, some of us swim, bed faces softened by watery dreams. The sun rises pink then gold, a karakia is said, then we enter, young and old, the sun shining on us and from us, salt on our tongues and skin, as the earth tilts forward, bending, tilting with all its oceans, taking us with her in her slow, gracious spinning through the sky, moving always toward new light.
Wa-i, we came together and laughed, dreamed, created. Three days or three lifetimes we are not sure, one thing we know is we wove light, in an imperfect time, a creative pressure, we shone, spoke into the unknown and called for sandy beaches, swimming awa and moana, a healthy home for our kaitiaki.
Words gathered by Ingrid Horrocks (Pākehā), Teah Carlson (Ngāti Porou), Carmen Farlie (Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti), and with gratitude to Lily Stender ((Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti) and Mere Tamanui (Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti). The words from Te Waiotu Fairlie (Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti) appeared in a piece in the Guardian on 25 February 2023, in ‘Like a tsunami’: the role of forestry waste in New Zealand’s cyclone devastation. [With thanks to Te Waiotu for permission to use.] Thank you to Amanda Roe for inviting us to swim, and to the whole Ka Mua Ka Muri whānau, for inviting us to participate in their creative collaboration.
JANUARY 2024 by DANI PICKERING (Pākehā, they/them)
ANCESTRAL COMMS THROUGH ANCESTRAL LANGUAGES
The first wānanga for the Pākehā stream of the Tīpuna Project was a deeply provocative and moving experience. At it, much of our kōrero was dedicated to what we mean by ancestral “comms”—what encompasses communing with ancestors, what conditions are necessary for that communing to take place, and how that communing might shape us in turn, especially as white settlers whose ancestors [also] did a colonialism, to put it glibly.
[Pictured: two people from the Pākehā-stream wā speaking to each other. They are standing on a brick patio, next to a strip of native bush. Ordinarily they’d have a stunning view of Tāmaki Makaurau, but a thick cloud enveloped us during the wā, so the white background almost looks Photoshopped.]
For me personally, though, the idea of comms with those ancestors is slightly more literal. Like many Pākehā I’m a classic “mongrel” mix of the usual Scottish, Irish, English and Welsh immigrants to Aotearoa from the nineteenth century; however, in recent years I have become particularly animated by my Gaelic ancestors from the Scottish Highlands, one of whom left behind almost two decades of bilingual English and Gàidhlig (Scottish Gaelic) diaries of their time in Aotearoa.
Tha mi air a bhith ag ionnsachadh na Gàidhlig a h-uile latha air ceithir bliadhnaichean a-nis. I’ve now been engaging with Gàidhlig every day for the last four years. To say it has enriched my life is an understatement—it has completely changed how I see and engage with the world, reshaping how I think and understand relations between the human, the ancestral, the more-than-human and the combinations therein.
Amongst other targets, then, our first wā helped me find the words to explain why reclaiming my own endangered heritage language, instead of being another Pākehā bum-on-a-seat in a reo Māori class, has in its own way enabled me to explore what it means to be tangata Tiriti.
[Pictured: a series of carved pou leading up a grassy hill to the Rangiriri Pā Memorial site near Te Kauwhata in Waikato.]
To explain what I mean, bear with me as I start off with a bit of linguistic theory. In her 2020 book Māori Philosophy, Georgina Tuari Stewart (Ngāpuhi) ascribes to the “’weak’ Sapir-Whorf hypothesis”, otherwise known as linguistic relativity. While the original hypothesis was that the language(s) you have determine(s) how you think, the “weak” version more commonly accepted today accepts that the languages you have don’t determine how you think but can still meaningfully inform it.
Reclaiming mo chuid Gàidhlig has absolutely come to inform how I think. For a more obvious example, Gàidhlig, like many world languages, has a very different understanding of possession than the hyper-capitalist approach of modern English. While present-day vernacular English tends to flatten possession into things you either “have” or don’t, it very much depends in Gàidhlig; some things are on you (e.g. clothes), at you (e.g. kitchen utensils, pets, husbands), with/alongside you (e.g. brought with you from another place), yours inalienably (e.g. your fingers), and more.
