 Hello my friends and welcome to the 43rd episode of Patterson in Pursuit. Got a change of pace for you today? Instead of talking strict philosophy or something about politics or economics, I'm going to talk about history and culture, specifically some of the history of the indigenous Maori in New Zealand where I'm currently located. In the States we have this very elementary idea that all indigenous people across the globe are all the same and they're all Pocahontas. But obviously this is a very crude way of thinking about the world and thinking about history. And New Zealand in particular has a really interesting and long indigenous history where the first European settlers came as late as the 19th century. So joining me this week is Dr. Herinika who teaches history at the University of Auckland and he specializes in religious and cultural history and especially how the Maori worldview changed when met with Christendom. So about half this interview we're talking about actual indigenous beliefs about spirituality and about their religion. And then we talk about the changing from the original indigenous beliefs after contact was made in the 19th century. And the last part of our conversation is talking about the impact of colonialism on the Maori way of life and on their belief system. So it's a really fascinating conversation and I'm sure you guys will enjoy it. Before we start I wanted to give some shout outs and some good news. If you guys were following the excitement a couple of weeks ago when I started that Indiegogo campaign I'm happy to say that after only a couple of days we raised $1,000 and Jason Brennan right now I believe is in the process of reading and reviewing square one. So that's pretty exciting. But also I have been talking with the sponsor of the show Praxis and I got a cool deal for you guys. 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That'll take you to their page where you sign up with your name and email and you can listen to the kind of training and prepping for that entrepreneurial mindset that you get in the Praxis program. So go check it out, steve-patterson.com-praxis you won't be disappointed. Alright so back to learning about the history, the culture, the religious beliefs the worldview of the Maori of New Zealand. So thank you very much Dr. Ka for sitting down and talking with me today. I have a lot of very elementary questions for you. There's a lot in the West and especially in the States people's knowledge of anything other than standard like Western philosophy, Western theology is very, very poor. So I wanted to talk to you about maybe some misconceptions and basic concepts in the Maori worldview. So I guess the first question is I'm sure you probably hear this all the time and I imagine your eyes roll when you hear it but there's a thought that in more indigenous cultures they aren't big on the theology or the theism or the formal religion, the orthodoxy they're more spiritual, it's spirituality. That's the term that gets thrown around at least in the States and that's the trope word spirituality. Is there any truth to the idea that in that Maori indigenous culture there is some, you could call it religious beliefs, spiritual beliefs but it doesn't come with a lot of the theological baggage. This is going to be annoying but yes and no of course. I think in some ways partly this is a kind of a conflation of Western perceptions of indigenous spirituality so we might get lumped in with the Moana Disney cartoon and Native Americans and so particularly I think coming from an American perspective, Native Americans this kind of crafted perception of them being free and unencumbered and the ultimate hippies who can just live with the spirit and with nature and of course so we get tied into that too it's a kind of a yearning in some quarters I suppose in the Western world for some kind of spirituality but one that comes without the dogma without the baggage perhaps of Western Christianity in particular but other forms as well. So why that is not correct perhaps for Maori traditionally religion and that's a big word with lots of meanings but religion was everything. We didn't have the dichotomy of the mundane and the sacred. Our leadership were also the embodiment of spiritual and secular power. Every rock, every tree, every river had maudi, a life force, tapu, sacredness was everywhere. You took one wrong move and the consequences could be immense. We came in fact from it would make the most puritanical system look the most liberal nowadays because every aspect of life there wasn't just some gods sitting in heaven waiting to judge us we were constantly surrounded by our gods. So in its traditional form in its pre-contact form I think our religion was maybe strictness in that sense of control certainly that sense of order was present. Social hierarchy, social control, food who cooked food was tied intensely to our religious understanding for example so every aspect of life. So this idea of us being free and going with the spirit kind of Pocahontas type idea. Well that certainly didn't apply I suppose. Yeah and we had a very structured understanding based on different tribes, based on different parts of the country based on landscape but we had a very strong rigid system I suppose. So can I ask you a couple of questions on that topic? So you say it's structured. Does the structure come from an internal set of beliefs about the sacredness of everything that comes from the structure from what we might call the church or something like the structure comes from the holy leaders the spiritual leaders. Is it imposed from the outside or is it something that is imposed from the inside? You know I think imposed from the inside on balance because we did have our experts we did have our hierarchy who were repositories of knowledge who would provide guidance and law but having said that every individual knew their place within this worldview, within this system everyone knew broadly the meanings of the system and how it operated. So yeah I think it wasn't necessarily imposed externally. Again this is pre-contact. Christianity these things have changed to some degrees but yeah I think from within to a large extent but certainly with a kind of system of social control which is the church I suppose. So what would be the