Going back to school

Please note this piece talks briefly about animal cruelty.

It's the job of any generation to care for the ones that follow.

My kids are big now, the younger having finished secondary a year ago, but I’m still grateful my sons' schools did their best to uphold Te Tiriti. This was the kind of education I wanted for my kids, but couldn’t fully offer them myself. I wasn’t quite equipped for the job.

Plenty of you probably had an education like mine, Gen X or earlier, with some pluses, some minuses and some serious shortcomings – a lack of Te Tiriti and te ao Māori amongst them. It wasn’t that no one was trying: I look back now and see there were adults in my world making heroic efforts. But then, just like now, there were cranky Pākehā who complained about "Māori stuff" distracting kids from the real skills of maths and literacy (although they were happy enough to let their kids be distracted by cultural stuff of European origin). 

There are so many reasons this is wrongheaded, including that maths and literacy can be woven into all parts of the curriculum, they're not the only skills and knowledge that matter, and actually, humans of all ages can have more than one or two ideas at a time. It’s good for our brains, even. The whole Māori-stuff-distracts-kids is a bad faith argument and won't be getting a good faith response from me. It’s not really the point I want to make anyway.

It should go without saying – but sadly, needs to be shouted until we’re blue in the face – that Te Tiriti is our foundational document. That’s reason enough for schools to uphold it. But I think there’s a whole other way Te Tiriti contributes to all our kids’ learning. We’re about to go on a meander through history to visit some interesting ideas I’ve discovered. I’m no expert (you’ll find those in the references) so you’ll need to forgive any gaps in my storytelling.

A few years ago, as part of my job at the time, I had to read part of something called Ko Aotearoa Tēnei, the Waitangi Tribunal report into what’s known as the flora and fauna claim. It’s also called WAI 262, because it was the 262nd claim heard by the Tribunal, so that’s what we’ll call it here. The story of WAI 262 is really interesting in its own right, but vast, so we’ll only pick out parts. It all began with kūmara and a strange and sad historical curiosity.

The spark for what would become WAI 262 happened in the 1980s during a meeting between iwi and government scientists at DSIR, the old Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. During the course of this meeting, something pretty extraordinary came to light. Until a couple of decades earlier, in the 1960s, the DSIR had owned a bunch of kūmara cultivars. Maybe that doesn’t sound exciting – but these weren’t any old kūmara, and certainly not the ones you get at Pak'nSave. They were way older, and maybe the kind of kūmara brought by the very first ancestors to arrive in Aotearoa.

And what had the DSIR done with these kūmara in the 1960s? The scientists had decided they didn’t need them, and had wanted to chuck them out – but they’d been snapped up by another scientist, a Dr Yen, and taken home with Yen to Japan. Iwi were flabbergasted. These kūmara, their precious DNA and the whakapapa wrapped up within it, were clearly a taonga, and they belonged in Aotearoa.

At first, the iwi were pretty ticked off with Dr Yen – although they eventually relented a bit, maybe because if it wasn’t for Yen, the kūmara might simply have ended up in the bin. Dell Wihongi, who would go on to become one of the WAI 262 claimants, tried to raise money in Aotearoa to go to Japan and rescue the kūmara, but no one was interested. In an odd sort of plot twist, he reached out to the famous British botanist David Bellamy, who agreed to support his trip. Eventually, Wihongi and others made it to Japan and brought the kūmara back to Aotearoa.

What went wrong here? Well, a whole lot of things – but one of them is the way that European-based approaches have typically thought about knowledge. Especially at the time Wihongi was frantically trying to get to Japan, Pākehā systems often understood knowledge as meaning intellectual property.

That ‘property’ word is all important. Back in the day, when the kūmara went on their misadventure, intellectual property was owned by an identifiable someone or legal entity – a person or maybe a company. But there was no identifiable person or legal entity to whom the knowledge intrinsic in the kūmara belonged. Instead, it belonged to collectives, iwi and hapū; and not just current generations, but past and future generations too. Faced with a whole different way of thinking, our Pākehā systems couldn’t compute.