It’s one thing to know that the language structures things in this way—it’s another to live it and use it every day. While opportunities to converse sa Ghàidhlig have been limited in Aotearoa, I’ve nevertheless had enough of them and become conversational enough through them to begin noticing the difference. When I speak Gàidhlig now, it forces me to think about how I relate to everything and everyone else around me more consciously than I ever did as a monolingual English speaker. Is my husband at me or inalienable? Did I bring that blanket with me or to me? Having to consider these things just to follow the grammar of the language has led to broader, more profound realisations about the interrelations of the world around me.
Of course, Gàidhlig is not unique in this respect; many (in fact, most) languages have their own ways of emphasising relational ways of perceiving the world, te reo Māori among them. According to Stewart, whakapapa is of course the Māori expression of those relations, and through this journey I’ve come to understand why ancestry remains such a crucial part of that. By reclaiming mo chuid Gàidhlig, my thought patterns are becoming more closely aligned with those of my ancestors; doing so has thereby made me closer to my ancestors. Every time I speak or even write in Gàidhlig, their presence becomes that much clearer, their past now far more irrevocably part of my present.
I also discovered very quickly, however, that because of this personal connection, learning Gàidhlig was going to be so much more than the intellectual exercises Spanish and Japanese were for me in high school. It has come with emotional and spiritual challenges, challenges whose parallels in the Māori context have been impossible to ignore. Both languages have been ravaged by British colonialism, past and present; the strategies used to marginalise te reo in the 19th and 20th centuries were fine-tuned in the Gàidhealtachd and deployed concurrently in both places. Today, alarmist media reports signal Gàidhlig’s imminent extinction, despite decades of knowledge sharing between revitalisation movements for te reo and the other Celtic languages. Learning a language so severely threatened, when it is integral to your own whakapapa, is heavy shit, which can lead to a deeply personalised sense of futility at the best of times.
So using Gàidhlig reinforces my connection to my ancestors, but also to the historical traumas I have inherited from them (and which we then inflicted on Māori in turn—I’m getting to that). Through this journey I have found stories about my own family’s experiences of the Highland Clearances, wherein Gaels were evicted from our ancestral lands by Anglicised clan-chiefs-turnt-landlords to make room for more profitable uses of those lands.
[Pictured: myself, beside the stone ruins of a home in the village of Arnish on the isle of Raasay, Scotland. My ancestors were Cleared from Arnish in 1865—25 years after the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi in Aotearoa.]
While I could dwell on the harm my ancestors endured through the Clearances, it would be dishonest to ignore how the Clearances impacted not only the Scottish present, but Aotearoa’s as well. As I found in my ancestor’s diaries, his own forced separation from his ancestral home in the Gàidhealtachd and subsequent language loss in Anglophone New Zealand contributed to his assimilation into Pākehā whiteness through the Armed Constabulary—and he’s far from the only one enlisted there under a “Mac” surname (the Gaelic word for son).
Because that ancestor was killed five generations ago though, before he could pass any of his Gàidhlig on to his children, I lack the living memory of language loss. I’ve only witnessed it secondhand, in the handful of Gaels and Māori I’ve known whose languages were beaten and/or bullied out of them in schools for well over a century. The wounds are there in my family too, but they’re not quite as fresh.
Moreover, the baggage of reclaiming an endangered heritage language therefore comes into the reo Māori classroom for Māori in ways that it simply doesn’t for Pākehā—even in my case—for the simple reason that the vast majority of us learn te reo in Aotearoa, on whenua Māori. That’s always going to hit different; the chance I had last year to do an immersion short course at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig on Skye, to speak Gàidhlig in the land Gàidhlig comes from, where our own people have struggled for sovereignty and then survival, was a qualitatively different experience for me than it seemed to be for my classmates who lacked that whakapapa connection to the language and place (they were all lovely, but it was a noticeable difference all the same).
[Pictured: a stage in the stone-built Talla-Mhòr (great hall) at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, the Gaelic college on the Isle of Skye. A neon sign with the letters SABHAL MÒR OSTAIG overlooks the stage.]
So after experiencing these smallest of insights into “what it’s like” from multiple standpoints, I’ve realised I’m simply not ready yet to share space with Māori going on their own version of the heritage language reclamation journey. I’m far too aware now of what that journey entails: a conversation with ō tātou tīpuna, a’ toirt a-steach ar sinnsearan Gàidhealach—sa Ghàidhlig. As The Tīpuna Project continues, I’m eager to see where this conversation goes.
NOVEMBER 2023 by TEAH CARLSON
ARE YOU OK?