origin, the explanation for those original beliefs, the pre-contact beliefs? So in Christianity and in Judaism you have Moses was on high, received words from God or a similar type of story or is this more of like an emergent set of beliefs that came from interacting with the world? Well of course you know the Moses story is a set of beliefs from interacting with the world they got tuned into. So it's very hard to make that clear, delineation. Ours comes from tens of thousands of years of people travelling across the Pacific so the latest research as we come from China, southeast in China there are parts and then we travelled across the Melanesia, across Polynesia and ended up here. There are parts of the Philippines for example where the traditional language, parts of Taiwan parts of China where their language, their culture is very similar to what else their understandings of land, their word for land is almost identical. So you know it's experiential it was us travelling across the water, it's us going across those vast open seas in a small canoe with a reasonably basic sail and needing to be able to read the signs the stars, the winds, the currents, the birds and you know finding theology in that just as the Old Testament tribes have done their meaning on their journeys and their mountains have meaning and our mountains have meaning. So we found it, but we do tend to have our Moses characters through our ancestors so we are, I suppose you could describe it as an ancestor worshipping people our ancestors provide the model for us provided the template, the behaviour, the language Maui, the demigod who the rock plays and the Moana cartoon for example is a very common ancestor deity across and again you know not going to that Greek kind of idea where we're separating them they were both our ancestor and our deity Maui and then a range of ancestors so I'm descended directly from Maui for example for a range of ancestors through tribal ancestors their behaviours, their stories, their patterns help to shape our understandings, our spirituality give us our God. So in terms of how we might rationally understand some of those beliefs when you say there was some spirit in everything, every single rock can you unpack that for me and what exactly that means if so what for example would be like an essential distinction between the force that's in a rock and that which is in a human being if any if any because you know to some extent again it could be hard to quantify I think we have different perhaps typologies but so Maui is a word that refers to life force or essence so every living and rock, stones some things that aren't scientifically living can have Maui, can have this life forces essence this can be affected by human behaviour this can be changed by say ancestor practices can elevate some mountains for example, some places because of the behaviour, because of the actions the ancestors in these places so it can change their spiritual nature for us but generally speaking the idea that there is this life force that flows through all of creation that was part of creation that the gods in our creation stories imbued this life force and it exists within all of us and we're part of it connected the big I suppose concept for us as Māori is whakapapa is connections so in some ways it's genealogy so it's those connections vertically back to our ancestors but it's also horizontal so it's going back to say the god of the forests this is simplistic I suppose or a simple explanation and then trees so tāne Māhuta, the giant tree up in the far north for example is in some ways both connected to me as a relation as an ancestor through the god of the forest so this sense of connection that everything can be connected this was challenged a lot by the rival of the first settlers explorers but the idea of whakapapa of connection there's no us and them we can fight, we don't have to love all these other components but we are connected and we recognize that connection so there would be so you said there's no us and them so does that just apply to humans and different humans or is it literally that as I'm conceiving of myself my own being, my own modi that it is identical to the one in what we would consider inanimate objects or is there any special uniqueness given to the human okay so are humans exceptional within this creation generally again it depends so some places, some spaces again it's a tricky kind of concept because again I'm trying to kind of think through Western you know almost comparative values and then I'm trying to think back into how we might conceive of it and that's challenging partly because humans in competition with rocks well no because it was a matter of coexisting with rocks and with the trees and we were living amongst them so it wasn't necessarily that humans are greater or had more worth so the ultimate extension of that question would be do we save the tree or do we save the beige but you know in that pre-contact culture you had to exist with the tree because it was a matter of survival the kind of economic environmental exploitation that we have now that's a new phenomenon making those choices for humanity is how long has that been around a few hundred years maybe maybe a couple of thousands but people didn't have to make those kind of choices and I'm trying to think of, we don't have for example large animals so we don't have to kind of do that kind of comparison so the environment was largely beneficial and when it was dangerous say for example the sea in particular we would relate that to our behaviour almost the type of our relationship with the environment was also tied to a form of say sin so if you transgressed against this moly, this tapu, this sacredness against the gods then you could suffer with that sickness, physical danger that was breaking those particular laws around the relationship with the environment but yeah I think largely we wouldn't have to I'm struggling to think about that balance between the environment and humanity because we didn't have to make those choices so let me ask you one more question on pre-contact ideas and then we'll talk about what has changed in my own pursuit of truth in a bunch of areas I'm interested in religion because I think there's something very much biased toward like western philosophy