“We are all indigenous – you guys have just forgotten.”
Soil is not an object—it’s not just dirt to wash off our hands. Aotearoa’s soil is where air, water, rocks, and organisms intersect. Brimming with living beings, healthy soil provides life support systems we cannot exist without. (1)
Māori have always known Aotearoa’s soil contains a life force, a vitality. Even without microscopes. They call it mauri. According to te ao Māori(2), all natural elements have mauri, from people and animals to soil and trees and water, even weather patterns. Together, we are a not a collection of objects, but a communion of subjects in one big cosmic family.(3) My last Solarpunk Thinking post talked about growing our sense of community to include nature. Indigenous people like Māori have thought this way for generations.
In Aotearoa a whakataukī goes, “Ko au te awa, ko te awa te au” / I am the river and the river is me(4). Meanwhile, Alexander Howland, a Sioux person, says: "We are made up of water, we are born in water, we come from water … we're all connected, because of water”(5). Howland’s world view of connection and his role as water protector at Standing Rock in North Dakota show his relationship with water is one of mutuality and justice.
Chas Jewett, another Sioux water protector, would say to non-Māori New Zealanders, “We are all indigenous – you guys have just forgotten”(6). How did we forget?
Once Europeans lived in harmony with nature. Then in the 1600’s Francis Bacon, father of modern science, suggested science and technology were instruments to aggressively dominate nature. Later, philosopher Rene Descartes declared humans unique and superior and completely separate from nature. There are stories Descartes' followers even tried to prove his ideas by dissecting live animals, claiming their pain was an illusion. Their actions were unspeakably monstrous, but Descartes' thinking, dualism, became popular—if nature was merely an object to be dominated, that meant humans could conveniently exploit it however they want. In the 1700s another Western philosopher, Immanuel Kant, wrote, “as far as non-humans are concerned, we have no direct duties. They are there merely as the means to an end. The end is man.”(7)
Dualism and domination entered Aotearoa on European ships. And here we are.
Human activities guided by dualist thinking have contributed to Earth’s devastation. To achieve sustainability in Aotearoa, we need to “remember”. Indigenous wisdom can guide us back to the only way of thinking about nature that enables hope for the future.
Photo credit: Vivienne, 08 April 2024, 5:58pm - The Ōpāwaho by Hansen Park.
Healthy soil cleans our air, regulates temperature, cycles carbon and nutrients, treats and recycles waste, cleans water, and provides habitat (including for our food). These functions are usually called “ecosystem services”, but “life support systems” is better.
2. The Māori world view.
3. Te Ara – The Encyclopaedia of New Zealand explains te ao Māori really well: https://teara.govt.nz/en/te-ao-marama-the-natural-world.
4. A Māori proverb.
5. At Standing Rock in North Dakota, Sioux water protectors protested construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline because of its threat to the region’s water: https://www.npr.org/2016/12/11/505147166/in-their-own-words-the-water-protectors-of- standing-rock.
6. Jewett said this to her interviewer, Mark Garavan, who is from Ireland. Source: “Water is Life – an indigenous perspective from a Standing Rock Water Protector” by Jewett, C. and Garavan, M. (2019)
7. In his book Less Is More, Jason Hickel writes a much longer and fuller version of the development of dualist thinking. I’ve very simply summarised his account.
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