As I lay down with my pepī to breastfeed after a long night of titty time. Holding back the sandpaper scrapes I call eyelids. I click on my phone to see the screensaver blue light rays on my face at 5:55 am bearing the latest cold sore.
“Are you ok? Do you need anything?”
I booked a holiday a few weeks back, that I never took - wtf is going on?
After failing high school, I put myself through uni. With no fallback on parental assets - we are humbly building our castle with a moat and a taniwha (with all this rain!).
Another day in the empire. What more could I ask for than a healthy, happy whānau in which I (we) have built and held with a busy, mental load of spell-checked typos and mowed lawnscapes.
Who am I kidding? I’m treading oxygen 24.
I have four tamariki requiring their own character wairua flows of life and living, casting actors in a great play of tangata whenua.
I feel like im failing them, as they talk to me I'm trying to be present to hear their dreams flow from their mouths.
“Are you ok? Do you need anything?”
I chase replayed tape recordings on the five governance boards I’m on all requiring their own transformations of kaupapa Māori - let alone this poor bloody maawree.
“Are you ok? Do you need anything?”
I run contracts like I ain’t got a fucken full-time job to hold up dreams of freedom. Built off the back of whānau legacies of bad credit, fines, repo possessions, legal bills and mortgagee sales but a candlelight away in a dark cave of trauma that isn’t my own I might add!
Not my cave…not my bear.
Then there's my salary mahi, which gives me flex, hope and stability in rolling storms of tsunami (I love to spell that word!).
I have 5 master's students, 4 PhD, guest lectures and a PhD to examine soon - what an honour this mahi is - Greenlandic, maramatanga, rangatahi, hauora, mahi magic on the fortnightly.
Fuck what else am I doing…..
I
Know
What
I’m
NOT
Doing
Having holidays, looking after my reo, hobbies, reading books, painting, dancing, swimming, diving, learning to cook new kai, gardening, sleeping in the sun.
“Are you ok? Do you need anything?”
As I sit down to write this first blog, all I can think about is the violent rollout of settler colonialism happening right now in Palestine, before the world’s eyes. The apartheid, the genocide, the White supremacy, rationalised through racist rhetoric that lands all too easily in the ears of settler peoples elsewhere, primed for generations to side with the settler colonial state.
I find myself getting lost in the depths of my own babies’ beautiful brown eyes, passed down from their own Muslim ancestors on their dad’s side – ancestors who too were colonised by British foot-soldiers – including my own Irish ancestors – Presbyterians who missioned in Gujarat before landing in 1863 on the Ngai Tahu whenua of Aotearoa to do it again. That is, to commit cosmological violence in the name of Christianity, although this time against Māori.
And I feel sick, I ache, my joints threatening dislocation, my neck so stiff I can’t look behind me. My body, in short, refusing to be ignored. So I look too at my settler skin, I sense the grinding of my settler bones, and I can’t stop thinking, also, about what it means right now to be Pākehā.
As we in The Tīpuna Project gather our co-researchers in preparation for our first wānanga, I am struck by the resonance between the question being asked by many of our Pākehā folx of our Pākehā ancestors, and the question being asked by many Jewish folx of the Israeli state: How could you do to others what our ancestors had done to them?
For us Pākehā share more here with Jewish-Israelis than our settler skin and bones. Like them, our Gaelic and Celtic ancestors weren’t always considered White, and were themselves targets of enclosure, expulsion or extermination before they and/or their descendants went on to become agents of an echoing colonial violence here in Aotearoa.
(How) did your comms with our ancestors become so broken?
(How) have our comms with our ancestors become so broken?
In 2016, I was diagnosed with Ankylosing Spondylitis – a serious arthritic condition involving the inflammation of all my joints and the gradual fusion of my spine, that I likely inherited from my missionary ancestors. I was told in ceremony that my bones – my iwi – have come to die in me because they are swollen with things to tell.
Things that feel sickening. That make us ache. Dis-locate. Things that make looking behind us – at ‘the past’ – difficult, uncomfortable, painful, scary or seemingly impossible.
So I began to experiment with listening to my bones, slowly learning pagan practices that are grounded in Gaelic cosmology, hoping that my more distant, witch-y ancestors – the bean feasa, the wise women, the faery doctors – might guide me in communing with their missionary mokopuna, to hear what these closer, settler ancestors have to say.