that's my orientation but I find that the experience of love has really forced me to expand my world view and I'm persuaded by some of the ideas in Christianity and some ideas in love I think that's talked about in almost every religion what would the traditional Maori conception of love be is it something that is a gift is it something that is another range of experiences is there anything, any categorical uniqueness given to that well you know and again we're polluted by the kind of genius re-conception of love with Christianity for example self-sacrificing love well of course that was us but of course it wasn't the idea for example of Manaki Tanga is a concept that means a range of things, generosity, hospitality Whakapapa of connection I think the idea when you are connected to one another that's an unbreakable connection effectively that goes for generations back that you know will go for generations forward the the idea of no one is really a stranger because you're connected to everybody and to everything having said that we're as capable of exploitation as any other culture, of domination, of greed of creating fear, we ate one another which is kind of the ultimate form of diminution of your opponent we ate one another, not for protein but to minimise the mana the authority, the integrity the leadership perhaps of your enemy so we really knew how to we knew how to act without love as well we weren't the free-flowing love everybody having said that, if it was your own people and you had or we would have divisions political divisions perhaps, economic divisions with our enemies, but within your own family group whether in your own units, your relationship was absolute you would sacrifice for one another you really, the idea that you conceive of an individual loving an individual well, what is an individual when you're not really thinking along those lines I just want to be me, that wasn't really a very common thought because of the way we lived because we were living very different from today I suppose, I know I'm not really answering the question but I would say love perhaps in the way we conceive it today not on the romantic sense, but in that sense of willing to lay down your life for another perhaps we certainly had that conception and it was built into our culture but we also had the opposite of love so when you're talking there about the conception or lack of conception of self I think that's what a lot of people romanticize they love that idea of it's not self-sacrifice it's almost like self-dimmunition that there's that elevation of the community giving to the community not even conceiving yourself as something separate from the community that's something that's very hard for me to wrap my head around because my experience is so extremely focused from my perspective from the self perspective so in that mindset, do you think that like in daily life there was a substantial difference in the conscious experience of the Mayor who's not conceiving necessarily of himself as rigidly as we are do you think that that was like a different way literally a different way of experiencing life when you see yourself as connected to part of a group or a community? Yeah, again it's tricky because your individual status, your individual sacredness, your individual authority, integrity was you go up and down depending on your behaviour depending on your relationships with one another so we did conceive ourselves but having said that your goals were effectively not subsumed but came from others, you sense that your ancestor deities are constantly around you with you you're not just an individual, every behaviour it's not what you get away with in private because there isn't a private because your ancestor deities are always there with you for starters so you know that sense of yes you were responsible for your own actions yes you could even advance yourself but very different to the way we do today certainly your kin group behaviour your kin group wellbeing was really the measure of your wellbeing if it went up, you went up, if it went down, you went down and your behaviour would reflect on them as well so you couldn't break away from them, you wouldn't even conceive of doing that so yeah it's tricky, yeah again there's a sense of wow that's again the ultimate hippie the ultimate commune but that's seeking freedom from a system that didn't exist so you can't even conceptualise of it at the time and I think our interaction with Western ideas, Western technologies how we responded particularly early on kind of helps test what was actually going on before contact so individualism did where it's hit occasionally but again it was pretty rare and quite different even using Western tools even today, I'm very Western wearing all my clothes and made by Bangladesh exploited labourers I'm sure and I'm just part of this global economic and exploitative community of the West but I still consider my kin group my purpose of life my measure of life of wellbeing my own goals need to factor into these so you know still 200 maybe 250 years later we're still living that kind of system as an excellent segue to talking about that 250 years ago so maybe just a little bit of the history of when the settlers came that initial interaction the exchange of cultural information, economic information contact between two radically different civilizations how that happened when it happened maybe some of the world view changes that followed from that because a big part of this is Christianity so how the initial it wasn't the case that there was missionaries that came and spoke to the Mayor so let's start with that initial contact and then we'll work from there so one thing to introduce that is that we are a very tribal people I've talked about kin group, we are Māori that's our collective name but we didn't call ourselves that because we didn't need a collective name of course Māori just essentially means normal we're the normal, everyone else is strange so by tribal kin groups experiences were quite different that's just something to kind of remember that one indigenous experience is no matter so and so I kind of speak from my own tribal experience as well which is again quite different from some others but the original initial contact you know you'd explore is Tasman, James Cook and