The almost-lost kūmara were the catalyst for something huge. Six claimants from six iwi across the motu joined forces. A sharp lawyer in his mid-forties by the name of Moana Jackson took up their cause. In 1991, the claimants sent a 28-page hand-typed letter to the Waitangi Tribunal. WAI 262 was born. The intellectual property system and its limitations were only the tip of the iceberg.

A whole other problem was the way our Pākehā systems thought about natural resources, their ‘ownership’, and the knowledge needed to look after them. A couple of sobering examples came from Ngāti Wai, one of the claimant iwi. Ngāti Wai are mana whenua of the east coast of Northland – including offshore islands such as Little Barrier Island, where iwi lived until the Government declared it a nature reserve in 1895.

As Ngāti Wai’s land was taken from them, so was their role as kaitiaki of the environment. Kiore (Pacific rats) became a problem on the islands, so over time the Government started culling them, but without talking to the iwi first. Ngāti Wai were frustrated. It wasn’t that they didn’t think kiore were a problem. It’s just that they’d had a perfectly good way of dealing with that problem until the government showed up, creating a new system that meant they had to apply for a permit to cull kiore. Iwi didn’t want to apply for permits to use their own land, so the kiore ended up running amok for a hundred years. Over the same time, the government set about trying to protect tuatara on the islands. Officials wanted to track the tuatara to protect them – so they did this by chopping off the poor animals’ toes, to make them identifiable. Again, Ngāti Wai were frustrated. The idea you should desecrate nature to protect it simply made no sense.

So what was going on here?

To put it in a simplistic way, the Pākehā systems at play again couldn’t compute. These systems thought that land (as property) has to have an owner – and only one owner, in this case the government. An owner’s job is to control or manage the thing they own. If iwi were showing an interest in the land, that meant they must be trying to own, control or manage it, pushing out the government. But that wasn’t what Ngāti Wai were asking. They wanted to see government and mana whenua join up, putting their knowledges together to share responsibility for the land. As Hori Parata of Ngāti Wai put it, “Ngati Wai’s resource management is based upon whanaungatanga, not only whanaungatanga with each other as human beings, but whanaungatanga with all of the uri [descendants] of Papatūānuku and Ranginui”.

WAI 262 is said by some to be the most complex claim the Waitangi Tribunal has ever dealt with, running right until 2011, twenty years after the claim was lodged. By that time only one of the original complainants was still alive. Ko Aotearoa Tēnei, the report on the claim, ran to hundreds of pages. It made massive recommendations to protect flora, fauna and mātauranga right across many areas of government, from te reo to resource management, patents and plant varieties, to preventing Māori cultural works from being used in offensive ways.

Before we move on from WAI 262 I want to share one last story, just because it tickled my fancy.

One of the WAI 262 claimants, who died some years before Ko Aotearoa Tēnei, was a man named Tama Poata of Ngāti Porou. As I was researching this piece, I spotted that Poata was the scriptwriter for a 1987 film called Ngāti, about a Māori community that fights to keep its freezing works open. Now I was intrigued, wanting to know more about Poata’s life, so I kept on researching. I found out the guy was a legend and I want to briefly pay him his dues.

Poata had all sorts of jobs during his life, from flax-cutter to freezing worker to manure spreader. He also became a union organiser – but his activism didn’t end there. In the late 1960s he founded a group called the Māori Organisation On Human Rights, joined Ngā Tamatoa, protested the Vietnam War, and even came up with the name of the well-known anti-Apartheid group Halt All Racist Tours (HART). He got offside with Robert Muldoon, who called him a "leading Māori Communist" – even though he’d somehow gotten himself expelled from the communist party. Muldoon later took another swipe at him, accusing him of treasonous activity during the Springbok tour, but was forced to back down when Poata had the stones to threaten to sue the Prime Minister.

Poata had begun to take movie roles from the early 1970s, even appearing in a feminist film before he moved behind the camera to write. In the later words of Poata’s daughter, Te Tiriti just seemed to her dad like common sense. She said, “[WAI 262 is] actually about being aspirational for our country and wanting everyone to be able to benefit from the strength that Māori have and rangatiratanga and just properly recognising it.” 