What can we, present-day settler peoples – particularly the womxn, the weirdos, the queers – i.e. those who too would have been hunted down by the Church, capitalism, colonialism – learn from the spiralling genocide in our bones? Could these comms help us to be accountable to Indigenous peoples past, present and future? Could they somehow unsettle our ongoing complicity in White supremacy?
These bony pātai are the whakapapa of The Tīpuna Project for me. But I tentatively sense such radical potential not in what we may hear so much as how, or even simply that. I am wondering if to commit to ancestral comms is to commit to wrestling our bodies away from a rational, detached figure-cum-standard of the ‘human’ still used to justify settler colonial violence, and towards something else. Something more-than-human.
And then earlier this year, Teah pointed out that in Te Ao Māori, the words ‘tīpuna’ (ancestors) and ‘mokopuna’ (descendants) are connected by puna – evoking us, the people in-between, as wellspring. And in the lands of the Gaels, wellspring are portals to the otherworld. They were (are) so central to paganism, that they themselves were targeted by colonial forces – filled with rocks, trapped in fences.
Perhaps then, for Pākehā – settler peoples in Aotearoa who whakapapa to the British Isles but live with Papatūānuku – The Tīpuna Project is calling us to enter some kindof puna-potential. To be a swirling, turbulent portal between our ancestors and our descendants that seeks to breach – not repeat – violent legacies.
Welcoming an-other-way, an-other-world.
I am not suggesting that simply by becoming more spiritual White folx can bypass our whiteness. Or that by recognising the trauma of our ancestors, we can heal our whiteness. Or that by connecting to our own indigeneity, we can neutralise our whiteness. Far from bypassing, healing and neutralising, White spirituality, trauma and indigeneity are too easily used to protect and reinforce whiteness and therefore White supremacy.
At least for now.
Even as I type, such kupu are being weaponised against Palestinians.
Kaore. Given the constant, seductive pull on White folx to become agents of White supremacy (whether wittingly or not), our rōpu Pākehā is tasked with militantly forefronting our present response-ability as settler peoples. Reflexively diving into (not away from) our whiteness – our inherited sickness, our broken comms – in explicit commitment to the decolonisation of Aotearoa and elsewhere.
This is the kaupapa Pākehā of The Tīpuna Project for me. It is where we are ‘beginning’. Refusing to sit back and watch the continued rollout of settler colonialism, whether in the world or in our bones. Not knowing where we are going, but attentive to how we move.
OCTOBER 2023 by RACHEL JANE LIEBERT(‘S BONES)
PALESTINE – PĀKEHĀ – PUNA
SEPTEMBER 2023 by TEAH CARLSON
My dreams are her dreams, her dreams are mine
Embracing the adventure along pothole roads, dust rises above gravel corners as peacocks hui on the road - a tohu to show up, show out and shake it up! I see the destination ahead, a whare built of logs, second story stacking that hold views of hinemoana. She glistens and pulsates vastness.
Mana wāhine connect
Greeted with eyes - casting scenes of whenua dreams, promising planets align, circling stardust settles.
Mana wāhine connect
Karanga karanga te rangi e tū nei, karanga karanga te papa e takoto nei
Moko kauae “a calling to be”
Mana wāhine connect
Feeling resistant, tired, then messages from far away hoha arrive trying to pull us back to decisions and missions never of our own
Mana wahine connect
And they said…rhyming stories -whakapapa lines of decent to lands and sovereignty long ago
Mana wahine connect
We shared time starring into eyes, showing cuts, bruises and scars - and still they smiled, beaming lightful spirits, the pulsating joy of jolly buddha chuckles - what a trip!
Mana wahine connect
Stretching and dancing bodies over grasses mown for views of salted winds. We show up!
Mana wahine connect
And then they stood showing themselves, beaming with beauty, stories of aroha rising. Shared heartbreaks, beats, swirls of boundless breath, we fly still in wānanga.
Mana wahine connect
I didn’t anticipate the admiration for every single wāhine. A gift of sisterhood, of fluid deep red blood, of birthing pain, of sensual power.
Strategizing billionaire realities - the truth of aroha, abundance and lessons of wise women. There is no contest, no race, no more conditioning, the truth is we have it all!
My dreams are her dreams, and her dreams are mine, what a powerful release - what a movement!
Mana wāhine connect