those are really even though some of them were quite fleeting they were integrated into a lot of tribal oral histories because they were so profound we were connected to everything until this new thing came sailing around the corner suddenly our world view which was connection struggled what are these things some attempts were made to reconcile them but they were just so different that was an immediate challenge it'll be when the aliens arrive here how are we going to respond one's already in the White House today but thank God for the deadline but how are we going to respond just that complete in some ways need to grapple as I said though no culture aesthetic created then locked in stone we sailed across vast oceans across tens of thousands of years to get here so we've been constantly evolving and adapting when we got here we ate all the moa for example all the giant fightless birds we ate all the low hanging fruit we had to pretty much re-pitch our civilization after that so we'd been through this process a lot of our tribes have these kind of stories of cultural massive cultural shift built into them to deal with change whether it's climate change which is part of our story in the small scale while it was earth-shattering we were capable of change we were adaptive we were innovative we need to be humans are humans we're just good at survival as well let's give up then and also a lot of the aspects of this other culture while radically different and a lot of respects also brought a lot of similarities but often in ways they didn't quite understand so the missionaries they're the classic missionaries are like dirt they're impossible to miss just the easy targets missionaries were the first permanent settlement in this country it was 1814 it was a missionary settlement and came out from Australia they'd been a long history though of Māori travelling to Australia and to England and around the world to America before that as soon as we could we braced out around the world to find some horrible experiences some amazing experiences so technology was huge the arrival of metal we were a stone culture metal was huge weapons of course were fantastic for people who liked to fight but the biggest change of course was ideas economic ideas alone were radical the idea that you could sell things that permanently we had an economic system based on exchange reciprocity effectively there was a commercial in some respects but it was also spiritual effectively and we didn't separate so you went into a commercial transaction there was a form of mana of spiritual interaction in that as well so you know the idea that you could do cold hard cash exchange well that's something for starters Christianity though was kind of brilliant because at its heart Christianity was the Jewish culture and story and are people who had the God intimate God travelling with them in the first testament but of course the New Testament it's coming from the first testament those ancestor stories are coming to life again in Jesus and being retold by this new rabbi so those relationships with their gods those relationships with the land those relationships with their sacred mountains wow hey what's the problem we got all that we get that of course we get that we don't know what the hell these missionaries are talking about we'll just ignore their stuff you know like here you guys just reading it all wrong this was actually pretty common around the country because of literacy right was a huge technology that incorporated both technological change and idea change literacy was a transmission of ideas so it was amazing we had our own literacy we had this amazing oral tradition we had carvings we had the landscape but you know literacy took it up a whole level as it did for Europe in the 15th 16th century so and of course the first literacy was with these stories where the gospels was these stories from these other we across the world but we could really relate to them they disseminated the scale was spectacular tens of thousands of bibles of Anglican pre-books being disseminated around the country literacy rates were spectacular a people who lived in the spiritual landscape didn't require much prompting to embrace you know the spirituality of those who arrived here and and adapt it and rethink it we had our own theologians they take a look at these writings they're like okay okay we'll think our way through this there are like you know 12 missionaries they're not like now you people here's what you gotta do they were living in fear up in the north watching us eat one another they weren't gonna like they didn't even get here in the country much to start off with the process of the transmission of Christianity was mighty driven the process of interpretation was mighty driven you know so you've got in the kind of 1840s late 1830s you've got a dozen you know missionary part white missionaries you've got 400 mighty evangelists around the country who'd learnt basic literacy who'd learnt a scripture from these missionaries and from one another then took off back to their own people and shared this message so the transmission it's not what we think you know it wasn't missionaries telling everyone what to do it was that engagement of ideas that interpretation of ideas amongst Marty by Marty my own tribal story explicitly rejects white missionary involvement almost almost to the point of yeah okay I don't think it was quite that extensive but because the point was we made our own choices and we reconciled our pre-contact culture with Christianity on our own terms so we decided that the practice of eating one another was not a good practice you know it's quite rational thinking it's like but we needed these new ideas to kind of make that breakthrough the idea of endless reciprocity that turned into endless warfare so your ancestor ate my ancestor we're going to live this out forever and because of our amazing old traditions we're never going to forget it the idea of Christian forgiveness could break that cycle but we would apply things you know those kind of ideas so it was spectacular intellectual development by the various tribes in different ways at different times that had different results but still spectacular nonetheless and often I think the irony was the missionaries who bought the ideas didn't