Exploring Indigenous and Indigenity

1. Exploring Indigenous and Indigenity Te Ahukaramū Charles Royal

2. Background • Began my exploration of mātauranga Māori in 1986 • Completed formal and informal study • 1996-2002: Master of Mātauranga Māori • 2001: Studied indigenous worldviews in Hawai’i, New Mexico and Ontario • Completed a number of research projects and publications

3. Key Themes in Mātauranga Māori • Traditional worldview proceeds on the basis that there is a world ‘beyond’ or ‘behind’ the world of our ordinary experience • This non-ordinary world or reality is able to express itself in our normal experience • When it does so, elements of the normal world find their ‘fulness’, their ‘essential’ qualities and true character • These ideas underpin the concepts of mana, tapu and mauri

4. Mana, Tapu and Mauri • Mana = a term for a non-ordinary power, presence, essence which bequeathes knowing and enabling authority • Tapu = a term used for sacredness and restrictions, vessels of mana are dedicated, committed to become such vessels • Mauri = the natural energy of the body, of the physical vessels

5. Examples • Mauri stones in nets, bird snares, meeting houses, gardens • Mana is the fish, the birds, the vegetables, the pou alive in the meeting house • Tapu relates to both the transformation of the physical vessel into the mana itself as well as the commitments and restrictions placed upon the vessel • Mauri is the alive energy within the physical vessel. All things possess mauri.

6. An Intimate Relationship with the World • This suggests an intimate relationship with the world • All things retain potential for the non-ordinary realm to express itself through it, including the human person • The mauri stones of the wānanga were about replenishing and enhancing the mauri of the physical body • The arrival of understanding and new knowledge in the mind is the mana, the expression of the non-ordinary realm into human consciousness

7. Final Examination of Students in the Whare Wānanga • Students were sent into the environment, on their own, to meditate and to fast • They were not allowed to return to the whare wānanga until a new understanding or knowledge had arrived • The new idea or understanding was conceptualised as the arrival of mana in the student – the world itself seems to speak directly into the consciousness of the individual. The word for this experience is tohu.

8. The Tangata Whenua Worldvew • These ideas inform the tangata whenua worldview • Relationship between human communities and the natural world • Tangata = person • Whenua = land • Whenua as placenta suggests that either a birth has taken place or is about to. • Tangata Whenua – a person(s) born from the land

9. Creation traditions…

11. Moutere (island) The floating land Whenua The Placenta Ranginui Tāne Tangaroa Tangaroa Papatuanuku

12. Expressions of the Tangata Whenua Worldview • The unification of landscape features with the human body • The Landing of Te Arawa waka • Te Heuheu and Taupō • The stone called Raukawa in the Waikato River • Quotes from Chief Seattle and Gregory Cajete

13. Encounter with the world • An immediacy of experience • A sense of I-thou rather than it • Beyond subject-object to unity • Knowledge is direct, emotional and inarticulate (requires symbols) as opposed to intellectual knowledge which is emotionally indifferent and articulate • Emphasis is upon experience rather than knowledge

14. What might be the application or relevance of these traditional ideas to our lives today?

15. Kinship with one anotherKinship with the natural world

16. …reflects the human mind’s pivotal role as vehicle of the universe’s unfolding meaning…The human spirit does not merely prescribe nature’s phenomenal order; rather, the spirit of nature brings its own order through the human mind when that mind is employing its full complement of faculties – intellectual, volitional, emotional, sensory, imaginative, aesthetic, epiphanic. In such knowledge, the human mind “lives into” the creative activity of nature. Then the world speaks its meaning through human consciousness. Then human language itself can be recognized as rooted in deeper reality, as reflecting the universe’s unfolding meaning. Through human intellect, in all its personal individuality, contingency, and struggle, the world’s evolving thought-content achieves conscious articulation Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind

17. Towards a new/old theory of indigenity • It is a feature of the human condition to be in a natural correspondence with the environments in which we dwell. We could call this a ‘natural indigenity’. • The environments in which we dwell are complex • There are varying degrees of ‘articulation’ of environment in human consciousness, society and culture • A ‘Formal Indigenous Culture’ is deliberate and conscious to the expression of natural environments into human society and culture.