OK, I’ve shared with you some of the interesting stuff I’ve learned about WAI 262. Now I want to come back to the place we started: why I believe Te Tiriti has such an important place in schools. I’m sure you can see where I’ve been heading. WAI 262, and the lives and legacies of people like Tama Poata, are stories of knowledges coming together, based on our Tiriti, to make us all better off. But that’s not where I want to end this piece.

Many years ago, I tried to learn te reo; but I struggled, feeling embarrassed, because it just wouldn’t click, seeming so unlike my own language, with workings I couldn’t figure out. I kept coming at it with the question, ‘But what does this mean in English?’, trying to force the kupu through a mental translation machine with cogs made up of quiet assumptions from my own culture. The system couldn’t compute.     

The day I read the first chapter of Ko Aotearoa Tēnei, something shifted for me. Now, just for a moment, I could glimpse those workings that I couldn’t figure out, and suddenly their logic linked everything. Here’s how it started to take shape for me, in my basic understanding. The language can’t be separated from the concepts. The concepts are often woven through metaphor, especially metaphor from nature, because people and nature can’t be separated: they share their whakapapa with each other. Myths draw these connections for us, and tikanga helps us navigate them; but carefully, respectfully, because you don’t want to damage what is so intricate.

Patient people had tried to explain much of this to me before, but I never quite got it – because there’s a difference between knowing something in your head and letting it begin to seep into your bones. Huh, I said to myself over the pages of Ko Aotearoa Tēnei. This was my first lightbulb moment, and it was followed by a second.

Right now, our conversation about education feels depressingly like the one I grew up with. There’s too much “Māori stuff” and not enough maths and literacy. It’s as if some of us imagine that knowledges sit in separate boxes that students open, empty and then shut again, one at a time. The education system’s task is to make sure students open the boxes in the right order, with the important ones first. This box-opening is what we call critical thinking.

I thought I was a reasonable critical thinker: after all, I spent years slogging through a higher degree. I got pretty good at looking at the world in one way – but really, that’s the opposite of critical thinking. The best thinkers refuse to confine themselves to their own boxes. They’re endlessly curious about other boxes, and don’t mind admitting they’re not sure what goes on inside them: it’s when you won’t admit you don’t know that you stop learning. Opening a new box might surprise or even unsettle them, but they’re not afraid to try. In fact, the best thinkers don’t really believe knowledges come in boxes at all.

To this day, no Government has ever fully responded to WAI 262, but its ideas have had quiet but deep influence over the years. Our intellectual property law now has ways to protect Māori concepts from abuse, including offensive or inappropriate use of symbolism. And despite all the political mischief around co-governance, the Crown and Māori have for years been coming up with new ways to recognise and respect the role of mana whenua in resource management. Earlier this year, Taranaki Maunga was vested with legal personhood, iwi and Crown agreeing to manage the mountain together.

It's hard to imagine these solutions could have happened without Tiriti, or from within boxes – just as it’s hard to imagine we will save our planet without the reverence that comes from acknowledging our shared whakapapa.

Our job is to care for the generations to follow. Long may our schools teach it, and long may our kids learn it.  

Acknowledgements and references

My thinking journey owes a lot to my colleague and friend Brigham Anderson (Ngāti Hauiti), who’s also an artist at Thinkbrig. We both see the world differently from everyone else, which means that when there’s a morning tea we end up yacking up a storm about our crazy ideas until well after the sausage rolls are gone.

If you’re on your own thinking journey, I can’t recommend enough reading Slowing the Sun by my friend Nadine Hura. Nadine weaves together te ao Māori, climate activism and personal stories in a completely original way that I can’t do justice.

Much of the information I’ve shared comes from a documentary called WAI 262, available on NZ On Screen. Other sources include the website of the claimants and the Waitangi Tribunal website.

You can read about Tama Poata on the claimants’ website as well as NZ On Screen.

If you’re interested in recent developments in the way the law protects Māori intellectual property, the New Zealand Intellectual Property Office website has the basics.

❤️ Like 0