quite always understand the ideas they bought their own you know the first missionary Marsden he equated Christianity to civilization we would only be truly converted when we acted, spoke, thought like he did you know whereas Marty was saying no thanks of course and you know later on the missionaries were like the CMS who sent them they had some great thinking around culture and gospel but later on that faded but it wasn't a radical thought that indigenous cultures could coexist alongside the gospel so yeah so this kind of simplistic story of missionaries and of the arrival of Christianity isn't always what it's made out to be so could you put it this way that the stereotypical story is that it was missionaries arriving hitting everybody on the head saying believe this way or else and it was Christianity as kind of a set of dogma dogmatic beliefs what actually was the case is the ideas of Christianity the Maori people found many of them persuasive doesn't really matter what the transmission that it's the white missionary saying this and then there was a natural dissemination of those ideas they found superior absolutely and I think as you talked about before the central idea of love for example very powerful you know as we've seen throughout history transformative transcendent enabled us now this is a slightly radical even subversive idea and in the context of colonization see we haven't yet kind of talked about colonization about all the bad side so it's tricky saying this but Christian love in some respects enabled us to fulfill our beautiful culture so you know they travel across these beautiful ideas of whanau family of our relationship of interconnection Christian love could really oh god right that's almost like the ingredient we were missing and this is not missionary ideas of love this is the central gospel which you know the disciple struggled with the lawyer asked Jesus so even the people around Jesus when getting it so it's not like it's you know everyone knew the secret and we were received it was it was a particular revelation and an intellectual revelation that enabled us to fulfill a full potential of our culture because until then you know that endless warfare 90% of the time 95% of the time we were fishing and growing kumara sweet potato and getting on with life and we had fun and we had relationships but yeah we also had this side to our culture that was essentially vengeance was dominant and it enabled us to remove that it's complicated there are other sides there's English you know Pax Britannia English law there's a whole bunch of other things that also enforce the type of peace on us poverty enforce the type of peace on us we have the luxury of warfare but a lot of our old traditions our old histories do point to this ability to transform and again we'd had these reconciliation practices these standings but you know this just kind of okay this will like power it up this will take you to the place we kind of wanted to go to like every society wants peace you know so how do we find that well but then came colonization so one more question about the ideas and then I think let's talk about colonization so would you say that the storyline isn't the Maori beliefs versus the Christian beliefs and maybe there's you know tension between the two and this difficult struggle and fight it's really Maori beliefs that were informed by a set of other beliefs that there's no there's not really especially when we're talking about Christian love it seems like that's not going to cause any more tension that that can be incorporated into that existing belief system without any tension do you think that's fair absolutely and Christian love that was also wrapped with you know I mean Christian loves presents throughout the first years I mean it's just you know people kind of look past it to all the fun stories and you know Jesus didn't just pluck this out of thin air right he's finding their story he's finding the best of their culture he's finding you know the tensions in the Sabbath and he's finding the tensions in the law and he's saying look we've got to think about this well same applied to us every culture needs to critique itself it's when it's critiqued externally that's the problem when the missionaries say you're not worthy or that can get stuff but us critiquing ourselves well that's a powerful and finally we had this amazing talk with which to critique intellectually we've been spending all our time you know thinking deep thoughts we had this expertise we could test it it was amazing but again you know the Jewish story particularly had worked for us because you know the ancestors the land the mountains we could it wasn't all alien you know we could kind of see where it was coming from and we could reconcile on a whole bunch of levels with these stories in fact we could incorporate them into our stories you know into our ancestors to some degree I gotta say we might go there a bit later but this is controversial I suppose some of this my thinking because at the moment we're going through we've been going through for a while a cultural renaissance you know the kind of postcolonial it's tricky too in which we're recovering traditional knowledge you know recovering if essentially a lot of suppressed knowledge our language was almost just decimated it's tricky to say that we self-critique in a in the midst of this kind of revival renewal because that implies we went perfect so it's a little bit controversial you know part of this renaissance for Māori is predicated on the idea that we were perfect and the only problem was the arrival of colonisation the idea that maybe we weren't quite perfect and you know some of it was but then you know because of course that gets misused by a lot of people by a lot of dynamics so I just wanted to kind of you know it's tricky thinking in some respects and which is of course why Christianity is so unpopular because it it's tied to colonisation as well so that idea of Christian love was great but you know it's everything else that came with it the legs that came in that was the problem exactly well let's talk about it so talking about the ideas the Christian love is beautiful people incorporate them in practice that also came like you said with colonisation with political structure imposed with the