M¯aori landscape classification no joke
Surely after 400 years of expanding our minds, the Age of Enlightenment doesn’t simply stop at western reductionist quantitative science.
I often read Bob Brockie’s opinion column. For many decades he has made ecological science accessible to general readers. But, in his October 5 column, he laments the expenditure of $2.8 million by the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment to record Ma¯ ori ‘‘landscape classification’’ names, values and stories before they’re lost.
Bob calls it a ‘‘preposterous’’ waste of money and a ‘‘bad joke’’, and he catalogues some of the environmental damage that our first Polynesian colonisers caused. I disagree.
Those early Polynesians did indeed have an initial severe impact, as all invading humans have everywhere since emerging from Africa. But they soon established a relatively sustainable relationship with the land and its resources, with humans as the new ecological ‘‘keystone’’ species. That is until the Industrial Revolution started in the 18th century, and then the Great Acceleration since the Second World War (we are now the worldwide ecological grindstone species).
Ma¯ ori were Neolithic hunter/ gatherer/horticulturalists, and had a necessarily intimate relationship with the rest of nature – and I say ‘‘rest of’’ deliberately, because they considered themselves part of nature.
Christian Europeans had a different view. Their one god made them in his image, and he gave them dominion over the rest of nature – ie, it was there to serve their needs; and with ‘‘civilisation’’ came a loss of direct connection to nature. So they came to refer to animals, plants and landscape features as ‘‘things’’, using the pronoun ‘‘it’’.
For Ma¯ ori, their several gods were the various forces of Nature, who they avoided displeasing by paying respect and propitiating with karakia. They knew they totally relied on them for food and shelter. Mountains, rivers, animals and plants had ‘‘personhood’’ status, in many ways being more powerful than the people, and their language reflects that. That respectful relationship has recently been recognised with the Whanganui River and Urewera Mountains both being granted legal personhood status under modern law.
The research will indeed be challenging, but possibly ground breaking. It will attempt to codify the abstractions, nuances and subtleties of indigenous knowledge into a sequence of 0s and 1s for digital recording, thereby making it much more accessible and useful for posterity; how cool is that! Surely after 400 years of expanding our minds, the Age of Enlightenment doesn’t simply stop at western reductionist quantitative science. That would make it no better than any other faith-based ideology, which is what Bob accuses Maori cultural knowledge of being. I think the Galileos, Newtons, Darwins and Einsteins of today will applaud this research.
As Kiwis we cherish our uniqueness in the world, but our primary language is actually rather boringly similar to many other countries. About 350 million people have English as their first language, and English is the third largest language by number of native speakers, after Mandarin and Spanish. So let’s hang on to our Ma¯ ori-ness, which is where so much of our uniqueness comes from.
Teaching te reo to kids in school is great, and Ma¯ ori names for places, birds and trees are beautiful. And storytelling is such a powerful social tool. You give people dry data and they yawn; you give them a good story and they laugh and cry and rejoice – and they remember. Bring on those Ma¯ ori landscape stories.