economic structure imposed so that also those impositions and those tensions also have an effect on the culture itself the cultural dynamics between you know traditional and the foreigners who are imposing their structure on you so can you talk a little bit about that what the difficulties are what the tensions were maybe what some of the you know justified anger was and is towards that particular system well you know colonisation was and is economic exploitation you know let's go over there and you know strip mine that place you know race comes into it ideas of superiority so it's not a good experience for those being colonised you know because it's predicated on you losing everything you losing everything available we were a culture based on land you know these various aspects of land colonisation here in this country was based on the acquisition of land which we were going to lose out on inevitably because of our technological and you know demographic disadvantage so and Christianity Christianity was used by colonisation deliberately as a form of control you know different ways around the world so in North America you get the mission schools which is a very terrible exploitative you know in South America you get well that's a whole other story here you get Christianity being used to make Māori conform as a form of control the early missionaries were you know they had their challenges but they were evangelical they had you know let's say I wouldn't necessarily question their their heart was mostly in the right place their mind wasn't always quite in the right place but later on the very quickly by the 1860s particularly with the military conquest of Māori by 1872 really it was over the Christianity quickly turned into a vehicle for helping to enforce colonisation so the church turned itself away from Māori Māori leadership got co-opted into Christianity as again another form of control or the assimilation ideas of compliance you know the British Empire and the Anglican Church was the flag bearer for the British Empire it saw the British Empire as basically a gift from God that its role was to support and uphold it didn't ever really question the basis of this and some of the more enlightened theology some of the brilliant theology the Treaty of Waitangi which was really the compact sign between the British Crown and Māori leadership in 1840 was predicated largely a large underpinning of that was evangelical theology so the Clapham sect that abolished slavery had a huge input into that treaty it was an amazing document but that all wore away pretty quickly in the huge wave of that economic exploitation ideas of racial superiority you know which didn't come up until kind of later in the kind of modern form later 19th century but it was just a huge wave and Māori culture was just not really going to survive that intake you know the dismissal of any worth of our ideas of our relationship with the land it was left entirely up to us to try and save what we could our language was the schooling system you know formerly banned effectively our language you know every aspect of society was made to drive our culture to eradicate our culture if not us you know often it was us there were episodes of genocide around the country in different parts of the country where Māori were killed on the spot so yeah this is the history that goes alongside you know the idea of love this is why it's so problematic to talk about Christianity and it's and it's benefit for us because it's overwhelmed by this we went from having the being able to enjoy because only ships are complicated for us I better enjoy 100% of this land and now we own legally less than 5% you know our population reached its absolute we're all going to disappear by the end of the 20th century our language is still only spoken by 12% of Māori are fluent in the Māori language you know and it's at risk of disappearing still you know all these are kind of measures I suppose of I mean you know people hopefully shouldn't need much of an introduction to colonisation but that's the experience here in the middle of that again the Christianity represented by the churches was part and parcel of this experience of this exploitation so very hard for us to you know consider it objectively now when did things start to change from that kind of active persecution to a more tolerant atmosphere where you don't have a genocide going on I think we've just been visiting for about a month but you can see that there's an active effort to try to have that acceptance and reemergence of the traditional culture when did things start to change and again just to being provocative maybe it hasn't just because Māori are still by far the poorest people in this country poorest communities but by far the worst health die younger you know if it has turned around it's hard to measure and it's not looking like it's going to get better we're not relatively relative to other ethnic groups improving our position maybe some immigrants are going to do worse than us but you know it's not much of a measure they're just being exploited more than we are post-colonial is a tricky term because colonisation doesn't ever really end we'll just put the stars and stripes in the corner of our flag and see the Union Jack now and maybe the Chinese flag later on because that economic exploitation hasn't gone anywhere either okay but there has been a consistent resistance to colonisation it comes in very different forms but throughout from that very early engagement Māori have constantly said okay we'll engage but here is what we need from this relationship here's what's important to us here's what we're going to protect with our lives if necessary here's the core yep I wear Bangladeshi exploited you know child made clothes I'll talk your language yep but here's the core that I'm never going to surrender that has been consistent so language for example what land we could various aspects of culture have survived adaptively including the ability for us to always be to adapt our culture on our own terms as opposed to what we're told to do or made to do that's a different process again so there's always been this resistance there's always been military resistance kind of ended the 1870s but you know they kind of hang in there some people might say early 20th century there's still some military resistance political resistance has been ongoing the Treaty of Waitangi has always been upheld by Māori and when Pākehā actually literally left it to be ignored by rats in a basement Māori have held on to it as a sacred covenant which was a language which to get crown put for there's always been this constant resistance Pākehā haven't even been aware of it but it's always been there we lived in our rural areas after World War II Māori moved to the cities very similar to Native American urbanization economic reasons government policy forced us into the cities we left our country areas behind we got a new generation raised in a more radical you know this kind of civil rights flow-overs the protest movements of the 60s and the states affected us here the intellectual ideas you know friends went on and you know all the big thinkers kind of flowed through to us the post-colonial thinkers gave us a new language we had new leadership that could challenge white society directly we had new intellectuals who could think perhaps in a different way well in a new way kind of often the same old thoughts you know the same traditional thoughts but expressed in a new way but really I think 1970s, 1960s, 70s society became aware of us again more radical action particularly we were living in the cities places within the academy so the university became you know also either influenced or affected depending on what side of the spectrum was sitting on by these ideas and the history departments were particularly places of for new ideas I'm just of course self-promoting there but it really was the idea of New Zealand history being retold to parkia, European people telling each other actually this is what happened in this land and we need to think about it that led to some quite radical changes you know the parkia middle class came through this university in particular these universities were influenced by these ideas particularly by these historians which is a long boringly patient work went off and took up their middle class public service jobs and when they got into positions of influence they thought actually we can do something about that now so the treaty was brought back into the discussion this came alongside the 1980s alongside your sunny optimism of Ronald Reagan we got a real revolution here that was quite radical in a lot of ways created a lot of poverty particularly for Marty, oh the irony you know through tens of thousands of Marty into back into a kind of dire poverty they've been lifted out of by our social welfare system but the treaty got back on the table tribes got empowered there are a lot of settlements of historical grievances through the Waitangi Tribunal that's happening right now tribes were given settlements of land not much land but money resources and now tribes are some of the biggest economic entities in this country in Auckland City here the land was taken it's a terrible story which at its low point Auckland City Council pumped raw sewage right on top of the Marty community down by the waterfront there's no greater probably sign of how they viewed Marty and then burnt their village down because young Queen Elizabeth was visiting and it would be an eyesore so they burnt their village down and finally they've been here for hundreds of years since we arrived in this land and then anyway and now they're the richest landowners in Auckland City because again we had the courage I think as a country to grapple with our story with our history with those ideas to say Marty culture actually might have something to contribute we've got a long way to go but I think particularly so some of that was political some of it was legal all the lawyers and the politicians who think in relatively short time span sometimes work to be done is the intellectual challenge of how as a western country we incorporate indigenous Marty thinking into our culture you know that applies particularly things like say climate change our relationship with environments the kind of easy low hanging fruit but there's been some amazing work by the Waitangi Tribunal for example on intellectual property they did a report on it but it's far bigger than that it's really about our collective values as a country and what some of the possibilities are so you know there's a lot of kind of behind the scenes work being done by intellectuals in unexpected places driven off by lawyers but that's alright it'll still get somewhere it'll still have some value beyond their pushing the money button every six minutes that will really make a big change but we're in the middle of that process and meanwhile Marty are really grappling with our identity so we're in this revival and we've got immersion schooling now which you know started in the 1980s and so you know numbers are still not as high as they could be things are still at risk but you know that brings through a generation that's not just about language it's about the ideas behind that language that these young people are fully versed in those values, those ideas but they're different you know from the generations that preceded them so it'll be really there's a type also a type of fundamentalism in there so gender roles you know what Marty men are supposed to look like is being redefined in a way I find a bit problematic sometimes the warrior model is boringly trotted out when actually we were nurturers you know most of the time so there's some challenges for Marty but again that's their critique Christianity is being deliberately removed in some respects like it's being put through a filter and they're taking out everything Western love is kind of infused in there now it's a bit too late hopefully to take it out because it's amazing you'll get the deepest minds and they'll quote they'll be quoting all this traditional knowledge and in the middle of it even without them knowing they'll be quoting scripture because it's become so infused often they do know but sometimes you know you have a little giggle because it's like the idea of love for example because you know assuming we're not going to eat each other again as part of our revival and I'm pretty sure we're not but there are some challenges there and I really worry if we one we're not allowing ourselves to have any agency in that adaptation you know the introduction of Christianity was colonization that's it it's got to be removed there's a lot more complicated than that that kind of takes away the responsibility or the active intentional choices to incorporate our agency we are the unassured story our tribal story is we chose to incorporate it we've actually got that story written down but we've forgotten it somewhere along the way and or it's it's very unfashionable for us to remember that so you take love out you got a problematic culture so let me ask you one more question it's been fascinating as you've been talking about the history you use we and I wonder is this from your and you've talked about the oral traditions is this from the research that you've done obviously you're an academic you've done a huge amount of writing or is this from your experience of the oral tradition when you're talking about a lot of this history yeah both yeah yeah both um I'm sorry I've got a story I finished my master's thesis here at this university on an aspect of our actually it was about our Māori dairying schemes we've got cows and had our milk factory sounds pretty boring for our tribe but it was really our conscious decision to engage with the modern New Zealand economy and in that engagement we made a lot of really interesting choices anyway it's very interesting if you're into that kind of thing and I got a good mark and it was all very oh wow and I took it back to my family my kin group and the response was we already knew that and I was like oh oh you're supposed to be praising me up it was really you know I learned a lot in that when I went when I got over myself and thought about it because anything I do here in the academy needs to reflect that oral tradition otherwise it didn't happen to be honest because the oral tradition is pretty comprehensive I'm not necessarily talking about detail there's room for learning new interactions and you know and I just enjoy that but our people know our history we know where we've come from sometimes we forget it sometimes of course we forget the details and that's you know the advantage of having access to the interweb and all that kind of stuff and the library but the ideas the principles so I am an historian a professional historian I teach history but the real repositories of travel knowledge are my elders who live back in our tribal homeland they you know might not be recognized by the western academy but their knowledge is spectacular they can go back multiple generations they can make connections they can see a baby and know where it comes from they have this knowledge they know these stories my job is kind of to partly to be that bridge to the western world to park it here but now of course to a global society because I think we have something to contribute something valuable I think we have something to influence when I'm teaching white middle class kids here at the university and sometimes wondering why to be honest I remind myself because that's how we can advance as a people by influencing those levers in the society and around the world because it's all connected now of course but also you know I can engage with other tribes and without the majority of our people aren't living back in our tribal lands who don't have our language I can share with them as well in a different way that I might share from the white middle class kids I'm saying that it's like a bad thing nothing wrong with being white middle class here it's just do that but it's we it's I'm only on the tiniest margins of our tribal knowledge with a particular role which is that kind of bridge connection I would say interpreter but it doesn't need interpretation it stands on its own merits but yeah it's also vulnerable knowledge so I do have even in here a lot of that traditional knowledge because I'm just in the fortuitous position of being able to maintain it and retain it because we're losing we're very poor communities we have poor health we die young like I was saying so I don't want to force them in that way but there are others who are much better at this than me they just won't you know don't need to engage in this way so you're saying there are individuals who have a great deal of this historical knowledge and it's all oral yeah yep yep and they might think of it differently from the way I do with my very western training and they might express it differently and they certainly might not write it down having said that our tribal leader who was an amazing repository of knowledge he just started a couple of years ago he could also had an honorary doctorate he just didn't get around to doing his PhD but that's our kind of tribal perspective our tribal perspective was to our tribal strategy was to engage with empire so we're Anglican we are teachers, lawyers soldiers some other tribe said actually we will do our own thing thanks and turned in but we all had the same objective that was to maintain our own knowledge maintain our own integrity identity we just had different ways of doing it unfortunately we didn't treat some of the others very well as part of that but that's another long story so we you know we're very comfortable in this environment as part of our plan where some other tribes do things slightly differently but yeah so I'm just part of you know a much bigger body of knowledge it's not formal necessarily but everyone in our tribe knows who to go to and I know my ranking hey I could be some kind of distinguished professor and written lots of books and I'll still be boy because you know that's my place and I'm because it's we as long as I do my job you know yeah I'll be comfortable I'll be I'm basically white middle class I kind of get the cushy job I get well paid you know it's like some of them are you know struggling to survive to be honest so I'm not exactly doing it hard but I know today I certainly my my seniors in terms of our tribal knowledge and understanding and I try to learn from them as much as I can that's an awesome note to end on I really appreciate the conversation thanks it's been great alright that was my conversation with Dr. Herini Ka I hope you guys enjoyed it I learned a lot I'm sure you guys did if you found this conversation valuable you can help out the show by leaving a rating and a review on iTunes or Stitcher alright guys I'll talk to you next week